From: Jasper
Date: 10/17/03
Time: 4:58:14 PM
Remote Name: 68.73.58.147
Charlie,
I’m afraid you missed the point entirely. I don’t know where I went wrong. Let me give it another shot – starting with that poor, white, Georgia farmer who can communicate easily with only other poor, white Georgia farmers…
Where do you think most black Americans learned how to speak English? They learned it from their parents, their uncles, aunts, older siblings, cousins and the people they came in daily contact with long before they started kindergarten. The people from whom they learned their English, learned it from their parent, their uncles, aunts cousins, neighbors, etc and they learned it from the generation of people they came in daily contact with who learned it from the generation that preceded them.
Eventually you will get back to a poor, white overseer of a Southern plantation who spoke a very similar dialect. In fact, the reason “black English” is so offensive, so laughable or so pitiable to most white people in this country is because it sounds so much like the speech patterns of “poor white trash.” It defines a low social class that few people above that class want to be identified with. The sound it “hurts their ears.”
Only a minority of black people speak in a dialect so dense that most people have difficulty penetrating it. What gets them in trouble is “bad grammar” and “bad pronunciation,” which is rooted in the lowest social classes of the Deep South. A heavy Bostonian accent or Cockney accent won’t keep you out of a job flipping hamburgers, selling shoes or fixing dishwashers in a white suburb of Detroit or Chicago. It might even help you.
“Bad grammar” and “poor pronunciation” have never been the real issues. You can make all the errors in grammar and pronunciation you like without paying a social or economic penalty as long as you make the same mistakes that Midwestern, middleclass white people make. That’s what Standard American English is. I would not pretend that “race” (which is fundamentally a class issue) doesn’t matter. I would concentrate on teaching the kids HOW it matters.
Educators are the ones who have to be educated before they can educate. They have to have a clear understating of where the starting point has to be with the kind of kid you mentioned in a broader social context of what happened, when it happened and why it happened. The educators have to be taught more than they have been taught about cultural anthropology and linguistics to help them understand what they see and hear in the classroom and in their attempts to communicate with dysfunctional parents.
Educators have to learn how they pass on subtle hints that they think their purples are inferior (a BIG problem with racially integrated schools) and what they can do about it. They have to learn what they can do to teach the kids you talked about and what they can’t do. They have to take careful aim at the right targets. With these kids the parents are not the right targets. To help these kids you have to help the parents or find a way to bypass them. I’m not blaming the teachers. I’m saying they need help, too. –Jasper