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And Language for All
What’s a (White) Teacher
to Do about Black English?
SARA DALMAS JONSBERG
W
hen they arrived in my section of freshman comp, the course required of all
entering college students, Tarsha, Shera, and Keydrya revealed themselves as
bilingual. They knew how to write and speak “good English.” They were articulate and graceful in written and oral “school language.” They also knew how to
speak “Black English,” and they knew when each language was appropriate. They referred to
the argot they used privately as “slang” or “bad English.” I don’t know how they learned their
two languages—which was first and which second, which was spoken at home and which
had been acquired among friends—but I did notice
this: one crucial lesson had been omitted from the
language training of these alert and articulate young
women. They did not respect the Black English they
could speak so fluently. They did not know its history. They seemed ashamed and were apologetic if
they fell to speaking it in class. Enthusiastic and
thoughtful contributors to class discussions and
projects, linguistically they demonstrated Theresa
Perry’s comment that “Black English is the last uncontested arena of Black shame” (4).
So I dragged them to the James Baldwin
piece that is often included in composition readers:
“If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me,
What Is?” Two paragraphs of this essay take my
breath away no matter how many times I read it.
They tell in just a few words the whole story, not only
of the origin of Black English, but also of the painful
reason why it must continue to live, at least until that
miraculous day when (if ?) we manage to eradicate
racism from American culture:
Black English is the creation of the black diaspora.
Blacks came to the United States chained to each
other, but from different tribes: Neither could
speak the other’s language. If two Black people
at that bitter hour of the world’s history had been
able to speak to each other, the institution of
chattel slavery could never have lasted as long as
it did. . . . [The formation of Black English] was
not . . . the adoption of a foreign tongue, but an
alchemy that transformed ancient elements into
a new language: A language comes into existence
by means of brutal necessity, and the rules of the
language are dictated by what the language must
convey. [Emphasis in the original.]
There was a moment, in time, and in this
place, when my brother, or my mother, or my
father, or my sister, had to convey to me, for
example, the danger in which I was standing from
the white man standing just behind me, and to
convey this with a speed, and in a language, that
the white man could not possibly understand, and
that, indeed, he cannot understand, until today.
He cannot afford to understand it. This understanding would reveal to him too much about
himself, and smash that mirror before which he
has been frozen for so long. (16)
“Bitter hour” . . . “brutal necessity” . . . the drama of
that scene requiring instant private communication . . . the white man self-admiring before a mirror that lies. The words are harsh, the pictures
condemn.
Sentimental white woman that I am, I hope
not to be accused of the nineteenth century sin of
“romantic racialism” (Frederickson) when I say that
I cannot read Baldwin’s words without feeling a
English Journal
Copyright © 2001 by the National Council of Teachers of English. All rights reserved
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surge of emotion that seems to mix shame and profound sorrow with an awed and astonished respect
and something almost like envy. The more I read of
real US history (as opposed to the “consensus history” of school texts and nationalist mythologies) and
African American literature, the more I am in awe
of black survival of the hells that were slavery, Reconstruction, and the continuing, seemingly endless
nightmare of racism and discrimination.
The language we call Black English, or
Ebonics (because I rely so on James Baldwin, I prefer to use his term), can be said to symbolize that
history of incredible strength. Geneva Smitherman
reflects on what it means to use the language: “To
speak Ebonics is to assume the cultural legacy of US
slave descendants of African origin. To speak Ebonics is to assert the power of this tradition in the quest
to resolve the unfinished business of being African
in America” (9). Speaking Ebonics should not evoke
shame or elicit correction; rather it should evoke
pride in the speaker and admiration in the listener.
It seems almost criminal to me that the three
young women in my freshman class had learned to
despise the language they operated in so comfortably. The truth is they were—and are—bilingual, as
much as if they spoke both French and English, or
Spanish and English, or Gujrati and English. They
deserve to be proud of the easy way they can code
switch and of the heritage that the language symbolizes. They deserve to know how much Black English has given to the language of the wider culture
(to adapt Geneva Smitherman’s way of speaking
about what is usually called “Standard English”) in
vocabulary and narrative structure and cadence. Or
perhaps I should say, how much Standard English
has appropriated from African American ways of
speaking, since the dominant culture does tend to
just take whatever it wants.
If we are going to celebrate diversity in our
classrooms, we must learn to be respectful not just
of various literatures, but of the various knowledges,
rooted in various languages, that our students bring
with them into the classroom. James Britton articulates in Language and Learning what has become
a truism in progressive pedagogy: “. . . we must
begin from where the children are: in other words
there can be no alternative in the initial stages to
total acceptance of the language the children bring
with them. . . . From there I would go on to develop
an awareness of difference among forms of speech”
(134, emphasis mine). Lisa Delpit elaborates on the
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M a r ch 2 0 0 1
idea of developing an “awareness of difference.”
Drawing on Stephen Krashen’s work in second language learning, she points out that the “less stress”
that is placed on learning new or strange forms of
speech, the more efficient will be the learning process (155). Delpit states that language competence
may be defined as the ability to choose what form
of language is most appropriate to a particular situation.
Black English follows a set of
rules as much as Standard
English does, but the distribution
of power in our culture means
it is easier to buy a traditional
grammar book for Standard
English than one for Black English.
I suggest that competence also involves respect (which must include self-respect) for all variations. James Sledd has said that if we think students
can comprehend the abstractions of subject and
verb (and we do certainly behave as if we think they
can understand these mysteries), then they can certainly comprehend the abstractions of race and class.
They can, in other words, understand how the larger
culture has come to value one dialect over another.
They can learn that “good English” has to do with
politics and power more than with aesthetics or
immutable rules. They can learn to be critical of a
tradition that uses language implicitly to measure
a speaker’s morality and social value—when, for
example, variations are described as “corrupt” or
“defective” or “broken.” (See Williams.)
They—and we—can learn not to talk about
“bad English” and “good English” but rather about
different forms of a living and continually changing
English. They and we can learn not to talk about
“correcting” language but rather about the rule
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structures of different dialects. Black English follows a set of rules as much as Standard English does,
but the distribution of power in our culture means
it is easier to buy a traditional grammar book for
Standard English than one for Black English.
The distribution of power in our culture also
means that certain kinds of “getting ahead” require
knowing how to operate in what Smitherman calls
LWC, the Language of Wider Communication. For
this reason, we have an obligation as teachers to
open up LWC to all our students, help them become
fluent in it and be able to use it with comfortable facility. To this end, we and our students together can
find some ways to play with language that will bring
all these ideas to the surface without pedantry and
prescription, without alienation from either (or any)
kind of speaking. Marlene Carter, for example, has
used literature that code switches, such as stories
that employ Black English in dialogue and LWC in
narrations. Lisa Delpit suggests using role play. Britton advocates various uses of drama. June Jordan,
working with college students, invited them to compile a set of Black English grammar rules so they
would understand that Black English is indeed a language and come to respect it more completely.
If we really mean to provide access to learning
for all, the way is clear. Baldwin offers the challenge:
The brutal truth is that the bulk of the white people
in America never had any interest in educating Black
people . . . It is not the Black child’s language . . .
that is despised: It is his experience. A child cannot
be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child
cannot afford to be fooled. A child cannot be taught
by anyone whose demand, essentially, is that the
child repudiate his experience, and all that gives
him sustenance, and enter a limbo in which he will
no longer be Black, and in which he knows that he
can never become white. Black people have lost
too many Black children that way. (16)
Most teachers in the United States are white. Many
of the young people we teach are Black. There does
not have to be a great gulf between us, a chasm of
misunderstanding and disrespect, but the responsibility for bridging the space between rests not with
the children, but with the teachers. We need to understand, to know, and to live the history. We need to
understand and believe and enact ideas about affirmation and support. We need to seek out practical
strategies for classroom action. Luckily, plenty of resources are available for teachers who want to transform classroom language practices so that all children
will appreciate and respect the beauty and power of
Black English. Let’s get on with the important work
of healing misunderstandings about this language.
Note
I thank my friend and colleague Sharon Lewis for help
in finding the voice to speak out.
Works Cited
Baldwin, James. “If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then
Tell Me, What Is?” The Real Ebonics Debate: Power,
Language, and the Education of African-American
Children, a special issue of Rethinking Schools. Eds.
Theresa Perry and Lisa Delpit. 12.1 (1997): 16.
Britton, James. Language and Learning: The Importance of
Speech in Children’s Development. London: Penguin, 1970.
Carter, Marlene. “The Best of Both Worlds.” Beyond Heroes
and Holidays: A Practical Guide to K–12 AntiRacist, Multicultural Education and Staff Development. Eds. Enid Lee, Deborah Menkart, and Margo
Okazawa-Rey. Washington, DC: Network of Educators on the Americas, 1998. 146–53.
Delpit, Lisa. “Language Diversity and Learning.” Lee,
Menkart, and Okazawa-Rey 154–65.
Frederickson, George M. The Black Image in the White
Mind. New York: Harper & Row, 1971. Cited in Allis
Wolfe, “Women Who Dared: Northern Teachers of
the Southern Freedmen, 1862–1872.” Diss. CUNY,
1982.
Jordan, June. “Nobody Mean More to Me Than You and the
Future Life of Willie Jordan.” June Jordan, On Call:
Political Essays. Boston: South End Press, 1985.
Perry, Theresa. “I ’on Know Why They Be Trippin’.” Perry
and Delpit 3–5.
Sledd, James. “Grammar for Social Awareness in Time of
Class Warfare.” English Journal 85.7 (1996): 59–63.
Smitherman, Geneva. “Black English/Ebonics: What It Be
Like?” Perry and Delpit 8–9.
Williams, Joseph M. “‘O! When Degree is Shak’d’: Sixteenth
Century Anticipations of Some Modern Attitudes
Toward Usage.” English in Its Social Contexts: Essays in Historical Sociolinguistics. Eds. Tim William
Machan and Charles T. Scott. New York: Oxford UP,
1992. 69–101.
For “Real” US History, Two Excellent Texts:
Loewen, James W. Lies My Teacher Told Me. New York: The
New Press, 1995.
Zinn, Howard. The People’s History of the United States.
New York: HarperCollins, 1980.
SARA DALMAS JONSBERG teaches in the English Department at Montclair State University, New Jersey.
English Journal
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