Since the Oakland public schools recently voted to recognize "Ebonics," the current term for the kind of language used by a particular segment of the school-age urban African-American population, as a separate language whose speakers would require ESL (English as a Second Language) instruction, there's been a lot of talk about the decision in the media. Unfortunately, most of these pundits and politicians are making their critiques, and most Americans are forming opinions, knowing very little about the history behind this decision. This is a situation this page aims, in its own small way, to rectify. So here we go:
PC, maybe; newfangled, no. "Ebonics" is the contemporary term for what used to be called Black English Vernacular, Black English, Vernacular Black English, Negro Standard English, and various other things. The number of different terms this has gone by indicates how sensitive politically this topic has always been.
So where did this concept come from?
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a linguist named William Labov published the results of some studies he had done on the language spoken among African-American teenagers who were part of inner-city street culture. His conclusion was that their speech patterns constituted a distinct language system, which he denominated vernacular Black English. According to Labov, this system followed its own grammatical rules, which were different from those of Standard English but which were internally consistent. For instance, one of its features was the use of "invariant be," which meant that under certain circumstances BEV speakers, instead of conjugating the verb "to be," would simply use "be" instead. ("I be eating," etc.) While most people would assume, hearing someone do this, that s/he just didn't know how to conjugate the verb, Labov's research showed that this was a grammatical rule that had developed in the system and was consistently followed. In other situations these speakers would conjugate the verb, which demonstrated that they did know how.
Labov's point was that speakers of BEV weren't simply making random grammatical mistakes when they spoke. They were following rules that their community of speakers had developed, and which they had learned from being immersed in it. What they were speaking, he argued, was not a flawed and failed attempt at standard English, but a particular version of English that was just as expressive and fluent as standard.
Why would a guy like Labov study something like this?
Well, aside from the fact that academics will study anything, Labov wanted to change the way inner-city children were perceived and taught in public schools. As he points out in his book, before this point most teachers and administrators started from the assumption that poor urban Black children automatically suffered from "cultural deprivation." The theory was that since these children were never taken to museums or classical music concerts or read to by their parents, they grew up without having been exposed to any form of "culture" at all, and this included verbal culture. The prevailing wisdom was that children from these homes were not verbally stimulated enough, and that as a result many of them arrived at school with almost no verbal skills, sometimes literally not having learned to talk. Thus, they needed to be taught how to talk before anything else could happen.
What Labov's research showed is that these children were considered nonverbal because a) race and class relations being what they are, a poor Black child being tested by a white middle-class teacher or administrator is going to clam up pretty quick and not say much and b) when the child does speak, chances are he will be speaking BEV.
This is where Labov's research comes in. If the tester does not recognize BEV as a distinct language system, all s/he will hear when the child speaks is a series of grammatical errors, apparently made at random and out of ignorance resulting from lack of exposure to the spoken word. The tester will then assume the child has no verbal skills and s/he is on his way to a remedial classroom. If, on the other hand, the tester has accepted BEV as a valid language system, s/he will realize that although the child is not speaking fluent Standard English, the child is fluent in something. So to the BEV-literate tester, the child has verbal skills and knows how to use language, and is someone who will probably learn to use different rules and conventions without too much trouble.
The point, then, was to argue that instead of treating these children as if they were stupid or ignorant or both, teachers and administrators should recognize that what to them look like mistakes are actually the result of a cultural difference that has produced a different language system. The idea was that BEV speakers should be treated as just as intelligent, fluent and verbally sophisticated as Standard English speakers, and not tracked into slow classes just because they arrive having learned a different dialect.
Sounds reasonable enough. Why's everyone so pissed off about this?
As soon as Labov published, his work was misunderstood, and over the past 25 years the misunderstandings have compounded. The first thing that happened was that even though Labov was very specific about the fact that this language was spoken only by individuals who fell into a specific age bracket, socioeconomic class, and geographic region, and that furthermore they had to be part of a particular street culture in order to speak it, most commentators immediately assumed that he was claiming that all Black people spoke this language. This is more the result of oversimplification on the part of the media than anything else; most racial issues lose their complexity once the national media get a hold of them and this one was no exception. However, this oversimplification led to Black leaders condemning the concept of BEV as insulting, since it seemed to imply that Black people were somehow genetically incapable of learning Standard English. On the other hand, it also led to some Black leaders championing BEV as proof that Black culture, while different from white middle-class culture, was equally valid and rich.
The problems got worse when public schools actually tried to deal with this in the classroom. In Labov's wake a number of books were published on how to teach BEV speakers, most of them focusing on how to get them to learn and speak Standard English. The problem with this approach was that it lost sight of the original goal, which was to recognize BEV as a valid and expressive language. By focusing obsessively on getting BEV speakers "retrained" to speak Standard--and by implying that this would only happen if a lot of time and effort was put into special education for BEV speakers--educators actually reinforced the ideas that Labov was trying to root out: that BEV is inherently inferior to Standard, and that BEV speakers have been so handicapped by their upbringing that they need extra help to get them up to speed.
As these attitudes became more entrenched, educators started seeing BEV less as a dialect and more as a separate language altogether, which had so little in common with Standard English that BEV speakers essentially needed to be taught English as a foreign language.
So that's where the Oakland thing comes out of.
Yes and no. The Oakland school system has, according to their school board, no plans to actually teach English as a second language to Ebonics speakers, or to conduct classes in Ebonics. What they have decided to do is train teachers to speak or at least understand Ebonics so that they can better understand their students.
But although it does not plan to treat Ebonics speakers as ESL students or ask for ESL funding, the Oakland school system is declaring its belief in divergence--the theory that since Labov's original work BEV and Standard have gotten farther and farther apart, to the point where translating from one to the other is impossible for non-bilingual individuals.
Is that really true?
I'm not an expert, but I have done a lot of reading about this topic, and based on my research, I don't think so. Most BEV speakers can understand Standard English. After all, they are constantly exposed to it via the media, their teachers, etc. SE speakers have more trouble with BEV, because they by and large haven't been exposed to it. Labov and others document the phenomenon of "code switching" among BEV speakers, many of whom switch from speaking BEV to speaking Standard depending on the situation. As with any language system, decoding is easier than creating, so BEV speakers who can understand SE may be less adept at producing it. But it doesn't mean that BEV and SE speakers need an interpreter to communicate.
So why is Oakland saying it's a separate language?
Probably because, based on their experience of their own students, they think it is. The members of the Oakland schoolboard are not the only people to buy the divergence theory. Labov himself changed his tune in the 1980s and started warning people that the difference between BEV and SE was getting wider all the time, and that if we didn't want an irreparable communications gap between Black and White people in this country we'd better start working harder at school integration, since that was really the only way speakers would have enough social contact to pick up each other's languages.
The divergence theory is dangerous, as I've argued, because it supports the assumptions Labov was initially trying to disprove--that urban African-American students are so linguistically challenged that they are not able to understand Standard English without serious help. It's still around because, as Labov's about-face demonstrates, it can be used to argue for goals which are laudable in themselves--school integration, more social contact across race and class lines, or in this case, more individual attention for an at-risk population in the Oakland school system. Unfortunately, the means do matter, and from my point of view the damage you do by treating BEV speakers as if they don't understand SE when they really do outweighs whatever political gains you may come by.
So what good is this concept if you can't use it in the classroom without making the problem worse?
I never said that. Teaching SE as a second language to BEV speakers will in fact make the problem worse, in my humble opinion. However, I think Labov's initial point is still valid--that if the teachers recognize BEV as a "real" language rather than a broken version of English, they will be less likely to treat BEV speakers as if they are stupid, which will in turn make BEV speakers less likely to fail in school. Numerous studies have shown that if you treat students like morons, they will eventually start acting like morons; if you label students slow or remedial they will fulfil your expectations. One of the main reasons BEV speakers don't perform as well, according to some of the BEV research I looked at, is that teachers treat them differently because they see BEV as the mark of stupidity. Part of this can be put down to good old-fashioned racism, which plays a larger part in the poor performance of inner-city students than most people are willing to admit. But even teachers who are conscious of racism as a problem and working in good faith to eliminate it from their classrooms may still tend to treat their African-American students differently if they hear them speaking a language they think of as stunted or flawed.
The point of raising awareness about this issue--and of the Oakland school board's decision to instruct teachers in Ebonics--is to encourage teachers and other SE speakers to realize that people don't speak BEV because they're too stupid to speak anything else, any more than Texans use "y'all" because they don't realize that "you" can be either singular or plural. They speak it because it is part of the culture they grew up in, a culture that is no more or less intrinsically "rich" or varied than white middle-class culture. The more educators recognize this, the less they will be inclined to discriminate, consciously or unconsciously, against BEV speakers.
But don't Ebonics speakers need to learn Standard English in order to survive?
Yes, they probably do if they want to follow conventional career paths. But so do white middle-class children, who don't arrive in the classroom speaking Standard English either. Nobody speaks Standard English; it exists only as a written language and as the language of the national media (and some would argue it's disappearing from there). A BEV speaker may find learning Standard Written English more intimidating because it looks more different, or because of the cultural baggage attached to it, but his white bourgeois classmate is going to have trouble with it too, and if you don't believe me, well, you've never taught freshman composition. Of course, no one has bothered to catalogue and describe White English Vernacular, but if they did they'd probably be surprised at how divergent it also is from Standard.
This is a lot more complicated than I thought it was.
My point. So are most hot-button issues. I don't know what it is, but Americans don't seem able to discuss racial issues without flattening them into the most basic terms imaginable. Yes, the whole Ebonics concept can be and has been misused. But it has also been mishandled by the media to such a degree that it will probably never be the useful tool that it could have been.
What was the name of that linguist guy?
William Labov. If you want to learn more about BEV and related issues, here are some sources you can look at:
The book that started it all:
There are several anthologies of pieces on either teaching BEV or the divergence controversy:
Sankoff, David ed. Diversity and Diachrony. Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1986.
Stoller, Paul ed. Black American English: Its Background and Its Usage in the Schools and in Literature. New York: Dell, 1975.