The Fire Next Time: Henry Louis Gates, his ties to PBS, Black English, etc..

[Harold F. Schiffman]

black children struggle with standard English,
while hip-hop becomes white lingua franca
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Changing Places
By HENRY LOUIS GATES Jr.
The New York Times, September 30, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/30/opinion/30gates.html

How do you spell rat, " my father would ask me during a lull
in one of his many bid whist card games with his buddies from
the paper mill. "R-a-t," I'd respond dutifully, with all of the
preschool pride that I could muster. "Not that mousy kind
of a rat," he'd say. "I mean like rat now. " His buddies would
howl as my perplexity grew.

Like many black people who came of age in the 60's, I've always
delighted in the mind-bending playfulness of the black vernacular.
And jokes turning on malaprops and double-entendres are among
the most vital aspects of black culture. The Kingfish's quip, on
"Amos n Andy," that he and Andy should "simonize our watches"
is nearly canonical in many black households.

But all of us have our favorites. It's said that Tim Moore, the actor
who played Kingfish, once had to appear in court as a defendant.
"Yo' honor," he told the judge, "not only does I resents the allegation, but
I resents the alligator!"

Still, I have to confess that the use of "ax" for "ask" has always
been, for me, the linguistic equivalent of fingernails' scraping
down a blackboard. The first time I heard the word "ask"
pronounced that way was on a Bill Cosby album in the 60's.

"I'm-o, I'm-o ax you a question," his character stammers,
and in my Appalachian hamlet we'd laugh at that, certain that
nobody would really be foolish enough to say "ax" for "ask."

Don't get me wrong: it's not as if the black citizens of Piedmont,
W.Va., spoke the king's English, but axing was something
 we did in the woods.

It was when I first visited Bermuda, where just about
everyone I met says "ax," that I began to suspect that
this usage had deeper origins than I'd known. Sure enough,
 as William Labov, a linguist at the University of Pennsylvania,
explained to me, "aks" is traceable to the Old English "acsian,"
a nonstandard form of "ascian," the root of "ask."

Professor Labov argues that black Americans have become
more monolingual since the 60's - that fewer of them have a
mastery of standard English. That's the result of residential
segregation, the fact that poor blacks tend to live with poor blacks.

But it's also compounded by desegregation, which ended up
separating the black poor and the black middle class.
Because of these two factors, there's now a large group of
poor black people whose face-to-face conversations are almost
entirely with people like themselves. As the cultural critic Greg
Tate told me, black people are "segregated, landlocked and
institutionalized between prison, the project and public institutions."

He added that "there's a certain tribal caste to segregated
African-American communities for that reason," and that's
reflected in their increased monolingualism.

Writing in The Times 25 years ago, James Baldwin ventured
that the black vernacular was one of self-defense.
"There was a moment,
in time, in this place," he recalled, "when my brother, or
my mother, or my father, or my sister, had to convey to me,
for example, the danger in which I was standing from the
white man standing just behind me, and to convey this with
a speed and in a language, that the white man could not possibly
understand, and that, indeed, he cannot understand, until today."

Is that still true? The black vernacular seems to be everywhere
these days, from Dave Chappelle's show to Boost Mobile's
"Where you at?" ad campaign. "It becomes part of the mainstream
in a minute," the poet Amiri Baraka told me, referring to the black
vernacular. "We hear the rappers say, 'I'm outta here' - the next thing  you
know, Clinton's saying. 'I'm outta here.' "

And both Senator John Kerry and President Bush are calling out,
"Bring it on," like dueling mike-masters at a hip-hop slam.
Talk about changing places. Even as large numbers of black
children struggle with standard English, hip-hop has become
 the recreational lingua franca of white suburban youth.
Baldwin's notion of using black English to encode messages
seems almost romantic now.

Is it possible, after all these years, that white folk have come to speak
"black" far better than blacks speak "white"? Just axing.



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Plone and its visual design is Copyright © 2000-2004
by Alexander Limi, Alan Runyan, Vidar Andersen.
______________________________________________________
New! Gates, Henry Louis Jr. America Behind the Color Line:
Dialogues with African Americans. New York, NY: Warner Books,
2004. (Companion book to the PBS series of the same name.)

Read more about it or order at Amazon.com
(See capsule review below)

The media often tries to appear balanced and diverse
by bringing  on somebody to present the 'black point of
view.' As this book of  dialogues amply demonstrates,
there is no such thing...there are only  African Americans with opinions as
diverse as the individuals themselves.

Gates wondered 'how far have we come since the
Civil Rights Movement. ' To get some sense, he interviewed movers and shakers
like Jesse Jackson
and Vernon Jordan, but also those the Great
Society left behind, like Kalais
Chiron Hunt in the Cook County Jail and
residents of Chicago's infamous
Robert Taylor Homes .

Familiar entertainment figures like Bernie Mac,
Alicia Keys and  Don Cheadle weigh in, with
refreshingly candid interviews not commonly
found in Hollywood hype. We meet activists
on the front lines, like  Lenora Fulani who uses
theater to teach kids how to succeed in business.

And we meet everyday people like Dierdre and
Jerald Wolff who joined
the new Southern Migration by moving to an affluent, predominantly black
community in Atlanta, and
Lura and Chris, a biracial couple living in Birmingham.

I'm always impressed with Gate's ability to capture
his subject's words
without imposing his personality...
he shares his own story in the introduction.
Each of the 39 stories is told with clarity and fluidity;
you read one and  can't resist moving right into the
next. A thought provoking book and
for many white readers, a glimpse of black America
not represented elsewhere.
______________________________________________________
>>From the same website:
http://creativefolk.com/blackhistory/blackbooks.html
Perry, Theresa and Lisa Delpit, editors.
The Real Ebonics Debate:
Power, Language, and the Education of
African-American Children.
Boston: Beacon, 1998. (High-School - Adult)
Read more at Amazon.com

This collection is a common-sense look at
the issue of Ebonics,
and a must-read for any teacher of African-American
children  or for anyone who loves language.

Contrary to media frenzy and popular belief,
the Oakland school board
did not pass a resolution in 1996 requiring that
Ebonics, or Black English,
be taught in place of Standard English. It did,
however, pass a resolution
recognizing what linguists had known for years:
that Ebonics, like Spanish
or German, is not defective English but a
valid linguistic system following
precise rules of grammar. It also recognized
that while students speaking
Ebonics need to learn Standard English
to attain success in mainstream
American society, to do so they must be
treated with the same respect as
any student who enters the classroom
speaking a different language or dialect.
Instead, they are often dismissed as lazy or stupid.

Rickford, John Russell. Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English.
NY: Wiley, 2000. (High School - Adult) Read more at Amazon.com

The subject of Ebonics generally sparks a knee-jerk
reaction. This book's
attempts to lift the subject out of the political realm
and into the more
appropriate realms of literature, language
and culture. It provides a
well-researched and detailed account of how
"Black English"  evolved from African languages,
and dispels the myth that it is simply
"substandard English."
_______________________________
www.pbs.org/newshour/forum/march97/mckay_3-18.html -
21k - Dec 6, 2004 -
I could not access this website, which adds
to the Henry Louis Gates' take on Black English.