Teaching Ebonics in School: It Really Don't Be Making No Sense

Filed under: News, Politics, Race and Civil Rights

I wrote recently about how the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) is now seeking to hire Ebonics translators to help them to apprehend drug dealers. The group seems to believe that by learning the underpinnings of urban language, it can find a way to bring down "Pookie nem" on the corner. The website Newsy.com covered the article that I wrote, with a few other scholars providing their own insights into how and why this decision might be implemented. While I am certainly listening to the discussion, I am not sure what it would mean to establish Ebonics as it's own language or to try to teach it in school.

Does the teaching of Ebonics mean that we treat urban dialect as a class? If the kids and teachers acknowledge the language structure of Ebonics, do we continue to reinforce the use of what some might consider to be broken English? If the language is acknowledged in school, does that mean employers and universities will accept graduates who speak and write in Ebonics? If not, is there any sense in solidifying a student's desire to speak in a way that doesn't match the rest of us? I'm not so sure.

I can say that most African Americans, especially those in urban settings, are expected to be at least partially bilingual. When I speak to my friends, I probably sound a lot different from the way a professor sounds when speaking to his white colleagues. Personally, it represents a form of intelligence to be able to communicate in a variety of ways in multiple contexts. The biggest mistake in the world is to presume that someone who speaks Ebonics is less intelligent than the guy who talks like he's from the suburbs of Omaha. Additionally, this one-dimensional way of viewing intelligence by associating it with grammatical constructs is part of what keeps African Americans out of many of our most prestigious academic institutions. In other words, we believe that sounding white presents the standard when it comes to measuring cognitive ability, which is about as ignorant as we can get.

Here's the deal on Ebonics: One of my children speaks Ebonics heavily, but I corrected her. It wasn't because I don't respect her creative use of the English language. Instead, it was because I just don't see any reason to persuade her to communicate in a one-dimensional manner using a way of speaking that is fragmented, evolving and marginalized. The day I hear of law firms hiring attorneys who write "I just really always been wanting to be a lawyer" on their applications, then maybe I'll change my opinion. This is not a matter of comformity, since I was fired from Syracuse University for not conforming to a racially-oppressive system. It's a matter of wondering what if the push to legitimize Ebonics is a case of liberalism gone wild.

To watch the video, click here.

Dr. Boyce Watkins is the founder of the Your Black World Coalition and a Scholarship in Action Resident of the Institute for Black Public Policy. To have Dr. Boyce commentary delivered to your email, please click here.

 

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