Posted on 06/13/2002 11:31:27 AM PDT by 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."
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!)
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.
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.
[ Grade Inflation Series | The Art of Teaching | Toogood Reports | Front Page Mag ]
Ebonics and the
Betrayal of Black Children
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. 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:
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
Copyright 2002 by Nicholas Stix. All rights reserved. |
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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?
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?
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.
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."
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