Like I said, they must not have been speaking proper AAVE. I guess they missed AAVE grammar class that day. I am amused that you cannot accept variance in an vernacular largely (if not exclusively) passed to most of its speakers orally. Biggirl’s white speakers will one day hopefuly have SAE grammar class in school and learn not to say “feets” and “geeses” and such.
No problem, I don’t think you’ve been the least bit rude. Unless you’re being smart now, then well, whatever. I don’t record my recollections daily. I am forced to rely on my memory. I can assure you it’s something I’ll be on the lookout for now, but so as to avoid donning the mantle of certainty in the face of reasons to doubt as has been done by Nzinga, I’ll concede that **pizzabrat ** might be correct as to my mishearing. I cannot say for sure other than this is my recollection on a number (to high to count) of occasions. But you shouldn’t assume too much authority, yourselves. “All the AAVE speakers here” amounts to less than 10 people. I cannot tell you how many times someone has tried to tell me what’s southern and I’ve just sat and thought, “what the hell are talking about? 33 years in the south (big towns, little towns, no towns) and that’s news to me.” Perhaps there’s more variety of experience than you’re accounting for.
Damn. you Black people are funny! 
The commentary with those pictures is priceless:
Overall, I agree that dialects often have expressions that are difficult to express in the ‘mainstream’ version of a language.
This is not one of those cases.
Based on your explanation of the sentence
“Sshhhhh! Don’t go telling the white folk what us black folk be doing!”
it should be equivalent to
“Sshhhhh! Don’t tell white people what black people do!”
‘what black people do’ has a general connotation that this is what black people have done in the past, do now, and will continue to do in the future. It is not restricted to the present tense, and is not necessarily restricted to non-continuous action.
For example,
“Italians make a lot of gestures when they talk. That’s just what Italians do”
The ‘do’ means that’s what they have done in the past, do now, and will continue to do so in the future.
I don’t see how that is different from ‘be doing’, based on your example and your definition of it.
You only caught one-third of the intended meaning, though. It’s hard to explain – I’m probably “reading” an inflection based on word choice and sentence structure you don’t “hear.” I understood she meant “shut up, now and forever, period.”
Biggirl, we’re just too extemporaneously and extemporally timeless for these folks.
That’s also what
“Don’t tell white people what black people do”
means
Polerius, it helps the speaker not have to specify such terms as “what we usually do,” “what we are likely to do” , “what we often do”
“We be at the Reggae club”
I am telling someone that it is the club I usually go to. The club I most often go to, the club I will be going to in the future.
If I say, “I go to the Reggae club”, the listener assumes I may not have gone to that club a few weeks ago, and may not go two weeks from now.
There are only certain times that you need this, though.
I would never say, “I be going to Princeton (I wish!)”
I would not say that. I would say, “I go to Princeton” (I wish!)
There is no need to make the listener aware of if I will go to that particular school next week or if I went two weeks ago. They know I will go there till I graduate! (I wish).
It is hard, even now, for me to really pin point the exact usage, because even as I write this, I could think of very, very rare situations where, “I be going to Princeton” might actually work. Sigh. Perhaps it is like certain Chinese* terms that don’t lend itself to translation.
*I do not claim that Black English is anything like the Chinese language.
“I go to the Reggae club” means, precisely, that that is the club I often go to, the club I will be going to in the future.
How is “I be at the Reggae club” different? Are you implying by it that you will be going there until you die? No. I assume you are implying that you will be going there for the foreseeable future, which is what “I go to the Reggae club” also implies.
Polerius, let me try again.
Would you always say, “I go the dance club?” Is there any time you would say instead, “I usually go to that club? That is a club I frequent” “I be going to the Reggae club” would be a good replacement! Try it. Nah. Just kidding. It takes a certain inflection to pull it off.
If I understand this correctly: yeah, it wouldn’t apply to the situation of attending Princeton as a student, because that wouldn’t need marking as a habitual or continuous action along the lines of “we be at the Reggae club”.
But if, say, I’m an academic who annually visits Princeton each July to work in a special collection at the library there or something, couldn’t I say “Summertime I be going to Princeton”?
In SAE it does, sure. But I think from what Nzinga is saying that it doesn’t carry quite that sense in AAVE. In AAVE, “I go to the Reggae club” seems to be more like SAE “I am (now) going to the Reggae club”. So AAVE does need that auxiliary “to be” verb to convey the sense of continuous/habitual action.
It means more “what black people habitually do.” It also conveys the meaning “the stupid things black people do all the time” when combined with “Don’t go telling”.
AAVE, full of nuance.
Polerius, I think in Biggirl’s example, “do” does work just as well.
The advantage of “be” is that it tends to be less ambiguous.
She be talking in class.
She talks in class.
The first is AAVE. The meaning conveyed is “She talks in class often”. The second is Standard, and has an identical message. But it can also mean (in the absence of context), “She is currently talking in class”.
In practice, though, both Standard and AAVE speakers use words like “often”, “always” and “all the time” that remove such ambiguity. When I’m speaking AAVE, I usually say “She be talking in class all the time”. Just like I would say “She talks in class a lot”.
My favorite AAVE verb usage is “been done”. As in, “We been done graduated”. A non-speaker may read this as, “We just graduated”, but they would be wrong. The actual meaning is, “We graduated a long time ago. Where the hell have you been?”
My snark bone is broken!
I was being sarcastic in the post I apologized for and sincere in my apology post.
I disagree. She talks in class ≠ She is currently talking in class. I would always interpret it, even with no context, as meaning that she habitually talks in class.
You’re right. One would say “She is talking in class” if they wanted to say “She is currently talking in class”.
I TOLE you this AAVE stuff was a whole 'nother thread.
The advantage of “I be at the Reggae club” is that it is so precise that it allows no other interpretation. “I be” means “I’m chronically there, at the club”. There’s a difference between that and saying “I go” because with “I go to” there’s room for a “I move or proceed to” interpretation from that sentence, which not only fails to place you precisely at the club’s GPS coordinants but also, without more context, doesn’t allow you to pin down the author’s intended tense.
Imagine you’re telling me a story about your weekend experience at the club. There’s two ways you could express what you did. You could say “So I ate dinner, right? And then I went to the Reggae Club. That’s when I fell on my ass.” Since storytellers also choose to speak in the present tense, you also have the option of saying “So I eat dinner, right? And then I go to the Reggae Club. That’s when I fall on my ass.”
You can’t do that with “be”. “Be” only works in one type of tense. The past, present, and future tense. It has no ambiguity. It stands alone. “I be at the Reggae Club” can only mean one thing. I am always at the Reggae Club.
All hail to the power of be!!!
Well, you see, it had to be that way. When we planning runaways, revolts, and rebellions, we needed to be able say a lot in only a few words.
Ask the AAVE speaker? Might not be a bad idea…
I have to admit that I would never have known about the “he be going” meaning if a real live Black person hadn’t explained it to me.
:dubious: Always?
“Tuesday goes much better for Heather than the day before. She talks in class, undetected this time, raising her hand just often enough to fool the teacher into thinking she’s paying attention.”
“So I remove the handcuffs and what does he do? He runs!”
“You look sad.”
“My head hurts.”
etc.