Naw, he doesn’t capitalize “Black.” And then there’s the title of the thread to think of. But you’re right, dive–we should concentrate on the arguments, not the poster.
Gundy: *As far as AAVE is concerned, it seems to me that it is simply modified English - whether it has its own grammar rules concerns me not at all. It’s not standard English, and standard English is historically the formal American norm, whether anyone likes it or not. Yes, it has evolved from “Queen’s English”. It continues to evolve, as is the nature of language, but basic rules and conventions have remained much the same over the years. Does anyone have a better idea than teaching and using standard English in schools? *
Nobody here is suggesting that we shouldn’t teach and use standard English. And everybody here, as far as I can tell, agrees that it’s important for blacks (as well as for non-blacks whose first language is a non-standard English dialect or an entirely different language) to be able to speak formal American English where necessary.
*There’s nothing wrong with maintaining a cultural identity by using native language. It’s important to know, however, when it’s appropriate to use it, and when it’s necessary to bend to convention. *
Absolutely. You won’t get any argument on that here.
*I think Reboot’s major issue here isn’t only language, it’s the supposed tendency of black America to reject educated blacks as “acting white”. It bothers me just as much. *
It bothers the rest of us too. Although many posters have offered intelligent and historically sensitive explanations of why this sort of rejection can occur, I think we’re all agreed that it’s not fair to scorn or harass people just because their cultural preferences are different from yours, or to use disparaging labels for their preferences.
What we’re picking on Reboot for is not these eminently sensible positions, but rather such assertions as that AAVE is somehow “deliberately created” or “enforced” by blacks to promote racial apartheid, or that blacks “deliberately fight to be accepted by everyone else, then just as deliberately, work to undermine and delay such progress” or “if you wish to be accepted by a greater society, then you don’t encourage seperationist speech or attitudes.” We are also trying to point out to him that sweeping statements about his personal aesthetic preferences, such as “I liked the black people of the 70s” (I guess he did not meet very many Black Panthers back then :rolleyes: ), or that he finds “prison haircuts” to be “offensive,” or that he thinks given names like LaWanda or LaTeesha are stupid, are irrelevant to the sensible points you brought up. Moreover, they don’t accomplish anything except to make him look like someone who just wants to criticize blacks.
GRUNDY:
I think I agree. The original post concerned a well spoken black man expressing his view about black language in black communities and the resistance he got from them because he didn’t choose to follow the crowd. He also said that his fellow blacks make a deliberate effort to keep their slang as a black language to remain separate from whites.
I did not hear the program, but I have heard similar things from both black and white before, so it is not just a discrimination thing on Reboot’s behalf. The difference, in my opinion, is that slang talk from most other races is accumulative by way of environment, while what the speaker expressed is that in some black communities, it is deliberate. Corrections are frowned on.
As for the other stuff, I have no opinion, having seen people of various races choose to occasionally wear various ‘clannish’ gear, except that even I have noticed that blacks seem to create and wear more black oriented fashions than spotted among other races. I take that to be an attempt to solve a racial identity problem since the styles seem to focus on Africa, poverty and the Muslim religion.
I’ve watched divorce court and consider it to be nothing but a display designed to show black people in about their worst light. Judge Ephrim does nothing much to discredit this image. It is similar to the period when Jerry Springer filled his shows with mainly black people who appeared to be about as low as one could get and out of the many people who respond too his searches, I have no doubt that he could have found enough whites to make both races look equally stupid, but did not.
sigh You don’t seem to have been in my part of the country lately. There are plenty of people who speak like a “hick” on school boards. That doesn’t mean they lack in mental ability.
Why are you so hung up on this anyway? Why does it matter in the grand scheme of things?
[sub]I noticed Alessan didn’t have a comeback for me…[/sub] 
I think Kimstu’s last post sums up how I feel. I don’t like to see people ridicule others who are working hard by saying they are putting on airs, being uppity, etc etc.
And I don’t like people who purposely act obnoxious, or play up to some stereotype because of LOW SELF ESTEEM and fear of ridicule.
What I don’t like, however, are Reboot’s generalizations. I I think the main point, is perhaps, education and background? Or is it an issue of feeling low self worth?
[sub] Give me time, man! I don’t carry my copy of Norton’s Anthology upon me wherever I go![/sub]
It’s not that, its the way he’s going about it. There’s a sub-text that becomes clearer and clearer… Sure I judge people by the way they talk, but I also know enough to do it individually and to reasses as need be.
Absolutely, its all about socialization. I will disagree that speaking non-standard English reflects on intelligence, but it does say a lot about education and motivation, depending on the circumstances. I do hiring. I do not hire people who can not speak in the appropriate register of their native language. (For my area education is important. Now if we were talking factory labor, that’s another question).
A dialect of English, not modified. A technical difference, but I thought I’d note it anyways.
No, standard American English has evolved at the same time as the standardization of English in England. Each fed off of the other, although certainly American inferiority complexes have caused us to look to English examples for correctness from time to time.
Well, that’s a question langauge acquisition specialists to answer I guess.
Well in many respects Af-Americans are the classic outsiders-insiders in historical American culture. I think that’s what puts them in such a weird spot and why there are such severe identity issues.
Absolutely, and in fact it would be a positive thing to see higher rates of bilingualism in the USA. Give us a better reservoir for me to hire from. I need multilinguals more than monolinguals.
Collounsbury, your points are well taken. But to be honest I don’t really care about Reboot’s motives; it troubles me that they were questioned from the first.
It’s not so much the actual use of non-standard English that I believe is somewhat indicative of intelligence, but the willingness & ability to use it and to know when to use it. Does this make sense?
Everyone here has noted that (to the untrained ear at least) AAVE sounds an awful lot like the way good ol’ boys talk down South. Why hasn’t anyone tried to legitimize that form of speech?
Gundy: Everyone here has noted that (to the untrained ear at least) AAVE sounds an awful lot like the way good ol’ boys talk down South. Why hasn’t anyone tried to legitimize that form of speech?
It’s already legitimized, Gundy. That is, it is widely accepted as a regional dialect that is quite okay for people to use in informal situations as part of their cultural heritage. Nobody is accusing Southern white “good ol’ boys” of deliberately fostering cultural isolation and irresponsibly derailing their quest for social equality just because they use that dialect among themselves.
What most of us here are saying is simply that AAVE should be accepted in the same way. Some people speak AAVE in some situations because it’s a dialect that’s part of their cultural heritage. We all agree that black AAVE speakers should also be able to speak standard American English when necessary, and that they shouldn’t hassle or ridicule other blacks just because they choose not to speak AAVE. But they should also not have to put up with silly and baseless accusations such as the ones Reboot quoted: e.g., that AAVE is just “speaking trash”, and that claims about its history and culture are “all crap”, and similar misinformation.
Oy, dey tink it’s a bleck ting? Dey neve hoid Bubele frohm Brooklyn!
I have no problem with anyone using whatever dialect they want in informal social situations. The problem arises when they use the dialect in a job interview (or another similar situation) and then cry racism when the interviewer doesn’t hire them. Even if the interviewee has better qualifications on paper, I believe that an interviewer has every right to turn down someone who fails to demonstrate an adequate command of formal english. It might be smart for the interviewer to say something like, “Could you please demonstrate for me that you can use formal english when appropriate by speaking formal english for the duration of this interview?” If the interviewee is incapable of complying, then they have the opportunity to say that they have sufficient other skills to offset this lack. If they are able but unwilling, then I say the interviewer has every right to not hire them. If they are capable and willing, then everything goes smoothly and I would expect that their cooperation would positively influence the interviewer.
There are people out there who feel that the requirement to speak formal english in a formal situation is a racist aspect of our culture. I disagree.
I don’t think that AAVE should be accepted as a legitimized form of speech. The fact that is has its very own acronym and that it is recognized as a dialect (duly noted, Collounsbury!:)) separates it from good ol’ boy-speak. No such nifty acronym for GOB-speak - which is fine with me. I don’t understand the need to say that it’s okay to use these forms of speech and “recognize” them as dialects. It’s just slang - highly developed and deeply rooted slang, but slang nonetheless. And I do think that to some extent the good ol’ boys have isolated themselves using this language - I believe I saw a couple of anecdotal reports in this thread saying that Yanks get ribbed when they go down South and use “isn’t” instead of “ain’t”. Derailing their quest for social equality? Well, probably not, but I imagine that those folks might have a hard time being taken seriously up North.
I think that legitimizing these dialects this way encourages their use, and the more common their use becomes, the more deteriorated the standard English becomes. I’m all for modernizing, updating, evolving, and expanding language, but simply breaking rules because a group of people regularly do in their informal speech seems wrong to me.
Re: Reboot’s tangents, having re-read the OP, I can see that he was asking a somewhat different question than it initially seemed. That being said, I think his initial question was a decent one, and many of the first responses immediately took him to task for his racism. Unfortunately for him, he’s not been particularly tactful in his subsequent posts.
VileOrb I haven’t heard of that happening, and how does it relate to the OP anyway?
Gundy my dear fellow you’re missing my point.
Not sure what you mean here. You mean should it compete with normalized standard English. Well, that all depends on the political (ultimately economic) clout of the community. I frankly don’t care one way or the other. But given reality, it ain’t (hehe) gonna happen.
Oh Gundy, take yourself down to a nice research libarary and spend a day reading about American dialects in linguistics texts Southern dialect (white version) has its own lively literature. I have no interest in it so I can’t share any real information, but interest in southern dialects (plural) is actually one of the older areas of interest in American linguistics, from what I have been led to understand.
Dialects are simply variants of any given language. Recognizing a dialect is simply recognizing a describable variation. Linguistics is not in the business of making hierarchies and in fact finds the whole proper versus improper debate to be tedious. Proper is what has power and money. Improper is what does not. That’s the way things are. My dad’s family speaks hyper-proper speech. Why is it hyper-proper. Cause they’re well-off and their dialect is valued. I’m not complaining about that, its simply a sociological observation.
No, it is not. Slang is one thing, dialect is another. This is really a linguistics sort of question, but to say something is a dialect is to recognize a form of speech a variant of a recognizable constellation of dialects called a langauge. It’s fairly subjective --one of the favorite definitions in linguistics of a language is “a dialect with an army.” Or some such, I think that’s Chomsky’s bon mot but don’t hold me to that. What we call standard English is simply a mildly artificial formalization of the prestige dialect. Nothing wrong with that by the way, a formalized prestige dialect is damned useful. But it ain’t a holy grail and other dialects can be quite rich resources for the prestige dialect over time.
I’ve encountered Texans, as I noted, who insist on their whacky-ass dialect even when working in an international environment. Whatever. It’s all about making a point or emphasizing one’s identity. SO I get all proper on them. Or I go the other way and pull out some Brooklyn tawk on them, not that I do it well but what do some cowboy hat wearing chowderheads know? (ah maybe its not nice to add the gratitious regional insult, but why not?)
Bother. Standards schmandards. I don’t see that standard English is deteriorating from dialectal usage. It’s enriched in my mind. Much worse is “memoese” – the horrible business-speak bureacratic language of some of my colleagues is a much greater threat to the language than someone busting out with some dialect.
Rules are made to be broken. It just has to be done with style. Don’t obsess about them.
Frankly, my read is he’s a kkker trying not to see to be. Maybe that’s off-base but the subtext is there. I gather from some comments that his writing style ressembles a another poster whose opinions on race became clear. I think I have a suspicion as to who.
Gundy: many of the first responses immediately took him [Reboot42] to task for his racism.
Gundy, I went back over the thread and I cannot figure out what you’re talking about here. As far as I can tell, although many of us disagreed with some of Reboot’s assertions, nobody called him a racist at all, or even suggested he might be racist, until he’d posted three or four messages including some of his unfortunate generalizations. I agree it’s not good to be over-hasty in accusing people of racism, but it doesn’t seem to me that that’s happened in this case. If you think it has, could you point out some specific examples in “many of the first responses”, please?
Thanks Kimstu, I had noticed that response but had pretty much dismissed it. I didn’t see where anyone called him a racist, though a few made cryptic remarks that might be construed as questioning his motivations. Oh, an references to a poster I assume is no longer around since I have no idea to whom they might be refering.
Well, I don’t know about AAVE, but in Pittsburgh, our local dialect is known as Pittsburghese-www.pittsburghese.com
My examples given aside from the speech were to point out actions of deliberate separation, which were pointed out to me some time ago. In a company I worked for, the personnel manager used to get exasperated because so many black people would show up for an interview speaking ‘blacklish,’ dressed in the current rap style, and talking like rappers. She was not about to hire any of them because they did not have the brains to dress and act the part of many others who applied properly for jobs. Plus along with the ‘blacklish’ often came an attitude of sullen aggression. She found it in men and woman, but mainly in men.
She would not hire anyone who appeared to have insufficient basic communication skills needed to work with the customers. That included all races. It used to irritate her that some races would show up acting like she had to give them the job. We dealt with higher end goods, above the level of Walmart so you had to present a certain image.
I worked with a guy in another job, where we had a large black contingent of employees, and he was one of these chameleons, who acted blacker than black even though he was white. Technically, this could be construed as flattery, but he generated quite a bit of resentment among the black workers who felt he had no right to copy their language and dress. Personally, the guy annoyed me to no end because he seemed to pick the worst traits of black stereotype to display. Eventually, he got himself fired because of his attitude.
The basic topic is that if, as the black guy on the radio stated, a deliberately cultivated racial language is existing for the purpose of separation, then the users are deliberately undermining their own efforts at equality, which doesn’t make sense.
What you are describing is class conflict, not race. In the U.S., the particular history of race-based slavery/segregation/discrimination creates a very strong correspondence between race and class (which is why a few blacks take their “poor” attitude into the middle class). However, the use of language as a separator has volumes written about it in British English, beginning in the eighteenth century and continuing into the present. G.B. Shaw’s Pygmalion has a huge subtext on the issue of language and class that is only partially carried forth in the musical remake, My Fair Lady.
It is not a “black” thing. It simply appears more frequently among blacks in this country because we have ceated such a strong link between race and class, here.
Class conflict? I never considered class, because among all races there are class divisions. In this instance I did not consider it because of the wide spread general imitation by young people of black generated transient styles and actions. I don’t recall very many people finding the ‘poor white’ stereotype of the 70s and 80s as something to imitate.
There was a time when it seemed that the entertainment field was packed with movies of the ‘cracker’ speaking white southern and back woods attitude, but that never seemed to catch on and as the 60s came into vogue, the non-race generated lingo just spread all over the place.
I grew up with a lot of cracker speaking whites, but no one ever found it necessary to develop a translatory form of language like Ebonics in order to act as a communicator for them. Even the much poked fun at Bronx dialect was more rich in accent than in created descriptive phrases and buzz words.
Mentions of past white based dialects have been brought up which have reflected the condition of the times that they were generated in which, IMHO, indicate the various levels of societal maturation. I.E.: the gangster dialect was created during a socially immature time when poverty was wide spread, people could legally buy machine guns, cops were one step above thugs, the average Joe on the street was quick to be a smart ass, racial separation was very predominate and the government felt the FBI should not be armed. (Study the movie series concerning the Bowery Boys. The Bowery was then a huge poverty area. Huntz Hall was a primary example.)
Over the decades, as education and conditions changed, so did the language and attitudes. The sudden return to a street language by a large percentage of blacks, to me anyhow, seems to be a retrograde action. It did not appear until the 90s, when great strides were being made in race relations, which is kind of odd because African Americans were getting more of what they wanted.
It is as if as they won the long fight, some felt that they were loosing some form of racial identity and retreated into things designed to create one, adopting and raising to high points of honor past repressed or poverty based living conditions.
Like poor whites used to consider BBQ, meals of poke beans, collard greens, fat back, chicken wings and biscuits - foods primarily consumed by the poor, high Southern cooking. In actuality, those were the foods most cheaply available. Chicken wings used to be considered a disposable part of the chicken and could be bought by the tub, the same with fat back and the bitter collard greens were not much in demand in higher society. BBQ was a way to make cheap cuts of meat palatable. Over the years, in many areas, the ‘cultural’ foods of the poor graduated to being an art form.
I still dislike greens, fatback gives cardiologists heartburn and wings are now quite expensive because of the Buffalo Wings craze.
It is a retrograde thing. (Am I making sense here? I’m having problems explaining this.) The difference is that in the black example, it seems to be more of a protective shell, which has become self defeating. The time of its development is inappropriate because of the improving social conditions. As more and more black people obtain good economic, political and social status, become more and more in the forefront, the regressive attitude is curious.
It makes me wonder if it might not be the Hells Kitchen example: people through economic and educational changes moved away from that hell hole in NYC, but some moved back, preferring the violent lifestyle and antisocial behavior to ‘normal behavior.’ They could not cope with achieving what they had fought for and were more used to the ‘exciting’ life style.