No it doesn't pass if Newt says the same thing, but it does not matter. I am proud of Cosby for saying this and we should all be rejoicing that Black Americans have a few leaders that are willing to speak the truth to them on occassion.
His point that blacks can't speak English, is important to understand though.
Most blacks brought to the US as slaves never learned to speak English properly. Segregated schools did not teach it to them and so parents passed on the black dialect of English - some call it Ebonics - to their children generation after generation. It is not as if blacks one day decided to speak differently. They never spoke "High English"
Dialects in Europe are so much more common and recognized that they are now seen as something valuable and worth preserving. But that does not mean that every student is not (in for instance Germany) taught how to speak High German.
There was a big outrage several years ago about "Ebonics". This was perhaps a ploy to get English as a Second Language money from the state.
But, ladies and gentlemen, perhaps this is exactly the type of investment black children need. Not welfare, not prisons, but English. Just like Europe they should be able to preserve their dialect and culture at home. But in the marketplace they need to speak High English.
Every other immigrant group has managed this after the 3rd generation. I am not sure why blacks have not. But, I would be willing to make the case that the reparations we owe blacks for slavery should be made by teaching their children how to speak proper English.
Lastly, if you have never learned to speak a foreign language, don't even bother to comment on how easy or hard it is.
When I was in school in the 60's and 70's, blacks knew how to speak proper English and they could slip in jive at will. English was their mother tongue. Their parents knew it, they teachers modeled it. Also, blacks have not lived in an entertainment vacuum. Proper English could be assimilated from television and radio about 20+ years ago. Now the untalented, hip hop, (c)rap has won over and the problem is has reemerged and entrenched.
Cosby has always spoken out against "blue" comedy. His last sitcom (early years, I stopped watching after that) repeatedly brought home the point that the children were entitled to nothing for which the parents had worked so hard to attain.
I give up. If I owe reparations as you say, should I just send the check to you? Let me know how much I owe.
Get real.
"But, I would be willing to make the case that the reparations we owe blacks for slavery should be made by teaching their children how to speak proper English."
What reperations do we owe? Do you owe reperations to the world wide Jewish community?
Take a good long look at the living conditions of West Africans.
The privilege of being an American citizen already belongs to the descendants of those brought here as slaves.
The only reparation needed is one already possessed, the freedom to improve ones own lot in life.
The exploitation of that opportunity remains the responsibility of the individual.
English isn't foreign to the people in question. They're not being expected to switch from one language to another. They're only expected to sharpen grammar and syntax.
oh give me a break, just more "excusism" going on. They have had plenty of time to learn somewhat proper English. My father-in-law did not speak English until he was 21 years old. But when he came to this country from SOUTH AMERICA, he made a point to speak the language of his new country. And although he spoke with a thick accent he spoke proper English. quit givin' im da co p-out! Ghostkatz
I am a former French (I know, boo, hiss, etc.) teacher. I have studied and learned another language fluently, although I am not sure I could still claim fluency today. I disagree with the headline of this link, that blacks CAN'T speak English. Many of them just DON'T. There are many reasons, of course, but no valid excuses. The opportunity is there for them. They all UNDERSTAND English, unlike many immigrants to this country. It remains only to discipline oneself to speak properly. Dialect is one thing, relating primarily to pronunciation and perhaps vocabulary differences. What so many blacks speak is simply a studied bastardization of standard English. Perhaps out of a misguided sense of rebellion or hatred of being thought of as white or Uncle Tom, this self-imposed practice persists. This language deficiency (along, I believe, with the ridiculous names many blacks thrust upon their children) almost condemns black children to an unnecessary failure to meet their potential in American society. This is a loss for them personally, but also for all of us, who lose out on what these children might otherwise have been able to offer. It is a very real drain on all of us. I wish Bill Cosby luck in his effort to correct this problem. Clearly it cannot be "imposed" by white America.
Dialects are enticing.
Live a year in the South and you will use "y'all" the rest of your life. Spend time at a Southern California beach and you can't help saying "dude" or "bro".
But I must take exception to your assertion that dialects are too strong to overcome, because I believe they are based in common laziness.
You and I struggled to form good speech habits growing up. Slipping back to lazy street dialect was always an option for us, but somehow we declined to choose it.
For myself, I opt for street dialect whenever I play basketball. In a game of fast-paced action and communication, we players revert to ebonics almost subconsciously. It's fun, a relief from the demands of a productive life.
It can be turned on and off like a faucet, IF the will is there.
Lastly, if you have never learned to speak a foreign language, don't even bother to comment on how easy or hard it is.
Where do you get the crazy idea that "we" owe reparations to blacks for slavery? Any supposed debt has been paid in full. As for teaching their children proper English that is done in the free public schools they have access to. And what does learning a foreign language have to do with English in America? Next thing you know you will want the US to teach everyone including blacks Spanish and Arabic...The melting pot seems to need a little more heat as the parts are still more separate than homogeneous...
I disagree with your statement about segregated schools. As a black person who attended segregated schools (1950-1962), I was taught correct grammar, diction, syntax, enunciation, etc. In the South, beginning with the end of slavery, black people revered education and the teachers who provided it. We knew that education was our only tool for a better life. Granted, there were some people for whom education was not important, but the vast majority who had education available to them, took advantage of it. In many of these cases, the children who went to school came home and taught their parents.
As segregation drew to an end in the 60s, more "opportunities" were available to us. Our choices expanded from business owners (for black customers), physicians and nurses (for black patients), lawyers (for black clients), teachers (for black students), ministers, federal government employees, domestic workers, cooks, manual laborers to physicians, nurses, lawyers, teachers for anyone, plus a bunch of menial jobs previously denied to blacks (sales clerks, waiters, secretaries (for non-black businesses), state and local government jobs.
In my opinion, this was the beginning of the end. Not because more jobs were available, but because a new generation saw that they didn't have to strive for excellence to make a "good living." Education began to be deemphasized, the welfare state and its associated mentality grew. These and associated factors get us to where we are today.
Many times I tell people, it's not that we were better off during segregation, but we were better people.
That would be described by the liberals and the black establishment as the most racist thing anyone has ever said. The requirement is that white society must assign these people riches and position regardless of their abilities and qualifications. They must be so treated because of their race. Any consideration of any quality that is not race is racist. And this is accepted as wisdom today.
Most blacks brought to the US as slaves never learned to speak English properly. Segregated schools did not teach it to them and so parents passed on the black dialect of English - some call it Ebonics - to their children generation after generation. It is not as if blacks one day decided to speak differently. They never spoke "High English"
I have to take issue with you here. The problem is not segregrated schools and parents not teaching them to speak proper English.
Up until the civil rights act of the 196?, black parents used to stress education with their children. I have read countless stories of Black Mothers scrubbing floors on hands and knees telling their kids to study so they never had to make a living this way.
In the 1940's there were Black Schools that could put any white school to shame. The children that grew up in the 1960's who went to college 1968-1970 that got involved in Black Panthers, Simbionese liberation army and all those other Black Power movements decided that being educated was acting white.
The Welfare mom's were dropouts and drugged out children themselves and saw no need for education for their children if the gub-ment was going to support you and your 7 kids each with a different last name.
Ebonics is not the traditional language of blacks, it is the culture that developed after welfare broke the back of the black 2 parent family.
My grandparents came to the USA from Serbia in the mid-20's. They lived in the Serbian section of Chicago, never learning the English lanuage except for necessary phrases. My father and his 8 siblings speak perfect English.
While in school (60-70's) the blacks I knew spoke perfect English but could slide into the 'jive' talk in a nanosecond.
Your stance holds no water.
It's parenting that makes the difference. There is no substitute. Contrary to PC belief, it does not take a village.
You really have no friggin idea what you're talking about.
Even Jamie Fox will tell you that blacks know how to speak what you refer to as "high English".
He says in one of his routines that blacks speak two languages; The way you talk when you want a job, and that other sh**. His mostly black audience laughs wholeheartedly.
BTW, the black people in my social circles speak both languages, and they're from all over this country, and range from 6 to 75 years of age. The ebonics is a "cool" thing.
Reparations, my eye!
Your attempt to transpose european linguistic experience to the US doesn't work. Ebonics is not a longstanding dialect. The reason it raised a flap a few years ago is because until recently, no one was obtuse enough to consider it a "dialect." It has nothing whatever to do with slavery, it evolved in the twentieth century inner city.
(There is of course and has always been a Black slang, understood and accepted as such, but no one seriously tried to sell it as a dialect or a language-- this innovation is a bastard progeny of the intellectual whorehouse known as the "Afrocentric" movement.)
By "High English," a term never used in the US, I assume you mean something like Hoch Deutsch. We do talk about Standard English, or "the King's English." But there is no comparison because it was always taught to everyone in the US, not just upperclass people or Whites only. Whether you attended a rural one room schoolhouse, or an expensive private prep school, or a big inner city public school(at least until recently) you were taught the same speech (regional accents notwithstanding) and the same words.
Read Frederick Douglas sometime, or George Washington Carver, or Langston Hughes, or a host of other Black authors who never felt the need to separate themselves from society by using "Ebonics."
I learned to speak German one summer while in high school, by the immersion method. I spent a summer in Germany with Germans. It was a snap, and I was told (by German acquaintances) that I spoke the language without an accent as a result.
Any Black American has been immersed in standard English for thousands of hours, on TV and radio if nowhere else, by the time he is an adolescent. If he doesn't speak standard English it is because there is no encouragement at home, or because he just doesn't give a crap, or because his (Black) peers give him hell when he does.
It isn't a learning problem. It is a social problem of the Black community, which the Black community can solve if it wishes to do so. That is what Bill Cosby is saying.
Definitely not true. English was taught better to Black students in segregated schools than they every got almost anywhere since.
and so parents passed on the black dialect of English - some call it Ebonics - to their children generation after generation.
The Black dialect was indeed passed on because it was spoken to a greater or lesser degree in Black homes. Some encouraged it and some forbade it.