Eloquent orators seem to abound In African American culture

Eloquent orators seem to abound In African American culture

Eloquent orators seem to abound In African American culture. Verbal art is an integral and highly valued component of the black lifestyle either on a personal or public level, as evidenced in the hip-hop culture and slang expressions. However, it is ironic that black American children are perceived to be ‘verbally deprived.’ I am not at all convinced that black children are verbally deprived. Whites have long believed that blacks speak bad English, but their reasoning for this has changed over time. They thought it was biological since the brains of black people were too small and their lips too big to speak proper English. The Americans later believed that it was sociological: bad parenting in black ghettos. Black parents do not talk to their children much.

These claims are all

wrong because Lip shape and size do not affect how people speak since there is

no indication that lip size correlates a language’s choice of sound. The human

brain has built-in language skills, but it is the same in all races as far as

we know. There are not different kinds of languages according to race. Anyone

of any race can learn any language. Children mainly learn language through

interacting with their playmates, not from parents or schoolteachers, as it is

assumed. In any case, anyone who has been in a black ghetto household knows

very well there is plenty of talking going on, and it is in this way children

learn to speak.

If the whites were right

about any of these, then black children who grow up in white, middle-class

neighborhoods would not “sound white.”Black children do score lower

on reading tests, and so on. That part is correct. But even that fact is not as

reliable as it looks. Those tests are written in Standard American English, the

native dialect of middle-class White Americans in the North. After all, it is

not just black children who score lower on those tests – so do white children

in the South and white working-class children everywhere. Standard English is a

fundamental dialect. It is what all the schoolbooks are written in and nearly

every book at the library. It is necessary for high school, university, and top

professions. It is a Job Interview English. But it should surprise no one that

the children of those who set the standard and write the tests do better.

Many blacks do not grow

up speaking Standard English. Most talk about some form of African American

Vernacular English – Ebonics, which comes from the pidgin English of West

Africa of the 1600s.

Ebonics is different but

not worse than Standard English. For example, it allows double negatives – but

so does Spanish, French, and Shakespearean English. It will enable sentences

without verbs, like “She nice” – but so does Russian. It has more

tenses – but so does Ancient Greek. It can express any thought that Standard

English can. It is native to rap. Standard English has borrowed heavily from it: okay, jazz, two-faced, sweet talk, put-down,

redneck, etc. It is hardly

verbally deprived.

The idea that Ebonics is

bad English comes from “white is right” thinking where white people

are the measure of all things. Whites have the cultural might to do that, but

that does not make them right.