Ebonics and the Betrayal of Black Children

A Different Drummer ^ | 17 June 2002 | Nicholas Stix

[mrustow]

"In the five years since the Oakland debacle, with the help of a media white-out, so-called ebonics may have faded from the public's consciousness. But during the same time, the Afrocentric warlords dominating inner-city schools have continued their campaign to enslave poor, urban black children through teaching them racism, while refusing to teach them English."

[mrustow]

Actually, I thought I'd hit "NY" as a topic, not "NM." Sorry about that, New Yorkers and New Mexicans.

[mhking]

Black conservative ping

If you want on (or off) of my black conservative ping list, please let me know via FREEPmail. (And no, you don't have to be black to be on the list!)

[mrustow]

Bump to list.

[Askel5]

Afrocentrists maintain that the pigment melanin makes blacks intellectually, morally, and culturally superior to whites.

Doesn't quite jibe with my observations of certain prejudices within the black community where color is concerned.

It's tragic what these blowhards have done to bend (and box) the minds of innocent kids.

[Harrison Bergeron]

"Doesn't quite jibe with my observations of certain prejudices within the black community where color is concerned. "

Man you got that right. It turns my stomach to watch the black clique members at my workplace treat their darker skinned brothers and sisters as if they were poor uneducated distant relatives. This is an aspect of racism that you'll never hear JJ or RS or even Oprah talking about on TV.

[Maceman]

A Different Drummer Commentary: Nicholas Stix

[ Grade Inflation Series | The Art of Teaching | Toogood Reports | Front Page Mag ]

Ebonics and the
Betrayal of Black Children

By
Nicholas Stix

A Different Drummer [June 17, 2002] Remember "ebonics"? A national debate erupted over the Oakland, California, school board's decision, in December, 1996, to use slang to to teach schoolchildren standard English. For the past five years, with the connivance of the mainstream media, most Americans have been able to forget ebonics. Unfortunately, however, ebonics has not gone away. Linguistics professors Walt Wolfram and Erik Thomas' new book, The Development of African American English, defends "ebonics" as the legitimate dialect of a dynamic minority. New York State regent Adelaide Sanford, recently insisted that her support of ebonics had been "misrepresented," and that ebonics is the language of great, black poets of the past, such as James Weldon Johnson. Last year, the Linguistics Society of America (LSA) reiterated its 1997 statement in support of ebonics. And in 1998, academics Lisa Delpit and Theresa Perry edited the anthology, The Real Ebonics Debate: Power, Language, and the Education of African-American Children, none of whose thirty-odd contributions was even faintly critical of Ebonics. "Experts" tell us that ebonics is: 1. An African language that is genetically passed on among blacks; 2. A creole, growing out of the encounter of African slaves with Irish immigrants; and 3. A wholly new dialect, created by young blacks since the 1960s, to separate themselves from white Americans. You might expect someone to have pointed out that the above definitions are mutually incompatible. No such luck. Despite having a professional interest in rigorous, scholarly debate, most linguistics professors long ago abandoned any pretenses to objectivity. The most common -- and correct -- understanding by blacks and whites alike, is that "ebonics" is broken English or street slang. However, any educator defining ebonics thusly is sure to be shouted down, or worse. As a result, those who know better have remained silent, as one well-meaning academic once advised me to do. Although ebonics supporters such as Keith Gilyard have publicly claimed otherwise, children taught using "ebonics" readers did worse than peers taught with standard English readers. Consider an ebonics reader used by Profs. John and Angela Rickford: "This here little Sister name Mae was most definitely untogether. I mean, like she didn't act together. She didn't look together. She was just an untogether Sister. "Her teacher was always sounding on her 'bout day dreaming in class. I mean, like, just 'bout every day the teacher would be getting on her case. But it didn't seem to bother her none. She just kept on keeping on. Like, I guess daydreaming was her groove. And you know what they say: 'don't knock your Sister's groove.' But a whole lotta people did knock it. But like I say, she just kept on keeping on. "One day Mae was taking [sic] to herself in the lunch room. She was having this righteous old conversation with herself. She say, 'I wanna be a princess with long golden hair.' Now can you get ready for that? Long golden hair! "Well, anyway, Mae say, 'If I can't be a princess I'll settle for some long golden hair. If I could just have me some long golden hair, everything would be all right with me. Lord, if I could just have me some long golden hair.'" Note that the foregoing lesson, which would be inappropriate for children of any age, was designed for seventh-graders! "Ebonics" is a pillar of Afrocentrism, a movement which, using intimidation, violence, and pseudo-scholarship, has dumbed down the education of black children beyond recognition, illegally barred whites from teaching black children, and deliberately cut poor, black children off from the mainstream of American life. Afrocentrists maintain that the pigment melanin makes blacks intellectually, morally, and culturally superior to whites. They teach black children that ancient, black Egyptians flew gliders, that whites who dispute such fairy tales are racists who seek to deny black greatness, and that all black educational failure is due to a racist, white conspiracy. Afrocentrists such as George Washington University Prof. Robert Williams, who coined the term "ebonics" in 1973, maintain that it is an act of disrespect for a white teacher to correct a black child. Prof. Charles Coleman of the City University of New York's (CUNY) York College, has argued that remedial education is harmful to black students. Afrocentrists are supported by "progressive" white educators, who also insist that it is wrong to correct students' usage and grammar. This approach has resulted in CUNY remedial students being given passing grades on writing proficiency examinations, and permitted to go on to take "college-level" classes, despite being at best semi-literate. Many middle-class blacks like to sometimes "go ghetto," and use street slang. But these professionals can speak standard English -- in many cases, better than I can -- and can always go home. The poor and working-class blacks whom Afrocentric educators have refused to teach standard English, however, have nowhere to go. Originally published in Insight magazine. June 17, 2002 RECENT COLUMNS: 6/11/02: Calling Agent Frank Black! Anthrax, The Left's Dr. Strangelove, and TV's Millennium 6/5/02: NBA Voodoo: David Stern Fixes the Playoffs 5/29/02: Cincinnati, 2002: Return of the Lynch Mob 5/02: De-Policing in America's Cities: Erasing the Thin Blue Line 5/12/02: Solving Philadelphia Crime with an Eraser: The "Good Irishman" and the Race Man 5/03/02: The Philadelphia Story: When the Cops are Criminals 4/26/02: We are All Pacifists Now 4/24/02: "Pacifist's" Brother Threatens Journalist 4/18/02: The Making of a "Pacifist": Adam Shapiro and Our Goebbelsian Media 4/13/02: A Jewish Nazi? The Adam Shapiro Story 4/02: Picture This: September 11, Multiculturalism, and the War Against White Male Heroes 3/31/02: Halle's Comet: Affirmative Action Comes to the Academy Awards 3/22/02: The War Process 3/7/02: How Black is It? Renaissance Man George S. Schuyler vs. the Harlem "Renaissance" 3/3/02: The Other Black History, Part II: George S. Schuyler 2/26/02: The Other Black History: Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois 2/12/02: Aaron McGruder and "The Package" 1/30/02: The State of Our Union 1/20/02: Tina Brown: Serial Magazine Killer Strikes Again 1/16/02: Heroes and Heels of 2001: The Media's Fourth Column 1/09/02: Heroes and Heels of 2001: The Antiversity and Edworld 1/05/02: Heroes and Heels of 2001: Race Hustles 'R Us 1/02: Guests from Hell: The NAACP's Shakedown of the Hospitality Industry 12/16/01: BUSTED! PC TV Producers Use Fake Crimes to Score Real-World Propaganda Points 10/28/01: Derek Jeter: The Pride of the Yankees 10/19/01: Anti-American Anthems 10/07/01: Rudy and the Rev. Bozo 10/01/01: Allegations of War 09/23/01: "The Jews did It!" 09/19/01: Arabprop: The Propaganda Wars 09/13/01: It Happened Here 09/11/01: Requiem for a Heavyweight: Herman Badillo 09/06/01: Condit Loses at "Checkers" 08/24/01: Shma, Yisroel! 08/16/01: America's Debt to Blacks Paid in Full 08/08/01: Gloria Steinem, Grave Robber 08/04/01: Dan Rather, Racist? 07/31/01: Dan Rather on the Public's Right NOT to Know 07/27/01: The Great Grade Inflation Non-Debate, Part VIII: Deafening Silence 07/22/01: The Crimes and Misdemeanors of Gary Condit 07/18/01: New York City Techurs spel Trubble 07/13/01: The Great Grade Inflation Non-Debate, Part VII: To be of Use 07/02/01: The Great Grade Inflation Non-Debate, Part VI: The Garden State 06/27/01: The Great Grade Inflation Non-Debate, Part V: Smoking Guns 06/07/01: In "Pope" John Paul & the ACLU We Trust 06/04/01: The Great Grade Inflation Non-Debate, Part IV: Fighting City Hall 05/30/01: The Great Grade Inflation Non-Debate, Part III: Postmodern Grade Inflation: Plagiarism 05/22/01: The Great Grade Inflation Non-Debate, Part II: Crime Scenes 05/11/01: The Great Grade Inflation Non-Debate, Part I: Reality Testing 04/30/01: Reflections Of A Child-Care Provider 04/23/01: Cincinnati: Recipe For A Riot 04/18/01: Cincinnati Burning 04/09/01: The Horowitz Maneuver Part III: The Fifth Column 04/04/01: The Horowitz Maneuver Part II: The New Free Speech Movement 03/29/01: The Horowitz Maneuver Part I: The Anti-Reparations Ad 03/22/01: Bullies: An Rx for Safe Schools 03/16/01: See No Evil: Seattle and Berkeley 03/07/01: The Race Hoax Handbook: Twelve Steps To Bigger, Better, Race Hoaxes 02/23/01: The Longest Month, Part V: Suing Whitey" 02/15/01: The Longest Month, Part IV: "Keep Hoax Alive!" (Florida Times Fifty) 02/02/01: The Longest Month Part III: The Red and the Black 01/29/01: The Longest Month Part II: The Divine Martin Luther King, Jr. 01/22/01: The Longest Month Part Part I: Martin Luther King's Burden A Different Drummer is the New York-based web-samizdat of Nicholas Stix. An award-winning journalist, Stix provides news and commentary on the realities of race, education, and urban life that are censored by the mainstream media and education elites. His work has appeared in the (New York) Daily News; New York Post; Washington Times; Newsday; the American Enterprise; Weekly Standard; Insight; Chronicles; Ideas on Liberty; Middle American News; Academic Questions; CampusReports; and countless other publications. Read Stix' weekly column in Toogood Reports. E-Mail him your comments and feedback at adddda@earthlink.net June 17, 2002 [ ADD Book & Movie Reviews | Toogood Reports | Free Republic | Front Page Mag ] Copyright 2002 by Nicholas Stix. All rights reserved. Don't bring around a crowd, to reign on my parade!

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[mrustow]

Afrocentrists maintain that the pigment melanin makes blacks intellectually, morally, and culturally superior to whites.

Doesn't quite jibe with my observations of certain prejudices within the black community where color is concerned.

During the early 1990s, a book came out -- I wish I knew the title -- on the color prejudices among blacks, a large proportion of whom consider blacks with LESS melanin superior to dark-skinned blacks. IIRC, an execrable Spike Lee movie, School Daze, contained an amateurish duet between the light-skinned and the dark-skinned fraternities at a black college.

However, I'm not certain about that. I turned on the movie during the duet, and found it so awful, that I could only endure about 90 seconds of it. Has anyone seen this, um, film?

[mrustow]

"Doesn't quite jibe with my observations of certain prejudices within the black community where color is concerned. "

Man you got that right. It turns my stomach to watch the black clique members at my workplace treat their darker skinned brothers and sisters as if they were poor uneducated distant relatives. This is an aspect of racism that you'll never hear JJ or RS or even Oprah talking about on TV.

Who's RS?

[mrustow]

Bump to list.

[mrustow]

Bump to list.

[mrustow]

Bump to list.

[mrustow]

Bump to list.

[mrustow]

Bump to list.

[mrustow]

Bump to list.

[DonQ]

You'd be astonished what the "Afrocentrics" believe. They include a group that they call "melanin scholars", and they are not being sarcastic about this. This bunch - which includes few, if any, authentic medical doctors - has this notion that high melanin (dark skin pigment) has all sorts of inherent advantages like high IQ and so forth (evidently the advantages are very well hidden). They do not consider this to be racism! If this notion were true, then it would seem that all sorts of tremendous intellectual advances would have occurred among dark skinned people outside Africa, such as the Australian aborigine and the American Indian, but they don't address this discrepancy.

The "Afrocentrics" claim all sorts of ancient achievements for Africans, one problem is that almost none of these achievements can be traced to black Africans south of the Sahara, most of them are attributed to the ancient Egyptians - who are assumed, on the basis of rather doubtful evidence - to be racially indistiguishable from central Africans. But they don't explain why none of those Egyptian attainments never migrated south of the Sahara, or why Africans in Africa don't have any of those attainments even now. Considering the demonstrable ethnic/linguistic differences and the geographic distance, it is as if the accomplishments of the Aztecs were being claimed by Alaskan Eskimos.

The worst of this is not the bad history, but a sort of racial animus that is set up. The sort of attitude that "We blacks invented higher mathematics, so we don't need any white school teachers trying to tell us about it." And of course Ebonics is the worst; the next generation will be marginalized, not for their color but for their inability to communicate in proper English.

[mrustow]

Bump to list.

[mrustow]

Bump to list.

[mrustow]

You'd be astonished what the "Afrocentrics" believe. They include a group that they call "melanin scholars", and they are not being sarcastic about this. This bunch - which includes few, if any, authentic medical doctors - has this notion that high melanin (dark skin pigment) has all sorts of inherent advantages like high IQ and so forth (evidently the advantages are very well hidden). They do not consider this to be racism! If this notion were true, then it would seem that all sorts of tremendous intellectual advances would have occurred among dark skinned people outside Africa, such as the Australian aborigine and the American Indian, but they don't address this discrepancy.

The "Afrocentrics" claim all sorts of ancient achievements for Africans, one problem is that almost none of these achievements can be traced to black Africans south of the Sahara, most of them are attributed to the ancient Egyptians - who are assumed, on the basis of rather doubtful evidence - to be racially indistiguishable from central Africans. But they don't explain why none of those Egyptian attainments never migrated south of the Sahara, or why Africans in Africa don't have any of those attainments even now. Considering the demonstrable ethnic/linguistic differences and the geographic distance, it is as if the accomplishments of the Aztecs were being claimed by Alaskan Eskimos.

The worst of this is not the bad history, but a sort of racial animus that is set up. The sort of attitude that "We blacks invented higher mathematics, so we don't need any white school teachers trying to tell us about it." And of course Ebonics is the worst; the next generation will be marginalized, not for their color but for their inability to communicate in proper English.

Of course, while some ancient Egyptians were black, most were (and are) not, and the Egyptians have NEVER considered themselves Africans.

I read an article about "melanin scholars"; I'll try to find and post it. They are all your basic Afrocentrists, but when they are speaking before or writing for the public, or at least not to initiates, they clean up their language, avoiding any reference to "melanin."

[Harrison Bergeron]

My bad, I meant to abbreviate "Rev. Al Sharpton."

[mrustow]

fyi

[FreeTally]

I believe they were the people that made such claims that Africans invented flight(LOL!) thousands of years ago, crossed the Atlantic on rafts way before Europeans did in boats and other assorted fantasies. Their catch to it all is that the "proof" was in the Alexandria library when it was destroyed, and that Europeans stole all the knowledge from them.

[aardvark1]

And of course Ebonics is the worst; the next generation will be marginalized, not for their color but for their inability to communicate in proper English.

But they will blame it on racism. Which leads me to the comment that the word "afrocentrists" is nothing but a poor euphamism for racist.

[mrustow]

My bad, I meant to abbreviate "Rev. Al Sharpton."

Kein sweat. I suspected that might have been the case.

[mrustow]

I believe they were the people that made such claims that Africans invented flight(LOL!) thousands of years ago, crossed the Atlantic on rafts way before Europeans did in boats and other assorted fantasies. Their catch to it all is that the "proof" was in the Alexandria library when it was destroyed, and that Europeans stole all the knowledge from them.

That's where the Greek philosophers "stole" their knowledge, except that the library wasn't built until long after the philosophers had all died.

[stainlessbanner]

Prof. Robert Williams, who coined the term "ebonics" in 1973, maintain that it is an act of disrespect for a white teacher to correct a black child.

Real nice guy - maybe that's why so many of our kids have discipline problems.

[mrustow]

One of the many sick things about all of this, is that these crooks ignore all the great black minds this country has produced, including for my money America's greatest living social scientist, Thomas Sowell, and some of the best columnists working today, Larry Elder and the great Walter Williams. (And when they mention great black scientists, it's only to spread lies, such as the myth that blood plasma and blood bank pioneer Charles Drew died because a white hospital refused to treat him, when in fact, white doctors and nurses worked valiantly, if unsuccessfully, to save him.)

They may hate Sowell and Williams' politics, but since they haven't read them, how would they know?

He**, these guys haven't even read many of the people they lionize. Try to talk to one of them about W.E.B. DuBois -- all they know is the endlessly quoted "prediction" from him, that the 20th century would be determined by the color line -- and that was less a prediction than a program that DuBois worked ceaselessly -- and sucessfully -- to bring about. Most Afrocentrists don't read books, and those who do, refuse to read anything but propaganda.

[mrustow]

fyi

[mrustow]

Prof. Robert Williams, who coined the term "ebonics" in 1973, maintain that it is an act of disrespect for a white teacher to correct a black child.

Real nice guy - maybe that's why so many of our kids have discipline problems.

Robert Lee Williams is a living warning label for affirmative action -- a hate-filled incompetent, who was hired as a professor because he was a ... hate-filled incompetent!

[mrustow]

fyi

[mrustow]

fyi

[mafree]

Thanks for the ping.

[mafree]

Not all Blacks have the color prejudice going on, though too many still do. Afrocentrists seem to be especially free from all that, though some of them may go in the other direction.

[mrustow]

"Ebonics" is part of a package deal:

Aaron McGruder and "The Package"

[mrustow]

And of course, Ebonics is inseparable from demands for reparations:

Reparations? America's Debt to Blacks Has Already Been Paid in Full

[mrustow]

Not all Blacks have the color prejudice going on, though too many still do. Afrocentrists seem to be especially free from all that, though some of them may go in the other direction.

I seem to recall that Garvey despised light-skinned blacks.

[mrustow]

fyi

[mrustow]

fyi

[mrustow]

Ebonics is also a pillar of hoax culture:

Guests from Hell: The NAACP's Shakedown of the Hospitality Industry

[mrustow]

fyi

[mrustow]

See also:

911 and the War on White Male Heroes

[mrustow]

fyi

[mrustow]

fyi

[Harrison Bergeron]

"Not all Blacks have the color prejudice going on..."

I apologize if I implied that they did.

[mrustow]

fyi

[mrustow]

fyi

[mrustow]

fyi

[mrustow]

fyi

[mrustow]

fyi

[mrustow]

fyi