I work with a lot of very smart African-American professionals.
Almost all of them will readily speak “ebonics” or jocular trash talk complete with black slang when they’re on break, among friends, or on the phone with friends, but all have learned to speak “white” English on the job.
You needn’t speak that way 24/7, but in academia or in the business world, you’re at a huge disadvantage of you can’t speak that way at all.
That’s called code-switching, and it’s quite common in many places for many languages:
A lot of schools, even in wealthy suburbia, have stopped teaching cursive, believing it obsolete. That is another debate, or a Pit thread.
AAVE is not Standard English With Mistakes
And no one, not even the pickiest of schoolmarms speaks or writes in SE naturally. Everyone has colloquialisms and slang. That’s why books need copyeditors.
He certainly does speak AAVE. Probably picked it up from his social circle in his college days.
If I get a business communication letter or email that I understand perfectly well but that is full of misspellings, my opinion of the sender and of the business they represent lowers drastically. And I am not alone in this.
If I lowered my opinions of everyone who sent me emails with spelling mistakes, I’d need a backhoe. And many of the most egregious offenders are college-educated, middle-aged white people, so there you go.
I am white and my co-worker is black.
My black co-worker will often speak what I like to call “ghetto English” to the students, thinking she is being cool and hip and on their level.
I can tell you that quite a few black students no longer want anything to do with the woman sitting next to me for that very reason, and specifically ask to speak only with me - they don’t talk like that nor do they find it cute or hip or “on their level”. Most find it rather embarrassing and not at all appropriate for college discussions regarding classes and planning for their future. I had one woman tell me, “when my kids speak like that at home, I tell them to stop it immediately!”
Just sayin’…not every black student likes to talk street, and some find it personally offensive and a stereotype they would rather avoid.
It is quite another thing to simply have a southern accent, or use regional phrases or words, but dumbing it down to sound like a drug dealer/pimp in the 'hood is not universally appreciated.
I recently read a book about a doctor who founded a mobile medical clinic for homeless teens in his city (Phoenix), and he told a story about a medical student who worked there on rotations, and he was Ivy League all the way but wanted to “establish street cred” with the kids. How did he do this? He peppered his speech with profanity. :dubious: The kids could see right through this, and avoided him.
As for whether her dialect will impair her college performance, probably not, but it will affect her ability to get a job.
Some people can switch back and forth pretty easily:
(I’ve broken the link since it does contain some profanity.)
Is it pahked at Hahvahd Yahd?
Sorry. Couldn’t resist.
Nzinga, Seated writes:
> He certainly does speak AAVE.
Can you link to a YouTube video or something that shows him speaking AAVE? What I said was that he wasn’t raised by anyone speaking AAVE. He may be capable of code-switching to AAVE, but I don’t think he does it naturally. When he tries it, I think, it sounds like he’s pushing himself to do it.
Well yeah, but the cursive in question here was written by a friend as a substitute for Ms Jeantel writing anything on her own, in any dialect. It was not some arbitrary test of whether or not she could read cursive. The question at hand was whether or not she could read her own frigging statement!
What the fuck are you talking about? If she can’t read cursive, it hardly matters if they words written are attributable to her or not. She wasn’t asked to tell what she said to her friend, she was asked to read the paper in front of her written in cursive. Clearly, if she can’t read cursive, it hardly matters whose words she is reading. People her age not learning cursive is fairly common. Not sure why this bit of information is particularly telling.
This is something I never understood when it comes to these issues - this idea that lowering expectations (which meant creating sub-standard expectations) for a specific and identifiable group is somehow going to help them, when, in fact, such ideas usually cement existing situation for longer (i.e. over more generations) than it should have been if said group was faced with standard expectations from a get go.
It appears - to me, at least - that in some cases a group that imposes “politically correct” narrative only perpetuates existing cultural and socio-economic dynamic and, over time, becomes a major obstacle to any notion of equality.
And I’m writing this as a member of a group that was faced with veiled attempt to lower expectations for no other reason than to delineate one group from the other in public sphere.
Out of curiosity, are you ‘fluent’ in AAVE? If you are, I’m surprised to hear you say it sounds like he is pushing himself to do it. It just glides right out of his mouth naturally in my opinion. Black people don’t have to force AAVE or so called standard English. Most Black Americans can speak both with equal comfort.
“Naw, we straight.” is an example of black English. Simply means, No, we are square…we owe each other nothing." He uses it perfectly normally like any other black person would use it.
At the 14 minute mark of the trash talking part of this video, where they are playing basketball is pretty good. I’m sure there are plenty parts in that video that would show it as well, but I didn’t feel like watching it all, so I skipped to the basketball. I could find tons of videos where he gets ‘preacher’ in his style, but that would be dismissed by people who don’t realize that black people do THAT all the time too when we are together, even those of us who are atheists.
Look, this shit is common as hell to black folks. Most of the black people I know go back and forth with it depending on what we are doing or who we are around. My black friends with white mothers, my black Army brat friends who grew up in Germany and Japan…once we get together and start being all black together and shit, it just comes out. It’s not a big deal. Even when he speaks “proper English” he still sounds like just another black dude to me. I have no idea what people are talking about when they bring this up.
Doesn’t this beg the question why wasn’t she able to write her letter herself in non-cursive?
Is that the best examples you can find? Those aren’t particularly clear cases of using AAVE. At best, it sounds like some mild use of AAVE expressions. Again, my point was that Obama didn’t grow up much influenced by AAVE. Neither his mother, his grandparents, his father, or his stepfather spoke it. He’s picked up some of it since college, and he’s able to code-switch into it when necessary, but he’s far, far from being a typical speaker of AAVE.
If Jeantel’s twitter messages are any indication of her literacy, it would have been an interesting, and possibly comprehensible, narrative, had she written it herself.
It doesn’t beg the question, but it does raise the question you asked. The answer, if you believe the lawyer questioning her, is that her writing is illegible.
As an aside, I wonder if/why her not being able to read cursive didn’t come out during depositions? You would think it would, meaning asking her on the stand is just an attempt to embarrass her.