ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, February 5, 1997 TAG: 9702050066
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MICHAEL SKUBE
THE VOICE was a mewling one, as so many of them are. A friend had disappointed her, and Dr. Laura asked how. ``Well,'' the caller said, ``her and her boyfriend ... ''
Dr. Laura isn't a coddler and she isn't into self-esteem. She will ask a caller to stanch her stupid tears, to cease the psychobabble and speak English. To this caller she showed benign mercy. She did not tell her she was ignorant. She did not even suggest that she try speaking standard English.
Half the people listening would have told you the woman was speaking standard English. ``Whadja think it was ... ebonics?''
No, but her English was no more grammatical than that of a schoolkid who says, ``I be goin' home.''
Perceptions of ignorance are selective, and many people would have thought this caller sounded like a neighbor. They are also the ones who are so sure of themselves when they talk about black English. Neither they nor the people they are talking about - the students at public schools in Oakland, Calif., let's say - know the parts of speech, but one group is stigmatized and the other is not.
If the stigma cannot be easily removed, then sublimate it into something it is not. It is always a charade, painfully obvious, and the Oakland School Board was hardly the first to try.
But what explains the casuistries of academic apologists such as Joan Carson and David Blumenfeld of Georgia State University, who, in an opinion page piece in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, instructed us that language is merely a function of politics? Here is one of the most inane paragraphs you will ever read:
``Because black English is rule-governed in the same way that all languages are, there is no basis for maintaining the correctness of one variety over another. What typically passes as `correct' is the variety of English spoken by the group with power and influence. Thus, the issue for speakers of black English is that they need to learn the `power language' if they hope to influence or succeed in a society in which that language predominates.''
By that logic, the rhetors in the Georgia House of Representatives are the models to be emulated - they certainly exert more power and influence than the crowd in the faculty lounge. By the same logic, we should be making students fluent in corporate talk and public relations. Why are they wasting time on Toni Morrison? A Nobel Prize is well and good, but it's not real political power.
Remove the politics, and Carson and Blumenfeld are two more advocates of the anything-goes school: Clarity and grace, force and vigor - none of that matters. Language is only another instrument of power and domination, with no value of its own: ``Each of us speaks a dialect that reflects our gender, age, education, social class, ethnicity and the geographic area in which we live or were born.''
You could call that demographic determinism, as crude in its own way as Marxism. Taken on its face, it begs the question of why we even need an English department. By extension, who needs a Department of Applied Linguistics? (Carson is the director.) Probably the entire humanities department (Blumenfeld is the associate dean) could be sent packing.
This is how farcical ebonics has become. The Oakland School Board at least had the sense to retreat from folly. But the volunteers and mercenaries who heard the call are still waging battle, on both sides. If ebonics is its own hybrid, then there must be others. A letter writer to The New York Times enumerated a few. Middle-class folk, who talk ``white,'' are fluent in ivoronics, Cuban-Americans in Hisponics, rabbis in Hebronics.
Academics don't often have a gift for satire (one of the reasons they seek cover in the academy), but it does get ridiculous. Who would have thought italics was not only a typeface but also a form of English - just as good as any other, mind you - common in Brooklyn?
Best of all is the music and melancholy of Irish-Americans, legatees of Joyce and Beckett and Yeats. What rolls off the Irish-American's tongue is not just standard English; it is ironics.
Here in the South, land of Bubbas, we need only turn on a talk show to know the bubonic plague is with us still. But there is a serious point in all this, and it is one that the late Cleanth Brooks made 12 years ago in the Lamar Memorial Lectures at Mercer University in Macon, Ga. The accents and pronunciations native to the South (and therefore to American blacks), Brooks said, echo not the antebellum plantation but 16th century Sussex and Kent. From these and other places in southern England came yeoman settlers for whom it was natural to say ``dis,'' ``dem'' and ``dat'' where the gentry said this, them and that.
It's likely that ``ax'' for ``ask,'' perhaps the most stigmatized marker of black speech, came with them as well. Its roots are in Middle English - at least Carson and Blumenfeld got that right - but none of that makes it a language of its own, with a grammar and system of pronunciation. Even less does it make a form of English to be emulated, any more than we would emulate the English of Art Carney.
Like any other language, English can be used well in myriad ways and it can be used poorly in even more ways. But it's hard to think of another language that is losing the sense that there is a difference between the two.
Michael Skube writes for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
- Cox News Service
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