Allison Armstrong
Professor Julie Cook
English
November 1, 2013
We were walking down the sidewalk on our way home from school as we hear
someone scream, “Go back to Africa!” I looked at my friend as her eyes started to well
up with tears. This had not been the first time she had experienced these comments since
she had moved to our neighborhood. A neighborhood located in an ethnically
homogenous county full of predominantly whites. With a town of no diversity, my new
friend was not very accepted. I handed her one of the tissues that I had started carrying
around since we had become friends because I knew that the ignorance of our town
would get to her soon enough. I watched how she was treated at school and just couldn’t
understand why race or culture differences even matter. She was made fun of constantly
for her discourse because she is African American. Isn’t America supposed to be the
melting pot of all of the countries? Shouldn’t everyone be able to fit in? Although we
make it seem that way, it is definitely not the case.
Even schools have had controversial issues over the discourse in our classrooms.
In the article Language, Race, and White Public Space by Jane Hill, she mentions the
issues coming up with the controversy. She writes, “ Like other anthropologists,
linguistic anthropologists have made "education," with its implicit assumption of a
confrontation with "ignorance," their central antiracist strategy. Attempts to inoculate
students against beliefs in primitive languages, linguistic deprivation, or the idea that
bilingualism is inevitably seditious can be found in every introductory textbook in
linguistics, and major scholars in the field have tried to spread the message not only as
classroom educators, but as public intellectuals in a wide range of functions. And what
have we to show for these efforts? "Official English" legislation on the books in many
states and a nationwide "moral panic" (Hall et al. 1978) about whether "Ebonics" might
be discussed in the classrooms of Oakland, California. In the case of the Ebonics panic,
the nearly universal reaction among linguists and linguistic anthropologists was "We
must redouble our efforts at education! How can we make classroom and textbook units
on the equality of all languages?”(Hill. 680) Schools have a fear to even discuss these
topics in the classroom. Although the textbooks tell us that bilingualism is not to be
feared, the nation goes into panic about whether or not they should even discuss Ebonics,
which is American Black English. America does not even have an official language,
which is why it should not be such a big deal to talk about more than one. We should be
able to study different languages and be accepting to them because America is full of all
different types of languages and cultures. It is not fair to think that everyone must look
and talk a certain way because really we all come from different backgrounds and
ancestry. There are a wide variety of different races in everyone whether it is visible or
not. Just because someone’s skin color or speech is the same as yours does not mean that
they are from the same background as you. America especially is known for having so
many various backgrounds because of the immigration that brought people from all over
to the country.
Works Cited
Jane H. Hill, American Anthropologist , Language, Race, and White Public
Space, New Series, Vol. 100, No. 3 (Sep., 1998), pp. 680-689