The Great Wall of African American
Vernacular English in the American
College Classroom
REBECCA MOORE HOWARD
The question of how a composition teacher should respond to students' nonstandard usage has been a subject of debate for decades. Colleges' open
admissions policies in the 1970s made the issue an even more pressing one;
hence in the 1970s and early 1980s an appreciable scholarship on pedagogical
responses to non-standard dialects emerged. The various recommendations
that surfaced in these discussions are well described in Keith Gilyard's recent
tripartite taxonomy (70-74): In response to a student's non-standard usage, the
teacher can opt for eradicationism, asserting the superiority of the standard code
and endeavoring to persuade the student to abandon the non-standard home
code entirely. Or the teacher can endorse pluralism, recognizing the communicative and cultural equality of all codes and respecting students' right to make
their own code choices. Or the teacher can encourage code-switching (which
Gilyard calls "bidialectalism"), averring that the nonstandard home dialect is
effective in its context but that the student will have to master the standard for
purposes of upward socioeconomic mobility:
Bidialectalists postulate that Black English is equal to Standard English but not quite
equal enough. They acknowledge that the language variety is not inferior linguistically
or conceptually but, claiming to be pragmatic, they feel that Standard English must
be mastered by Black children in the schools so that these children can keep the
possibility of upward mobility alive. (74)
This latter option, code-switching (also known as bidialectism or
bidialectalism), has become the teacher's standard response to linguistic variety
in the American college composition classroom. The debate about how to
respond to non-standard English (such as African American Vernacular English,
also known by the shorter and older terms "Black English" or "Black English
Vernacular" or their acronyms "BE" or "BEV") seems to have been settled by
composition teachers in favor of code-switching. Hence when]errie Cobb Scott
writes about linguistic variety in the college composition classroom for a 1993
MLA handbook on linguistic pedagogy, she does not argue the choices between
eradicationism, pluralism, and code-switching. Instead, she assumes code-
266 Special Issue: Who Does the Teaching?
switching to be the pedagogy of choice and spends her time explaining techniques for implementing it.
Not everyone shares Keith Gilyard's taxonomy; instead, it is customary to
differentiate only two categories-co de-switching and eradicationism. Gilyard
differentiates two categories within what is customarily meant by code-switching
or bidialectism. His names for the two categories are bidialectalism and pluralism;
my own background in linguistics disposes me to call them code-switching and
pluralism. To Gilyard, the difference between the two is one of agency: who
decides when and whether to code-switch? H it is the language user, then the
policy is one of pluralism; if it is the teacher, the policy is one of code-switching.
This is, I believe, an important distinction, and with it Gilyard has made a farreaching contribution to multicultural linguistics and composition pedagogy.
To many commentators, though, that difference is invisible, and the term codeswitching (or bidialectism}describes the benevolent alternative to eradicationism.
The context of Scott's earlier work (in Smitherman, Black English} would
suggest that when she talks about "code-switching," she might be intending
something more like Gilyard's pluralism than his bidialectalismlcode-switching, but nothing in her 1993 article itself would suggest that interpretation.
Rather, Scott seems to treat the question of agency in code-switching as a nonquestion. My concern, therefore, is not so much with ascertaining Scott's
underlying intentions as it is with predicting the conclusions that her readers
are likely to reach; in a climate in which the hegemonic code-switching
described by Gilyard is considered the humane option and in which acommentator on code-switching does not address the question of agency, readers are
likely to fit the commentary into the framework of a putatively benevolent,
teacher-directed code-switching.
Given that commentators have given little consideration to the question of
agency and given that code-switching is customarily represented in binary
opposition to eradicationism, it is not surprising that code-switching is the
linguistic pedagogy of choice in composition classrooms and that pluralism is
invisible as a third option.
It is the purpose of this essay to express some discomfort with that choice.
The linguistic principle behind the pedagogy of code-switching is that all
language varieties are equally effective in their communities; that the standard
variety prevails in the academic community as well as in the communities of
American commerce; that students who wish to succeed in these communities
must learn the standard; and that teachers should therefore encourage students
of non-standard varieties to switch to the standard in the classroom. The
pedagogy of code-switching endeavors to acknowledge the viability of all
varieties of English while teaching students how to use the standard. However,
code-switching pedagogy, unaccompanied by a significant pluralistic component to the curriculum, can send the same message to students as does
eradicationism: only the standard counts, because non-standard varieties are
inferior.
African American Vernacular English 267
The pedagogy of pluralism asserts that all language varieties are equally
effective in their communities and that language choice should therefore be made
only by the user, not by the state or by its representative, the teacher. Asignificant
pluralistic component to the curriculum entails far more than classroom lip service;
it entails something on the order of a course or courses that teach African American
Vernacular English (AAVE) as a language like French or Japanese, not as a dialect
like Brooklyn English or Appalachian English. Only in such an atmosphere can
the pedagogy of code-switching function as anything more than covert
eradicationism. The purpose of a pluralistic curriculum extends far beyond the
liberal agenda of making Them feel welcome among Us; in this particular instance
it also includes making both Them and Us realize that African American Vernacular English is the language of a culture that has historical origins in Africa and that
has undergone modern fragmentation and reunification; and it includes our
realizing that this language variety is a significant influence upon and contributor
to other contemporary varieties of American English, including the standard. It is
not only a means of communication in African American culture, but it is a
significant component of American linguistic life. To study African American
Vernacular English, therefore, is to learn about one's own language, regardless of
whether that "one" is African American or European American. It is to challenge
along-standingtradition in which European American culture is not only superior
to but independent of African American culture.
Consider the paradox: our colleges teach African American studies and
celebrate African American culture but shun African American language as a topic
for pedagogy. How can one learn a culture without learning its language? What
are American college curricula teaching students about African Americans when
they offer programs in African American studies without offering courses in
African American Vernacular English, while at the same time they promote codeswitching in their composition courses? They are, I believe, teaching students that
African Americans and their culture are recognized but not accepted in the
academy. Higher education curricula can treat African Americans as objects,
examiningtheir history and literature, but may not treat them as subjects by learning
and making public use of their language, the vessel and fluid of their culture.
Institutions of higher education in the United States have curricula that simultaneously endorse and reject the lives of African Americans and their influence upon
other Americans. In the college classroom, the specter of AAVE, notas a topicfor
study butasavehicleofcommunication, precipitates a crisis of cultural representation
for both insiders and outsiders.
My experience with this crisis of representation comes from the first time I
taught a new linguistics course, "Language, Race, and Ethnicity in the United
States." The students in that course decided to try speaking AAVE for one day in
the classroom. (The majority of these students were people of color; and of that
contingent, the largest group consisted of African Americans and African
Caribbeans.) The attempt was a failure, from which Ilearned agreat deal about the
linguistic messages absorbed by students in a lifetime of American education.
268 Special Issue: Who Does the Teaching?
"Language, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States" taught the creole
history of African American Vernacular English; i.e., it taught students that
AAVE had at one time been a functionally independent New World language.
Mervyn C. Alleyne points out that acknowledging AAVE as a language is
insufficient; one must also engage the origins of that language. North American
scholarship, he says, tends to "stress the creation of a distinctive culture rather
than the continuity of African culture(s) transplanted to the New World"(173).
Alleyne explains the shortcomings of this interpretation: "The creativity view
fails to consider the possibility that preslavery cultures may have largely
determined the response and adjustment of slaves to slavery" (174-5). Alleyne
Qike many other scholars of African America) subscribes to a continuity
hypothesis rather than the creativity approach: AAVE represents a linguistic
process characterized by continuity from parent African languages. The fact that
African slaves came from a variety of African nations does not, from Alleyne's
perspective, undermine the continuity hypothesis. Although slave society was
comprised of many different West African groups, there was considerable
"emotional unity" among them (175-7). That emotional unity made possible a
common African American culture in which traditions (including linguistic
traditions) were carried over from Africa.
In "African Elements in African-A.merican English," Molefi Kete Asante
outlines the process whereby AAVE emerged as a creole language and developed into the language form(s) that Americans know today. During the Middle
Passage andDiaspora, the juxtaposition of various West African languages of the
Niger-Congo basin produced the morphology and phonology of new pidgins
that were derived from a mixture oflanguages, with the Mande languages of West
Africa and the Bantu languages of Central Africa, together with the Portuguese,
French, Dutch, and English of the slave traders and slave holders, substantially
represented. Much of the lexicon for these pidgins came from the European
languages of the superordinate slave traders and owners. (In most of the U.S.,
the superordinate language was English, whereas in Haiti and New Orleans it
was French.) The grammar of the pidgins came from both the subordinate
African languages and the superordinate European-but, following the "rules"
whereby pidgins are formed worldwide, the initially strongest grammatical
influence was the grammar of the subordinate languages (see Nichols). As these
pidgins became creoles-as their speakers taught the pidgin to their children as
the sole home language-phonology and grammar converged more strongly
with the superordinate form. In the creole stage, the erstwhile pidgins gained
creole status when they came to function as new languages. This condition
continues in Haiti today, where creole is the native language of much of the
population.
In the United States, on the other hand, there was considerably more social
interchange between the European-descended and African-descended population; hence plantation creoles began converging toward the superordinate
language, English, in a process that Asante calls Englishization. In this manner
African American Vernacular English 269
African American Vernacular English was born, a descendent of plantation
creole but no longer unintelligible to a monolingual speaker of English. AAVE
therefore comes not from antiquated British English nor from the "influence"
of African languages upon English, but from another language, plantation creole.
Finally the convergence was so extensive that (except for isolated areas such as
the Sea Islands of South Carolina, where the creole Gullah is still spoken by a
handful), the creole had functionally become a dialect of the superordinate
language.
Hence today we consider African American Vernacular English to be a
dialect of English. Given its continuing strong influences from its African
sources, it is indeed a non-standard variety. And given the power of hierarchy
in American society and the historical enslavement and then subordination of
the African-descended population, that non-standard variety has widely been
considered lesser, "deviant," "incorrect." And it still is. Just ask the students in
"Language, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States."
At the point when they decided to speak AAVE in the classroom, they
believed that they believed otherwise. In addition to learning the creole history
of AAVE, they had learned something of its structure, learned to think of it as
a language form whose grammar and vocabulary could be logically classified
and systematically explained.! It was Geneva Smitherman's Talkinand Testifyin
that impelled them to propose that they could and should speak AAVE in the
classroom. Smitherman's switching back and forth between Standard Written
English and print representations of AAVE; her inclusion of both white and
black readers; and her accessible narrative and analysis of the structure of AAVE
had persuaded my students that AAVE was not only a language but a speakable
language. By the time they finished the book, the students were convinced that
it was time for them to bring AAVE, as one student put it, "out of the closet."
Two students, one of African descent and one of European, sought and
gained my permission to make the proposal to the rest of the class. The class
debated the possibility only briefly; the proposal was received enthusiastically
and was quickly putto a vote. All buttwo of the twenty-eight students in the class
voted to have an AAVE Day on which they would all speak the language.
Problems arose almost immediately. European American students came
to class the next day saying that they had thought it over and didn't think they
could do it, after all. They didn't know enough AAVE, they said, to be able to
speak it. African American students in the class received this demurrer in
indignation. "You've been hearing it all your life," said one of the two students
who had made the proposal. "Don't tell me you can't speak it." But the white
students did not back down, and gradually they gained supporters among other
European American students who came to assert that they, too, were unable to
speakAAVE.
At first I was surprised by this turn of events. But soon I began to learn what
it was that the students were not willing to say in class. Two of them, two
European American women, came to see me separately, each with the same
270 Special Issue: Who Does the Teaching?
explanation: they did not want to speak AAVE, because if they did, they would
appear "prejudiced." In their experience, a white person speaks AAVE only to
parody African Americans. Both of them believed that it was not possible for
a white American to make any other use of AAVE. One said she had been raised
to "have more respect for black people" than to "mock" them by speaking their
language. The other woman was the European American who had co-presented
the proposal for AAVEDay. After some reflection (and perhaps some discussion
with her classmates or other friends), she had done a complete about-face on her
own proposal.
The class quickly became hotly divided on the issue, with the majority
nevertheless voting to continue the project. The dissenters bought time by saying
they needed to learn more. So we watched two films recommended by native
speakers of African American Vernacular English: Boyz 'n the Hood and School
Daze. Native speakers ofAAVE pointedoutthe features described by Smitherman
as they appeared in these films. Still the European American dissenters insisted
that they could not do it.
We pressed on, the class falling into greater confusion and division. Yet
another surprise awaited us. When AAVE day finally came, we discovered that
no one except two African American students and I were willing to try it. It wasn't
just European American students; it was African Americans, too. When the
moment came for us to speak AAVE in class, the African Americans discovered
that they did not want to be publicly associated with the language. One said that
he had spent years learning to speak the standard and did not now want to make
himself look ignorant in front of his European American peers. African
American Vernacular English was for him the language of the uneducated.
Another said that he was so accustomed to speaking the standard in the classroom
that he did not think he could simply switch to AAVE. The language, in other
words, would not transplant out of its context-the interaction of African
Americans in the absence of European Americans.
I came away from this course as disturbed as were my students. What we
found was that at least for those twenty-eight students, AAVE has no publiclife
in American society. It is a private language of one group, and neither the
members of that group nor any other group feel comfortable with it as a public
language. It is important to recognize, though, that for the students in "Language,
Race, and Ethnicity," it was not group solidarity but group stigma that made
AAVE a private language. The taint of stigma-the European Americans' fear
of appearing prejudiced and the African Americans' fear of appearing ignorantmotivated the collective desire to keep AAVE a private code sometimes
witnessed but never spoken by outsiders, a private code never spoken out of its
context. Code-switching to AAVE is profoundly constrained.
I would go so far as to say that in the first outing of "Language, Race, and
Ethnicity in the U.S.," AAVE emerged neither as a dialect nor a language, but
as a discourse position (in) which people may not learn from one anothexjn
classrooms. I attribute this phenomenon not only to Americans' quasi-apartheid
African American Vernacular English 271
cultural heritage but also to the absence of AAVE as a language taught in the
American educational system; and I attribute it to the surreptitious messages of the
composition pedagogy of code-switching. For whatever combination of reasons,
Standard English represents a discourse position (in) which American college
students may learn from each other (as attested in all the successful peer group
pedagogies of composition instruction), andAAVE one in which they may not.
The second time I taught "Language, Race, and Ethnicity," I avoided the
conflicts. We focused chiefly on the history of African American Vernacular
English and touched only briefly on the structure. We did not read Geneva
Smitherman's Talkin and Testifyin. We worked our way through a much safer
syllabus that madeAAVE an object of study without pushing students to engage
the language itself. The syllabus encouraged students to consider the power
relations that lie behind the fact that our culture is unaware of AAVE as a
language and unaware of its contributions to other American Englishes, as well
as the fact that the distinctive speech of many African Americans is regarded as
"bad English." But the syllabus did not push the students to confront the
contradictions that these circumstances create in their own lives. It did not ask
them to speak the language nor push their engagement with it to the point where
they would feel uncomfortable about it. It allowed distance rather than intimacy
to be the medium of classroom knowledge. The syllabus dodged rather than
embraced the generative conflict endorsed by Linda Flower:
Fashioning a more resonant classroom and workplace means more than defining and labeling
disagreements or mapping out arguments to show why we are in conflict. It can mean going
on a joint inquiry into thorny problems, opening up live options that let us construct a language
of possibility and a more complicated ground for action. (51-2)
Having briefly described the events in one linguistics class that I taught, I
should explain my own background as a linguist. When I was in college, a white,
middle-class, female, returning adult student enamored of language, I took a
course called "American English" in which the chief text was Albert
Marckwardt's 1958 American English. A feature of the 1958 edition of the
Marckwardt text which at the time seemed unremarkable but which is now
fascinating to me is its complete omission of African contributions to the
American language. Marckwardt lists the contributions of the French, Spanish,
German, Dutch, and even Native American languages to English, but does not
mention Africa, except in one sentence at the end ofthe chapter, which observes
that "immigrants" from "the Dark Continent" had inevitably left "some impress
upon the heterogeneous mixture of which they formed a part" (57-8). Marckwardt
provides no examples of what this Dark Continent impress might have been. In
his 1980 revision ofthe book, J.L. Dillard attempts to remedy the omission, but
his insertions amount to scarcely more than a page (65-6). Hence the readers of
the Marckwardt book have little reason to believe that African languages have
contributed to the development of AAVE, much less that African languages have
significantly enriched the American English word-stock.
272 Special Issue: Who Does the Teaching?
The American Dialect Society that dominated the dialectology of
Marckwardt's 1958 edition had been formed in 1889 with what Michael Montgomery calls Anglocentric "antiquarian goals" (443). When these linguists
encounteredAAVE and African American creoles like Gullah, they attributed
the distinctive features not to contributions of African languages but to the
retention of earlierfeatures of British dialects. AAVE was commonly explained,
in other words, neither in terms of creativity nor continuity, but in terms of
"colonial lag" : because the slaves were so socially insular, their form of English
changed less rapidly than did white Americans'. However outlandish such an
interpretation may sound today, it was at one time the solemn and sincere
opinion of the great majority of American linguistic geographers, e.g., George
Philip Krapp and Hans Kurath.
Molefi Kete Asante warns that other, more sinister explanations have been
offered for the distinctive features of AAVE:
A considerable intellectual meanness had to be combated by the initial cadre of
commurucationists who examined the continuity of black language behaviors from
Mrica to America. The racist assumption that black pidgin reflected an innate inability
of Mricans to learn English was current at one time. ("Mrican" 19)
But overt racism is hardly the only possible explanation oflinguists' denial of
the continuity hypothesis. One factor in Anglocentric linguistics was a lack of
knowledge about African languages. Lorenzo Turner, the first linguist to devote
a career to uncovering the African sources of American English, himself had to
spend a decade learning African languages. A second factor in the Anglocentrism
of early twentieth-century American linguistics was that, until the 1930s, linguistic
primacy was accorded to written, literary forms oflanguage, not to speech. (After
all,not sincethe ancient worldhadthe spoken word been accorded equal status with
the product ofpens.) Little description ofspoken language was therefore available,
and many of the African contributions to the American English word-stock were
of spoken, not written currency. Montgomery explains:
Gullah was described as 'Elizabethan' or 'Jacobean' for the same reason that so many
commentators called black usages 'Elizabethan' or 'Chaucerian' and for the very same
reason that other commentators labeled southern Appalachian speech in the same way:
these writers knew their classics, especially sixteenth-century literature. (444)
Montgomery suggests a third factor in the linguists' Anglocentricity: they knew
little about language contact situations (445). They were dialectologists, not
creolists. And Peter Trudgill points to a fourth possible limitation on early
research into AAVE: white linguists' fearthatin studying and describing AAVE
they would appear to be racist (59). The very acknowledgment that there is
something "different" about African Americans, so this reasoning goes, is
tantamount to racism. The more African Americans' culture and origins can be
identified with those of European Americans, the more egalitarian will the
society be.
African American Vernacular English 273
At the same time that the linguistic geographers were attributing the features
of AAVE to antiquated dialects of British English, Lorenzo Turner and his many
creolist successors were discovering African origins for a number of American
English words. Their discoveries support what Alleyne calls the continuity of
African American culture: many of the important features of the culture
constitute an African heritage, preserved (in however transformed a state) from
African cultures. Joseph E. Holloway and Winifred K. Vass specify which
African cultures are significant contributors: "At least 70 percent of the ancestors
of Americans of African descent came from the Mande (West African) and Bantu
(Central African ethnic groups) ... " (xix-xx).
Even for one who, like me, was schooled in Marckwardt's linguistic
geography, it is difficult to engage creolist scholarship and still maintain that, for
example, the zero copula in AAVE derives from retained features of an older
British dialect rather than from characteristic West African grammar. English
is a language that requires a verb between noun and predicate adjective, e.g., She
is pretty. The grammatical rules of many other languages of the world (including
West African languages) do not employ a verb in this situation. Hence AAVE,
descended from West African languages, has the zero copula: Shepretty. The zero
copula is a particularly troublesome feature for Anglocentric linguistics, since
there is no present-day British dialect marked by that feature (Trudgill64). It
takes quite an historical stretch, then, to assert that the zero copula of AAVE is
a retained feature of some hypothesized early British dialect form.
It is equally difficult not to noticethatthe Anglocentric disposition of those
early linguistic geographers still prevails in today's dictionary representations
of etymologies of American English words. Many words which creolists
Asante, Dalby, Holloway and Vass, and Thompson attribute to African origins
(e.g., bogus, bug, cool [as in "calm and collected"], daddy, jamboree, jazz, mojo,
okay, and phony) are not so indicated in desk reference dictionaries. (Perhaps
most outrageous is the representation uh-huh and uh-uh, Y oruba words for
affirmation and negation that every American speaker of English uses in
conversation. Both are commonly marked in dictionaries as interjections-as
grunts-and given no etymology.) Such lexicographic shortcomings only
encourage the common perception of AAVE as a language form important only
to its speakers, a language form that is a degraded version of the superstratum,
Standard English. Many Americans, in fact, regard AAVE as "slang" or "bad
English," not as a dialect, much less a creole that has converged toward the
superstratum so that the two are now mutually comprehensible. What is absent
from the non-linguist's understanding is the extent to which popular and even
standard English may be influenced by the languages of Africa; and our
dictionaries are doing little to remedy this common misconception.
Even when African origins are attributed to English words, the dictionaries
usually label those words "non-standard" or "slang." Despite the disclaimers
that dictionaries like theA mericanHeritage print in the beginning of the volume,
where they note that nearly everyone uses slang in some situations, most
274 Special Issue: Who Does the Teaching?
dictionary users do not read these disclaimers. Even if they did, they would
predictably continue to apply the common understanding of "slang" and "nonstandard" as bad English. As Charles F. Meyer observes, students come to
college convinced that there is just one right answer to any question of usage. The
words in the American English word-stock that are derived from African
languages, because they are given stigmatized labels, are therefore confirmed as
"bad English."
Hardly a congenial cultural environment for an appreciation of African
American Vernacular English. Hardly a cultural environment in which composition teachers' declarations of the viability of AAVE in its communities is
sufficient to counteract the negative lessons that the twenty-eight students in
"Language, Race, and Ethnicity in the U.S." had so thoroughly learned. When
the composition teacher is making such declarations while encouraging the use
of the standard, to which of those conflicting messages can we expect that the
students will form an allegiance? The case study of "Language, Race, and
Ethnicity in the U.S." offers what is for me a powerful answer. The pedagogy
of code-switching has the effect of eradicationism.
And its logic is enormously persuasive. In the United States, teachers of
English composition-and most of their students-know that the American
language code known variously as Standard English or "good English" is a
necessary tool for success in mainstream American society (which we usually
refer to simply as "society"). Other varieties of American English, such as
Appalachian English (my own native form; the term actually designates a whole
set of stigmatized regional codes from the Eastern mountains) or African
American Vernacular English (an umbrella term for language forms that
themselves exhibit considerable variation according to region, rurality, gender,
and class), can present problems when used in public settings such as the
corporate or academic worlds. 2 Americans know that speakers of Appalachian
English or African American Vernacular English are marked as outsiders to
corporate and academic communities. Still, most English teachers in the United
States assert that they should treat non-standard language varieties with respect,
reasoning that even though African American Vernacular English is lamentably
stigmatized in "society," it is not "bad" English but rather an effective form of
communication within its community.
The ways in which code-switching is pedagogically implemented varies to
some extent according to time period. Two decades ago, English teachers were
themselves urged to code-switch-to learn African American Vernacular English and perhaps even to use it in the classroom. For the 1979-80 school year,
for example, the language arts consultant to the King Elementary School in Ann
Arbor, Michigan, was required to have "extensive knowledge of black English,
and experience in teaching black English speaking students" (Ann Arbor 20).
Books that included "some Black English expressions" were considered valuable as children made the transition from monodialectism to bidialectism
(Yellin 153), and teachers were advised to learn the grammar of AAVE {Kochman
African American Vernacular English 275
251). In 1974the Conference on College Composition and Communication went
so far as to publish its 1972 recommendation that teachers "should be wholly
immersed in a dialect group other than their own" ("Students' Right" 18). Today,
though, the idea of teachers' code-switching has lost currency, at least in higher
education. Even the milder recommendation that teachers be linguistically
well-informed, learning, for example, the history of English and the nature of
dialect (see "Students' Right" 15-18) has subsided. What has gained currency is
the pedagogy of students' code-switching: AAVE speakers are encouraged to
learn the standard and use it in public life while maintaining their native variety
for the home and community.
Linguistic research of the 1960s and 70s established that AAVE is regarded
as a non-prestigious language variety and that Americans-including African
Americans-judge its speakers as having less intelligence than Standard English
speakers. Michael Hecht et al. point out that many European Americans have
a negative attitude toward the use of African American Vernacular English in
intellectual discussions. African Americans, too, may regard their language
with disdain, calling it "slang." "This makes it difficult for them to form and
maintain a positive identity. This ambivalence may play itself out in many
forms, prominent among which is code or style switching" (67).
The pedagogy of code-switching employed by English teachers in the
United States only reinforces these negative judgments, and indeed (as Hecht,
Collier, and Ribeau assert), in terms of social psychology, code-switching
expresses a negative judgment about the language form not being chosen.
Regardless of whether it is to be the teacher or the student doing the codeswitching, African American Vernacular English is pedagogically measured
from the vantage point of the dominant culture. AAVE is measured in terms of
the standard variety when we ask questions like (1) Does one's pedagogy
"respect" African American Vernacular English? and (2) Does that pedagogy
also empower AAVE speakers to master the standard and thus succeed in
"society"? Neither of these questions challenges the prevailing linguistic
hierarchy of American English dialects, in which the standard, needed for social
success, is assigned a top position, and African American Vernacular English,
a social liability, is assigned a low position. We may say that AAVE should not
be considered "bad" English; but we all "know" it isn't "good" English, either.
Thomas Kochman delivers what I consider a telling blow to the pedagogy of
code-switching: "We don't ... demand that an educated southerner or south
midlander accommodate a Chicago audience by modifying his dialect pattern,
even though it is a social liability in Chicago and elsewhere" (229-30). What
Kochman suggests is that it is not dialect but racial Otherness that the pedagogy
of code-switching would remove. Ruth Frankenberg'S research demonstrates
that for many white women, "culture" serves as a label for "minority culture";
many of the white women whom she interviewed believed that they themselves
had no culture of the ethnic sort (192). In their own estimation, their lives are
normative, and ethnic culture marks deviation from that norm. Even though
276 Special Issue: Who Does the Teaching?
white dialects like Appalachian English are stigmatized in American society,
they are not the object of code-switching pedagogy. Rather, it is the dialects of
people of color that are to be switched from. How much ofthe academy's desire
for code-switching stems from the fear of the Other, the desire to remove their
power, the desire to Same them? Glenda E. Gill speaks of teachers' fear of male
African American students (228-9). How much of pedagogy is aimed at quelling
such teacherly fear, through the exercise of benevolent hegemony?
The consequences of code-switching for African Americans are grave.
Social psychologists Hecht et aI. describe three types of African American code
switchers: those who know AAVE well but not the mainstream standard; those
who know the mainstream standard well but not AAVE; and those who are
comfortable in both. They regard the latter as a desirable outcome of education,
though such biculturalism may leave speakers without a strong sense of group
identity. "While effective communicators adapt their style to fit the situation
regardless oftheir ethnicity, the power dynamics ofU.S. society and the history
of African American oppression imbue this type of switching with a political
meaning" (90). R. Patrick Solomon says that black cultural forms (which of
course include AAVE) practiced in the school setting limit black students' access
to the benefits of education, for which the students themselves show a high desire.
Why would African American students use a code that impedes their attaining
their own objectives? Because, Solomon explains, AAVE in the school setting
functions as an oppositional practice; it is valuable for in-group solidarity and
the concomitant exclusion of "dominant group students" (259-60). The importance of this oppositional practice should not be overlooked. Creolist Patricia
C. Nichols speculates that only the factor of group solidarity may prevent the
complete disappearance of African American creole. American creoles, she
says, are converging toward the standard, losing their creole status and becoming
dialects. This process occurs because of the creoles' similarities to the standard;
because of the low esteem in which they are held; and because of the low socioeconomic status of their speakers. When the creoles nevertheless persist, it is
because they function as markers of group solidarity (90). And, as historical
linguistics has demonstrated repeatedly, the loss of an ethnic language amounts
to the loss of ethnic culture. Eradicate African American culture, and what you
have left is a still-subordinated group marked only by victim status. Hence
Geneva Smitherman's National Language Policy for the Conference on College
Composition and Communication specifically provides for the retention of
minority languages ("Miseducation" 116).
By what means does the college composition teacher have the right to make
social choices for her students? By what means is she empowered to make the
students' decisions about which of these-educational advancement or group
solidarity-is more important? For commentators like Jerrie Cobb Scott, the
answer is transparent: linguistic assimilation will facilitate social success.
African American Vernacular English 277
[E]ven without further empirical proof, we can safely assume that the degree of school
success attained by any group is directly linked to the degree of bridging that takes
place between naturally acquired and school-taught language and literacy patterns.
(Scott 341; emphasis mine)
Victor Villanueva, Jr., however, says that we make a mistake in conflating the
immigrant experiences of, say, the Italian, with the minority experiences of, say,
the Puerto Rican (or the African American). For the minority American,
linguistic accommodation is insufficient for social advancement.
[W]e behave as if the minority problem is the immigrant problem. Two generations of learning
the language and the ways of America, and all will be better, we hear. But two generations
come and go and all that happens is that the minority's native tongue is gone. (19)
Gilyard makes a significantly similar assertion:
Pluralists insist that the language of Blacks be left alone since it is as good as any other.
While it is true, these critics assert, that Black English speakers suffer setbacks in the
society at large, such setbacks are due to who they are-not what they speak. (72)
From Gilyard's and Villanueva's points of view, imposed code-switching
is not only hegemonic but ineffective. Its only product is the erasure of minority
culture, the creation of a cultureless but still disempowered "minority."
Villanueva recalls Paolo Freire's notion of liberatory pedagogy: '''In the
liberating moment,' [Freire] writes, 'we must try to convince the students and
on the other hand we must respect them, not impose ideas on them'" (qtd. in
Villanueva 60). Villanueva states his own solution quite simply: "Oral proficiency more or less takes care of itself; no need to impose doggedly the standard
dialect" (97). Thomas Kochman offers a linguist's affirmation:
Bilingual and diglossic studies have revealed a tendency to switch automatically, as a
result of conditioning, from one language to another or from one dialect to another,
depending not only on audience and setting (situational criteria), but on what was being
discussed (topical criteria). . .. The important point here is that it was the topic that
was the stimulus that challenged the speaker to evaluate his verbal resources and choose
the system in which his stylistic levd was sufficiently developed to be useful to him. (237)
Kenneth Goodman asserts that change must be effected on the system, not
the learner: "Dialect differences between learner and the language of the text
[are] not in themselves a barrier. The barrier, essentially, [is] the negative
attitude and lack of understanding of the schools as expressed through teachers,
curriculums, and programs" (177). Describing the conflicts of her classroom
discussions of AAVE, Linda Flower concurs: The pedagogical "problem" of
AAVE "was then a problem for me in that it challenged me to reconstruct my
academic response in terms of the political, social, personal, and moral consequences of using these constructs in this place" (55). It is the educator, therefore,
who Flower believes should change (59-60).
278 Special Issue: Who Does the Teaching?
As a native speaker of Appalachian English who lives and works in the
Northeast educational establishment, I do a lot of code-switching. In speech, that
code-switching involves changing the pronunciation of vowels; in writing, it
involves some rhetorical code-switching, as well. Hence when I am speaking
to my colleagues at my university, the way I pronounce the word sign is quite
different from my pronunciation when speaking with my family. And when I
am writing my academic books and articles, I eschew the hyperbole that is
customary and persuasive in Appalachian rhetoric. Victor Villanueva, too,
acknowledges the value and necessity of code-switching: "Sociolinguist Fernando
Pefialosa, " he says, "sees the code switcher ... [as] a rhetorical power player. He
knows language isn't fixed, has a relativistic perception of language, knows that
words take on hues of meaning when colored by cognates ... " (23).
I do not wish to contest the value of a speaker's changing codes; everybody
does it, for sound sociolinguistic reasons. I do, however, wish to contest the
notion that pedagogy should directly or indirectly mandate code-switching.
In making this statement, I am simply taking a stand in a debate whose
grounds and positions are already well established. What I have to contribute
to that debate is not my allegiance to the pedagogy of pluralism. Rather, my
contribution is to point out that we should not limit this question to the issue of
what composition teachers should do. I wish to go beyond the usual perimeter
of the debate to contest the absence of a pluralistic counterpart-a curriculum
that teaches the positive values of African American Vernacular English. I
would like to imagine a curriculum that teaches the historical formation of
AAVE; that foregrounds the contributions of African languages and African
American Vernacular English to American English; and that constructively
counters the social penchant for calling AAVE "jive," "bad English, " or "slang, "
by actively demonstrating that AAVE is a coherent, systematic, intelligent
language variety. I would like to imagine AAVE itself being taught in curricula
of American higher education-the reverse code-switching that the students in
"Language, Race, and Ethnicity" desired but could not accomplish.
What would be accomplished in an AAVE course would be different from
what is accomplished in Italian or Swahili courses. The European American
students would be learning the language, true; but they would be learning it in
order to alleviate their ignorance about the culture from which it derives, and,
initially at least, seldom for the purpose of entering that culture. They would
also be studying AAVE as a means of studying the larger construct called
"American culture." It is not enough to say that a knowledge of AAVEhelps one
understand the culture of African Americans; we must recognize that a knowledge of AAVE helps all Americans understand their culture, for African cultures
are a substantial contributor to what we mistakenly think of as a monolithic
European American culture. Those contributions are illustrated by the quantity
of lexical borrowings into American English from African American Vernacular English and from African languages, not just for new concepts but also for
synonyms for established words. '
African American Vernacular English 279
My conclusion must necessarily circle again to my own positionality in this
issue. In "Where Is the White Professor Located?" Asantesays that when a white
professor teaches African American studies, positionality is all. I think he is
right. AnnLouise Keating says that my positionality is insufficiently described
by my simply labeling myself white. I think she is right. Victor Villanueva,] r.,
says that although Mike Rose tells minorities' stories with "passion and
compassion," he can speak only from the position of an outsider. I think he is
right. My students ofcolor say that my university needs a linguist of color to teach
African American Vernacular English. I think they are right. Where does this
leave me? I must ask myself the same question that a member of his audience
once asked white scholar Daniel Reagan when he was speaking on African
American literature: What gives me a right to speak on this subject?
It is not simply "passion and compassion." While I do, obviously, have a
concern for the equitable education of African Americans, my primary motivation
in the recommendations I am making is not to right social wrong, to effect social
justice. Although I endorse those agendas, recognize them as powerful directives
for our society, recognize that race, gender, and class are anything but "settled" for
Americans and that all of us must actively engage the search for settlement, it is not
from that position that I speak here about African American Vernacular English.
My primary motivation is to remove the veil (to adapt DuBois' metaphor) that so
blinds a society to itself, that so limits the ways in which we describe ourselves, that
allows us to engage in the willful ignorance that makes us believe that teacherdirected code-switching can be part of a "liberatory" pedagogy. I speak from a
simple desire to understand my own life as an American. I want to understand my
culture, and I recognize that European culture does not equal American culture.
"My" culture is not some sort of binary European American opposite to African
American culture; rather, the two are mutually entailed. I want to understand that
entailment. ldo not want to erasethe differences between cultures, butIcannotagree
that those differences produce mutually exclusive categories, either.
Solspeak. llistenmostattentivelywhen people like Keith Gilyard, AnnLouise
Keating, Molefi Kete Asante, and Victor Villanueva,] r., speak, because they can tell
me of life inside "minority" cultures. Perhaps they are only, like Zora Neale
Hurston (qtd. in Reagan 43); allowing me small glimpses ofthose cultures; perhaps
glimpses from within are all that anyone could communicate to an outsider. But
in those glimpses I see myself, the self that has been willfully hidden from me by
an often- (though not always-) unwitting Anglocentrism.3
Yetldonot believe that only African Americans can speak of African America;
to adopt this attitude would imply that, as Cynthia Fleming observes, a course in
AAVE would be only "a service for black students rather than ... a legitimate field
of study" (18). However much the program of African American studies may
provide a valuable service to students of African descent, surely it has other
purposes, as well. So I listen attentively, too, when people like Michael L. Hecht,
Daniel Reagan, Robert Farris Thompson, Linda Flower, and Mike Rose speak,
because they are talking across the boundaries, pushing, exploring.
280 Special Issue: Who Does the Teaching?
I recognize that only members of a culture can do the work of preserving
that culture and that only fluent speakers of a language can teach it. Hence my
purpose in involving myself in the issue of African American Vernacular
English is not to enhance African American culture; that is not a job that I, as an
outsider, am capable of doing. Nor can I undertake to teach a course inAAVEnot one that teaches people how to speak the language, because my knowledge
of it istoo fragmentary, too halting, too isolated from the culture thatgivesitlife.
Instead, my primary purpose in involving myself in the issue of African
American Vernacular English is to understand the ways in which all Americans,
including outsiders, are entailed in it. My agenda in linguistics is parallel to that
of Leon F. Litwack in African American history-"to transform and redefine the
mainstream" (14). WhatIcan do is teach anAAVEcourse thatfocuses on history,
that is honest about contemporary social realities, and that, in a very outsiderly
but well-informed way, introduces present-day linguistic features of AAVE.
And that is what I intend to do when for the third time I teach "Language, Race,
and Ethnicity in the U.S." No more cowardice; I will engage the conflicts,
knowing that I cannot resolve them but that I can provide my students (and
myself) with a sustained engagement of them. And in my composition classes,
I will let my students make their own decisions about the code in which they
communicate. No more hegemony.
My readers and I end this essay wondering how these pedagogical recommendations might be implemented. Important as this issue is, it cannot be
engaged in any detail in the space allotted here. It is a difficult, complex question,
one that I suspect will be answered in a variety of ways, depending on local
constraints. Elayne Zorn asks me whether AAVE has ever been taught as a
college course. The answer is "yes," I have heard of an experimental course here
and there-but the experiment is rare, and as far as I know, an AAVE course has
never been established as an ongoing part of curriculum but has instead been a
singular course taught by a committed individual, on whose continuing interest
and availability the continuation of the course depends. And everyone asks how
a pluralistic composition classroom would be enacted. Frederick Luciani
complicates the issue by drawing a parallel with his Spanish classes, in which
speakers of non-standard Spanish heavily influenced by American urban English often enroll. Elayne goes further and wonders whether she, as a bilingual
speaker of Spanish and English, should accept papers in her composition class
that are written in Spanish.
Without detailing how composition curricula would be enacted, I would
like to conclude by pointing to what I think are salient issues in determining that
enactment: Is the purpose of the course to teach writing, or does the course's
mandate include the teaching oflanguage (standard English usage)? In answering
this question, one must differentiate standard English usage from the grapholect;
subject-verb agreement, for example, falls into the realm of standard English
usage, whereas the semicolon belongs to the grapholect. Is the composition
course taught in an English department, or in an independent writing program?
African American Vernacular English 281
(An English department is much more likely to see the teaching of the English
language as part of a writing curriculum than is an independent writing program.)
We cannot, I believe, come up with a linguistic metanarrative that will determine
all choices. What we can do is work out, in the individual environments of each
college, how a pluralistic composition can be negotiated within institutional
constraints-and then, if necessary, revise those institutional constraints. One
highly desirable component of those institutional constraints is a course in
AAVE, which would contribute to a climate of appreciation for rather than
eradication of African American Vernacular English.
Colgate University
Hamilton, New York
Notes
lFor American college students, this alone is an accomplishment. Linda Flower, who
also writes about the experience of a white professor's difficult engagement with AAVE in
the classroom, observes, "[T]he notion that Black English (BE) or Black English Vernacular
(BEV) was considered a named, coherent linguistic alternative came as a new idea not only
to the teens but (to my surprise) to nearly all the college students ... ." Students asked, "If
this is true, why didn't they [the school] ever tell us we were speaking Black English?" Because
they had never heard of Black English before and because it was introduced to them by the
white professor Linda Flower, the high school and college students alike suspected that the
putative language form was a racist invention (54).
'For a description of the variation within AAVE, see Hecht et al., Chapter 3.
3Just how persistent is this Anglocentrism is brought home to me again and again.
Hearing my conference presentations on the issues in this essay, conference-goers at the 1993
NCTE, the Fifth International Conference on Language and Social Psychology (1994), and
the 1994 MLA have helped me develop my ideas. More recently, colleagues Tom Howard,
Frederick Luciani, and Elayne Zorn have read and responded to drafts of this essay. Their
responses not only helped me with logical development and prose expression, but also
engaged important conceptual issues. Fred, for example, pointed out that my phrase "the
students would be learning the language, true" assumed that "the students" meant white
students. I revised that passage-it now reads "the European American students would be
learning the language." But this will not be the last time, I fear, that I inadvertently assume
European Americans to be the norm and assume that "white people" can be shortened to
"people."
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