SIX

Bad-mouthing Black English

The inner cities of America—the term is often a euphemism for black ghettos—can look very different from one another. Harlem, with its stock of once-grand New York brownstones, has a different appearance from Watts in Los Angeles, with its small, one-story houses surrounded by chain-link fences. But these communities with heavy concentrations of African Americans often have many features in common: poor-quality housing, private or public; high rates of unemployment, school truancy, and dropouts, of drug dealing and abuse, of illegitimate births, of violent crime; and an absence of adult males, because such dispro­portionate numbers of them, relative to white communities, are in jail. The black communities share similar rates of poverty. In 2002, one in four African American households lived below the federal poverty level. In New York County, where Harlem is located, it was one in three; in Los Angeles County, one black household in five.

These communities also have in common a vibrant culture and lan­guage, Black English, which lies at the vital center of that culture. But language may also be a factor in perpetuating the social morbidity—for instance, why 27 percent of blacks fail to graduate from high school, compared with 16 percent of whites; and why only 14 percent of blacks get a college degree, compared with 26 percent of whites.

It is one of the paradoxes of American life that white America both is fascinated by black culture and disapproves of it, embracing it and bad-mouthing it simultaneously. The very word bad-mouth carries in itself a miniature history of Black English. According to linguist Geneva Smitherman of Michigan State University, bad-mouthing came from the West African language Mandingo: dajugu meant "slander, abuse," liter­ally "bad mouth." Now it is one of many words white America has bor­rowed from Black English. Professor Smitherman's book Black Talk gives seventeen hundred "words and phrases from the Hood to the Amen Corner" (the neighborhood to the corner of a church where older women frequently say "amen"), and almost one in ten has "crossed over" into general American usage.

Even as it borrows, however, white America continues to bad-mouth the source, the dialect that linguists call African American Vernacular English. It has been called "this appalling English dialect. . . gutter slang . . . the dialect of the pimp, the idiom of the gang-banger and the street thug." Not only white commentators but middle-class African Americans have often been as negative. Yet this is the speech of millions of Americans in inner cities all over the United States, a speech that is remarkably consistent from place to place, more consistent than the speech of white Americans from city to city. An African American in Detroit will sound much more like his soul brothers in Philadelphia and Los Angeles than will the white inhabitants of the same cities. Black English has become a national form of speech. Its common features— such as he start for he starts; we going instead of we are going; and we be going for a habitual action—can be heard everywhere. Those features, and many subtler ones, are the speech of the urban ghettos. They are also increasingly often being appropriated by some Hispanic and Asian Americans, and by middle-class white youths finding a covert prestige or generational protest in imitating black speech.

So little attention had been paid to the language of America's black population that in the 1920s H. L. Mencken could seriously claim,

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"The Negro dialect, as we know it today, seems to have been formu­lated by the song writers for minstrel shows." Mencken meant the at­tempts to render black speech in writing, calling it "a vague and artificial lingo which had little relation to the actual speech of the Southern blacks."

A great deal of attention has subsequently been paid by linguists, es­pecially after World War II, but the origins of black speech have only been partially uncovered.

The first generation of research surmised that blacks' speech derived from pieces of dialects brought by their slave owners from different parts of England. One example would be the use of axe instead of ask. Frederic G. Cassidy, editor of the Dictionary of American Regional English, notes that in Old English the word was acsian but over time the "ks" sound was reversed. The old verb axe appears fully conjugated in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde—axe, axen, axed. More than four centuries later, in the novels of Anthony Trollope, axe appears in the mouths of country squires speaking their local Barchester dialect. In fact, axe was used by Southern white speakers until recent years, when it fell out of favor because it had become such a marker for black speech.

When linguists tried systematically to match English dialect forms with patterns of colonial migration and slaveholding, the Anglicist theory fell apart. It was supplanted by the Creole theory, that African American English is a descendant of English pidgins developed during the slave trade. Pidgins passed on to another generation to become Creoles.

In The Story of English, we followed this theory back to its origins in West Africa, to Mambolo, a trading post up the Great Scearcies River in Sierra Leone. British and American slavers working up rivers like this introduced the English language to the African middlemen from whom they bought the slaves. Three hundred years ago, blacks and whites communicated in a simplified English known as pidgin. This Anglo-African mixture is still the lingua franca on the river, as we heard from the boatmen on the dock touting for passengers to Freetown, shouting,

Bad-mouthing Black English   *    117

"Freetown-Freetown-Freetown, now-now-now-now," and, "Verygood-verygood-verygood." Navigating through the sandbanks, the captain told the helmsman, "Go small-small," for "very slow."

Near the coast, on Bunce Island, are the ruins of an old fort where newly captured slaves were penned up. To prevent revolts, traders mixed slaves who spoke different African languages. The traders spoke to them in pidgin English, and the slaves used and elaborated it to speak among themselves. So, even before they left Africa in die infamous slave ships, they were speaking a version of English that was all their own.

John Baugh, a Stanford University linguist, himself African Ameri­can, said that these "are the very origins of contemporary African American English."

We also filmed on the Sea Islands off South Carolina—Kiawah, Edisto, Daufuskie, and Wadmalaw—low-lying barrier islands, sandy on the seaward side, wooded and marshy toward the mainland. Once, rice and cotton were grown on plantations here. An infestation of the boll weevil killed the cotton in the 1920s, and the islanders now survive on general farming, fishing, and a lot of vacationing mainlanders. The novelist Pat Gonroy taught school for a year on Daufuskie and de­scribed its fictional representation, Yamacraw, like this: *

The island is fringed with the green, undulating marshes of the southern coast; shrimp boats ply the waters around her and fishermen cast their lines along her bountiful shores. Deer cut through her forests in small, silent herds. The great southern oaks stand broodingly on her banks. The island and the waters around her teem with life. There is something eternal and in­destructible about the! fide-eroded shores and the dark threat­ening silences of the swamps in the heart of the island.

This was where people spoke Gullah, one of the early precursors of today's African American Vernacular, and twenty years ago you could

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still hear faint whispers of that original slave English. Older people, such as Benjamin Bligen and his sister Janie Hunter, were among the last natural Gullah speakers. Benjamin, who was mending his seine net before going fishing for ashtas (oysters) and rustys (crabs), sat with Janie in the shade of those old trees as we listened to their conversation:

janie:                    All these trees here are medicine.

benjamin:   Yeah, yeah.

janie:                    We're sat down 'neath medicine right now.

benjamin:   Yeah, yeah.

janie:                    All them was medicine. I'm looking at medicine

ever' day.

benjamin:   Yeah. Like molasses.
janie:      White root.
benjamin:   All them things.
janie:          Big girl. Red oak fire.
benjamin:   Yeah, yeah.
janie:          All those was medicine.
benjamin:   Oh yeah.
janie:          Papa had a whole bag full. He'd say, "Go in the

loft, get a piece of bark, and give it to drink." benjamin:   Go to bed with fever, wake up in the mornin',

fever gone.

janie:    Fever gone, boy. Done sweat that fever out.
benjamin:   Oh yeah.
janie:          Oh, they was good time.
benjamin:   Good times, good times.
janie:          Good times. They time is still here right now.

But they, they just don't want to own it. benjamin:   Oh yeah. janie:         But I still old-time and I'll keep my old time

here.

Bad-mouthing Black English   *    119

benjamin:                 Oh yeah.

janie:                  Nothing like it.

benjamin:                 Give me that old-time religion.

We left them singing "Give Me That Old Time Religion"—voices from the past, because today both brother and sister have passed on, and Gullah is kept alive only as a cultural artifact and tourist attraction, no longer a living language.

How the original slave speech or plantation Creole developed de­pended on the period, location, and circumstances of slave manage­ment. Linguists Guy Bailey and Patricia Cukor-Avila write that in the colonial period black slaves and white indentured servants often worked together, and relationships between the races were more fluid than later. There were differences in the Upper and Lower South, slaves who were nearer the coast in the Lower South, the location of the largest planta­tions, often having minimal contact with whites. After the Revolution, more than 10 percent of the slaves in the Upper Sotith were freed, and for the rest restrictions were relaxed, so there was more racial contact. Then, in 1793, the cotton gin was invented, and that led to a huge growth in cotton production. Cultivation spread west ijito Mississippi and Texas and led to a dramatic increase in the importation of slaves. This "cotton kingdom" was characterized by very large plantations with big slave populations working the fields. When slavery ended, this society was the source of many of the most important products of African American Vernacular culture—for instance, blues, jazz, and rock-and-roll music.

After the Civil War, the plantation system was replaced by share-cropping and tenant farming, for blacks and whites, and the emergence of general stores as the anchor of the Southern economy. In these stores, both races mingled to buy tools and provisions, and to secure credit against their future crops. Then industrialization began, the Jim

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Crow laws were passed, and the races were again segregated. By the early twentieth century, frustrated blacks began migrating north to what they called "the Promised Land."

One community in East Central Texas has changed little since the days of tenant farming and has been the focus of intensive research by Bailey and Cukor-Avila for clues to the evolution of modern Black En­glish. We reached what they called "Springville" after driving across miles of flatland, past the mesmerizing blur of furrows recently plowed in soil enriched by periodic flooding of the Brazos River. In winter it is cold; in summer, stiflingly hot. Because there are few trees and no hills, you can see for miles, as you can hear the whistles of the endless trains carrying freight for the Southern Pacific and Union Pacific Railroads. Springville is a tiny community now, sandwiched between two lines, trembling every few minutes as the trains rumble through.

The same family has owned the redbrick general store for more than a century, and it appears hardly to have changed. A cast-iron stove sits in the middle, for fires on freezing winter days, when customers, black and white, would linger for the warmth. On a slight elevated platform are a nineteenth-century desk and an ancient contraption diat holds the accounts of customers. Dusty showcases display a modest selection of groceries, notions, and dry goods. At the back is the small post office. The store appears caught in a time warp.

It was here that Patricia Cukor-Avila, of the University of North Texas, conducted her early research nearly two decades ago. Rarely does linguistic research in any one community extend over such a long period of time, and to achieve this, she said, it was necessary to win the trust of the locals: "When I first started out with this project, I would basically hang out there most of the day and interact with people who came in and talk with them, not necessarily record right at first, until I got to know people. The mail is still delivered at the store—there is no mail delivery. So that always ensured a nice crowd of people coming in

Bad-mouthing Black English   *    121

about the time that the mail would be brought to the store and then put up into the various postal boxes. People oftentimes don't just come to get their mail and leave. They come, get their mail, sit down, open it, sit around, and talk."

By concentrating in this way, she and Bailey have been able to look at how speech changes over time in a single community. Over time in the case of Springville meant an extraordinary chance to hear voices that literally go back to the days of slavery, and the changes since. In the 1930s and early 1940s, workers from the Works Progress Administra­tion made a series of recordings and photographs in this part of Texas. Among their subjects were elderly black people who were born into slavery in the United States, the children or grandchildren of slaves brought directly from Africa. Although the legal slave trade ended in 1808, Bailey says that didn't end the illegal importation of slaves. In The Emergence of Black English, editors Bailey, Cukor-Avila, and Natalie Maynor argue that illegal importation was heaviest in the cotton lands

m  *                                                             ^

from the Mississippi Delta to Texas. One of the former slaves inter­viewed by the WPA was born in Liberia, captured there in the 1850s, and brought to Texas as a child.

It is haunting to look at the photos of these black people, their work-worn bodies in shabby clothing, yet their faces to us expressing a dig­nity that seems to be absent from the faces of some of the gaunt, half-starved white migrants in the famous photographs of the dust-bowl victims of the same Depression years. Suddenly slavery advances out of the "long ago" to within living memory, an impression reinforced by listening to people's voices.

One WPA interviewee was Laura Smalley of Hempstead, Texas, south of Springville, in the-same river country, known as Brazos Bot­tom. Laura was born to a slave mother imported from Mississippi; she said she was nine when "freedom broke," her term for the Emancipa­tion Proclamation of 1863. Lincoln's proclamation freeing slaves in the

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Confederate states, in the middle of the Civil War, was issued on Janu­ary 1; the slaves in Texas were not told of it until June. She said, "All of them went to the house to see old master. An' I thought old master was dead, but he wasn'. . . . He had been off to the war, an' come back. All the niggers gathered aroun' to see ol' master again. You know, an' oF master didn' tell, you know, they was free. . . . They worked diere, I think now they say they worked them six months after that, six months. And turn them loose on the nineteen of June. That's why, you know, they celebrate that day. Colored folks celebrates that day."

It is true that in Texas June 19—or Juneteenth, as they call it—was a bigger holiday for blacks than the Fourth of July and is still widely cel­ebrated.

Laura's descriptions of slave life were graphic, like this scene when a house slave known as Aunt M was accused by her mistress of hurting her when she took her by the wrists and made her sit in a rocking chair. Laura recounted what happened when the master came home and his wife complained the slave had hurt her.

An' he ask her then, says, "What you doing in this house here, hurting her ol' mistress?" Say, "She wasn't hurting no ol' mis­tress, she was jus', when mistress started whoop her, she sat her down." But they taken that oF woman, poor ol' woman, carried her in the peach orchard an' whipped her. An' you know, jus' tied her han' this-a-way, you know, 'roun' the peach orchard tree, I can remember that jus' as well, look like to me I can, and 'roun' the tree an' whipped her. You know, she couldn' do noth­ing but jus' kick her feet, you know, jus' kick her feet. But they jus' had her clothes off down to her wais', you know. They didn' have her plumfb] naked, but they had her clothes down to her waist. An' every now and then they'd whip her, you know, an' then snuff the pipe out on her, you know, jus' snuff pipe out

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on her. You know, the embers in the pipe. . . . Man, he sure did whip her. Well, he whipped her so that at night they had to grease her back, grease her back. . . . Later that evening they give her her dinner. Lay there and watch, she was whipped so bad, you know, she din' want to eat, you know. If they whip you half a day, you ain't want to eat. Not at all. No.

In transcribing the accounts of such barbarity, the researchers were intrigued to notice how different this speech was from current African American Vernacular English. Bailey said, "In some respects the syntax and grammar were more similar to white speech of the time." Many of die features common to contemporary Black English are absent from die "slave" tapes, for instance, what linguists call "the invariant be" as in they be working, and the "deleted copula," leaving out the auxiliary verb in they working.

Bailey and Cukor-Avila interviewed people of several generations living in Springville in the 1980s and 1990s, using pseudonyms, as they did with "Willy," who grew up on a farm close to the store and worked in agriculture all his life. Patricia said he was "a very good example of what we would call older African American speech patterns." We recorded a conversation between Willy and Guy Bailey.

guy:           You told me that when you were a little boy you

did a lot of hunting and stuff.
willy: Yuh, I hunted a little bit, yuh.
guy: What all'dya hunt?

willy:           Armadillo, rabbit, and anything I could catch!

guy:           Is that right? Is the armadillo pretty good to eat?

willy:                 Yessir, he good, sir.

guy:           I've never had armadillo. What's it taste like?

willy:                 Taste good. Like chicken.

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guy:             Is that right?

willy:                         Yessir. You cook it right, sir.

guy:             Is that right? How d'you cook it?

willy:                         Well, sir, my momma she boil him. Boil him. In a

   pot, you know.
guy:      Uh huh.
willy:      Put some onion rind in, make gravy, fry him.

And Willy concluded, "Hard times in my day. Yessir. We work hard, sir." The researchers found that the speech of older black people like Willy also lacked the features of modern city Black English and more resembled the Southern white speech of their time. Here is an example of some dialogue recorded by Cukor-Avila in the general store between Rupert, born in 1916, and Slim, born in 1932, both African Americans. Rupert was well known locally for stories about his encounters with a ghost, the "Little Man."

slim:       It's a little man that follows him aroun'. A

little short man. He ask him for cigarettes an' things.

rupert-.   Oh jus' about that tall. He followed me one

night. Right over there. Clean to the house . . . An' uh, I didn't see anythin'. I started turnin' in the yar'. Here comes somethin' followin' behin' me. I turned aroun' an' there he standin' right in the middle of the yar'. "What's your name? You'd better tell me your name." I said, "Come up on me I'm gonna cut ya!" . . . Me an' uh, me an' oP Moses was sittin' over there. Moses went back to the highway. I said, "Who is that?" Moses said, "Oh that's a dog." No that wasn' no dog. I

Bad-mouthing Black English    *    125

said, "That was human being!" Moses said, "Oh yes! Most those devils are human!"

But the younger the Springville African Americans they studied, the more the speech began to resemble urban black speech of today. Patri­cia Cukor-Avila compared thirty-two grammatical features in the speech patterns of whites and blacks in the periods 1920-40, 1940-60, and after 1960. One notable feature that is easy for nonlinguists to grasp is the use of "s" on the third person singular of verbs. Among black speakers of the earlier periods, like Rupert and Slim above, the use of the "s" (as in he goes to work) is typical; it starts to shift in the next generation, and is gone in the speech of Springville residents born af­ter 1960. The youngest were saying things like, His sister go where she need to go. Cukor-Avila describes this as a "new development" within the African American Vernacular English grammatical system. Besides the loss of the "s," other innovations are the use of be plus a verb in the

i?

present participle—for example, he be working—and the use of had plus a past-tense verb, as in Yesterday I had went, or Yesterday I had saw him; these features were not found in black speech before World War II.

These insights led Bailey and Cukor-Avila to conclude that urban black speech appeared to be diverging from rather than converging with white speech, as a result of the great black migration to the North. Start­ing during World War I, which created a Northern demand for black la­bor, and lasting until the 1970s, some six million blacks left the rural South for the major cities of the North. There whites and blacks did not mix. In fact, the movement of Southern blacks into city centers often started "white flight" to the suburbs, creating black ghettos. Bailey said, "In the large cities you had;sj3atial segregation but you also had the for­mation of separate communities often with a kind of oppositional cul­ture to the rest of the U.S. This created an ideal context for African American Vernacular English to develop along a sort of separate track."

Here are some examples of the product of that separate develop-

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ment. They were collected by John Baugh in his fieldwork. This is a black man of sixty-two:

Inside of you, you gotta mind. There's a mind that be workin' that's constant, that never sleep . . . it's yo subconscious mind, which never go to sleep on you. Because ... I think when it's gone, you done lef' the world anyway. But your subconscious mind is steady workin'. This is why men don' live as long as womens because there is so much that's pressin' on you. And this is why that black people is hypertension; more of us die from high blood pressure because of that strain. We live under that shit constant. . . . It's no black person livin' free in the United States; I don' care how rich he is.

Some other examples were collected by John Baugh in Philadelphia and Los Angeles.

When the baby be sleep, and the othe' kids be at school, and my husband be at work, then ... I might can finally sit down.

She told David they Mama had went to Chicago to see her sis­ter and her sister's new baby.

If he lay a hand on my kid again, I'll be done killed that moth­erfucker.

Bailey believes that white and black grammars "are very different to­day, probably more different than they've ever been. And their phonologies [sound systems] aren't very similar either; it's a kind of in­dependent development." William Labov of Philadelphia says that to­day "the African American community are carried even further away on a separate current of grammatical change ... as a consequence of

Bad-mouthing Black English    *    127

the large and increasing residential segregation of African Americans in Northern cities."

To speak of black "grammar" will disconcert many Americans, white or black, who think that Black English is merely a lazy or broken En­glish. Washington Post columnist William Raspberry once called it "a lan­guage that has no right or wrong expressions, no consistent spellings or pronunciations, and no discernible rules." That is a common assump­tion, except among linguists. In 1969, William Labov analyzed the speech of blacks in Philadelphia and in Harlem and concluded that Black English had a consistent internal structure, grammar, and syntax. Linguist John Baugh wrote that Labov's research, "The Logic of Non-standard English," "was the single most important article ever written that debunked the pervasive linguistic fallacies associated with cognitive-deficit hypotheses"—that is, the fallacy that speakers of Black English were somehow mentally backward. In 1997, Labov told a Senate hear­ing: "This African American Vernacular English is a dialect of English, which shares most of the grammar and vocabulary with other dialects of English. But it is distinctively different in many ways, and more different from standard English than any other dialect spoken in Continental North America. It is not a set of slang words, or a random set of gram­matical mistakes, but a well formed set of rules of grammar and pro­nunciation that is capable of conveying complex logic and reasoning."

There is still a dispute, too specialized for nonlinguists like us, over whether the Creole theory of black linguistic development means there is a deeply embedded structure in black language or whether, in Cukor-Avila's words, "factors such as education, age, and social class were also significant in determining linguistic choices."

We left Springville with the sobering realization that a hundred, even fifty years ago, rural blacks and whites sounded more alike than we

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might have thought. Today, whites and inner-city blacks sound more different than we might have hoped. After decades of genuine civil-rights advances, and significant achievements by the growing black middle class, the majority of African Americans and white society are growing further apart, because more separate languages mean more separate peoples.

That is where we come back to the fascinating paradox. Whatever its evolution, urban black culture has from its earliest days had a profound influence on the popular culture of white America. Over a century of musical innovation—with ragtime, jazz, the blues, boogie-woogie, doo-wop, soul, rock and roll, and today hip-hop—generations of white Americans have embraced the black imagination, millions as avid con­sumers, some as crossover artists like Elvis Presley or the contemporary Eminem. John McWhorter, another Stanford University linguist, who is also African American, calls black sound, especially after the 1960s, "the cross-racial bedrock of the American musical sensibility."

In the process of borrowing this sensibility, white America has also appropriated a lot of Black English Vernacular, whether slang or the code-speak that was part of Black English development from slavery days to keep whites, so to speak, in the dark. As the writer James Bald­win noted: "There was a moment in time and in this place when my brother, or my mother, or my father, or my sister had to convey to me, for example, the danger in which I was standing from the white man stand­ing just behind me, and to convey this with speed and in a language the white man could not possibly understand, and that, indeed, he cannot understand today." Baldwin had some ironic observations on how white Americans considered it hip or hep to pick up black expressions:

Now, I do not know what white Americans would sound like if there had never been any black people in the United States, but they would not sound the way they sound. Jazz, for example, is

Bad-mouthing Black English   *    129

a very specific sexual term, as in jazz me, baby, but white people purified it into the Jazz Age. Sock it to me, baby, which means, roughly, the same thing, has been adopted by Nathaniel Hawthorne's descendants with no qualms or hesitations at all, along with let it all hang out and right on! Beat to his socks, which was once the black's most total and despairing image of poverty, was transformed into a thing called the Beat Generation, which phenomenon was, largely, composed of "upright" middle class white people, imitating poverty, trying to get down, to get with it, doing their despairing best to be funky, which we the blacks never dreamed of doing—we were funky, baby, like funk was go­ing out of style.

Many other borrowings from blacks have enriched American En­glish—dance names such as cakewalk (the 2003 invasion of Iraq would be a cakewalk, according to some in the Bush administration), jitterbug, break dancing. To be cool, or heavy, became universally American. One wave of popularity for black idiom among whites came in the 1920s and 1930s, when it was cool for New Yorkers to go to Harlem to hear jazz greats like Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong but also the hepcqt Cab Galloway, who created a 'Jive Talk Dictionary" in song, popularizing expressions such as hip (wise, sophisticated), in the groove (perfect), square (unhip), and chick (girl), or a hip chick (a beautiful girl). But the white hepcats drifted away, and Harlem became slum territory for decades after World War II, only beginning to enjoy a renaissance in the 1990s, when soaring Manhattan real-estate values made it desirable. That trend was symbolized when Bill Clinton chose to locate his post-presidential office in Harlem.

But there is the other side to the black-white language paradox. De­spite its enormous influence in popular culture, what is clear to black Americans and to any sensitive whites is that inner-city Black English, whatever its evolution, is a huge barrier to advancement in American

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society, limiting prospects in education, employment, and housing. For years Stanford University linguist John Baugh has been studying what he calls "linguistic profiling," as real in black lives as the "racial profil­ing" whereby skin color alone makes police suspect criminality.

We joined Baugh in Detroit, home of Motown in the 1960s, today boasting a thriving hip-hop scene. The white rapper Eminem comes from the Detroit area called 8-Mile, the title of his signature movie. Inner-city Detroit is 82 percent African American, but language can de­fine you as well as the color of your skin.

At the Greyhound bus station, John Baugh demonstrated the tech­nique he's used for years to reveal how Americans react to different ethnic accents. He checks the rental-housing section in the local pa­per, and then calls to inquire about places advertised. He calls first us­ing an African American accent, then again using a Latino speech pattern, and a third time in a neutral American accent, which is in fact how he really talks. In general, results from this effort in many cities show that those with minority dialects do not fare so well, par­ticularly in affluent communities. The outcome reflects white percep­tions of both race and economic class, but also prejudice based on how people speak.

Baugh sees both sides of this, having felt the pull both ways: "At a young age, then, I received mixed messages about language; some were overt, advocating that I 'speak properly' and avoid 'bad language,' whereas others were more subtle, reflected by the hippest Sisters and Brothers who emphatically rejected 'white speech.' ... I didn't want to sound 'lame' and, as I had observed 'on the corner,' most of the 'cool brothers' could 'talk the talk'—and those who exhibited urban elo­quence never did so in standard English."

The two dialects clash particularly in America's schools. Ann Arbor, an hour from Detroit, was the scene of what became a landmark court case about prejudice against Black English. In 1979, the mothers of a

Bad-mouthing Black English    *     131

handful of black kids at the largely white school claimed they were not being educated because of their language. When they spoke as they did at home, their teachers assumed they couldn't do schoolwork. Ironically, the school was named after Martin Luther King, Jr. Annie Blair, one of the mothers, had moved north from Tennessee. She told us, "When my kids was tested and was put into special-ed classes and I felt like that they were not getting educated and was not treated equally. And I felt like that shouldn't be a barrier because of the language to stop them from being educated." One of her sons, Asheen, now a man in his thir­ties, said, "They sort of felt like we were unteachable, in a sense. So it kind of made them go towards other students more and gave them a lit­tle bit more help than they would give us. Actually, to be honest, the teachers really didn't communicate with us too much. It was just sort of like, in a sense, that we were on our own."

A social worker, Ruth Zweifler, familiar with the housing project the boys came from, became convinced that they were being discriminated against because of their African American English: "There were maybe twenty-four poor black children in a sea of affluent white fami­lies and they really were having a very hard time. Language is the marker for assumed attitudes—coming with an implied criticism, which is what I think a black child carries with him. We as adults, as main­stream society, as Americans, have really done bad by these little kids."

Unable to make any headway with the school board, Ruth contacted lawyers in Detroit, and together they thrashed out a legal strategy that led to a landmark court decision on Black English. One of the lawyers, Ken Lewis, said they tried at first to focus on the children's poverty, but "there is really no constitutional right not to be poor in this country." Eventually they were able to tie language to race as a barrier to educa­tion. And they were victorious. John Baugh said the most significant thing raised during the trial "was that you had a federal judge acknowl­edge formally that African American Vernacular English represented a

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significant barrier to academic achievement and success. He confirmed that the school district was really insensitive to the linguistic back­ground of the vast majority of African American students within the school district."

The judge ordered the district to make a plan to teach black students, and the school district announced that teachers at the Martin Luther King School would have to take sensitivity courses.

Ken Lewis said, "One of the things I remember Judge Joyner indi­cating in his opinion was the need to help youngsters appreciate the dif­ference between the language of the majority, how it would impact upon your being perceived by others."

The judgment brought mixed reactions even from blacks. William Raspberry of the Washington Post approvingly quoted one of the plain­tiff lawyers: "When a 5-year-old has his language system treated as in­ferior from his first day of school, the resulting psychological damage is inevitable. Once this barrier is raised by school officials, the child begins to withdraw and his learning performance suffers." But the case got no sympathy from an equally influential black columnist, Carl T. Rowan, who said he found the ruling "far fetched." Rowan wrote that he would remain skeptical "until we make more black parents understand the value of reading in the home, until more teachers force ghetto students to read newspapers and magazines, and at least try to resist peer-group pressures to downgrade standard English. 'My teacher was insensitive to my black English' is an alibi that black youngsters can use forever to 'explain' why they did not aspire to excellence, and thus never learned to read—or to prepare for a decent life."

From Paris, where he had long exiled himself to escape racial fric­tion, James Baldwin wrote to the New York Times: 'A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled. A child cannot be taught by anyone whose demeanor, essen­tially, is that the child repudiate his experience and all that gives him

Bad-mouthing Slack English   *    133

sustenance and enter a limbo in which he will no longer be black, and in which he knows that he can never become white. Black people have lost too many children that way."

And Baldwin added: "The argument has nothing to do with language itself but with the role of language. Language, incontestably, reveals the speaker. ... It goes without saying, then, that language is also a political instrument, means, and proof of power. It is the most vivid and crucial key to identity. It reveals the private identity, and connects one with, or divorces one from, the larger public, or communal identity."

Years later, in 1997, the argument Ken Lewis had used successfully in court was raised by educators in Oakland, California. They claimed, however, that Black English, for which they resurrected the old term Ebonics, was not a dialect of English but a separate language. That caused a national storm. Critics felt, in the words of John Baugh, that the Oakland School Board "was trying to abscond with the limited bilingual education funding available for students for whom English is not native." Baugh said that if Education Secretary Riley had not squashed that separate-language notion instandy, "countless school dis­tricts from across the country would have quickly lined up at the federal
Tide \TI trough."                       i

But the storm had another side. Well-educated blacks joined whites in believing that the Oakland authorities wanted to teach Black English, and the commentators unleashed a stream of hostility. Liberal colum­nists referred to Black English as "gibberish . . . the patois of America's meanest streets... a mutant language." Recalling this in an NPR talk, Geoffrey Nunberg said, "It's hard to read those characterizations with­out feeling that a current of displacement is at work—at least, it's strik­ing how many of the words that critics apply to the dialect in the press are the same ones that many whites apply in private to the people who speak it."

The Ebonics story consumed laymen and the linguistics community.

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Dennis Preston talked about it when we met in Pennsylvania. He said that if national columnists who called Black English "gibberish" had used the same kind of language about the intelligence or physical char­acteristics of an ethnic group like blacks, they would have lost their jobs. "It's pretty horrifying, when you think of it, that we can still describe people who just go about living their daily lives, speaking a language that they learned in their homes and in their neighborhoods, and have some outsider listen to it and say it's 'gibberish,' when it serves them perfectly well as a vehicle of communication for what they want to do in those environments."

Preston, who has studied many European languages, said that in most European countries kids do not go to school speaking the standard lan­guage of that country: "It's not true in Italy. It's not true in northern Switzerland, for example—there's a radically different dialect of Ger­man. But when those kids go to school the school system says to them: Now, look, when you travel outside of Switzerland or outside of Sicily or, you know, wherever we are, you're going to need standard Italian or stan­dard German. It's not because—and here's the kicker—it's not because it's any better, and it's not because your dialect is dumb or insufficient for the things you do with friends and family. It's just that this variety is more widespread, there's a bigger literature in it, and it's just going to serve you well to learn it. So, for some odd reason, in Europe they don't attack na­tive dialects, they simply equip people with something else, which they think they should have. You can imagine the psychological repercussions of this. The kids who go to school say, 'Oh yeah, something else we got to learn,' rather than, 'Gee whiz, my brothers, my sisters, my friends, my whole family, my aunts, uncles use sloppy speech,' which is in fact what we do to kids in the American educational system."

Oakland schools have put the Ebonics fiasco behind them as the city tries to rebuild itself culturally and physically from the disastrous earth­quake of 1989, and tries to cultivate a sense of pride among African

Bad-mouthing Black English   *    135

Americans there. Not all young blacks share the civic optimism. We spent an evening with a talented young poet, Chinaka Hodge, who performed at a poetry slam. When she was sixteen, her work made her a member of the Berkeley/Oakland team, winners of the National Teen Poetry Slam in 2000, and later won her a scholarship to New York University. She was a recipient of Teen People magazine's What's Next Award, and performed at the awards ceremony at Harlem's Apollo Theater. Her poetry uses an interesting mixture of standard and Black English, which she calls slang. She told us, 'A good deal of youth in the country speak very standard English and another portion speaks the slang, and I think a lot of us run, you know, right down the middle of that gamut."

One of her poems, "Barely Audible," echoes imagery used by the legendary blues singer Billie Holiday in "Strange Fruit," about black lynchings.

This is Darius' world

he moves feebly

decrepit in the candy apple neon glow

of Mohammed's Millenium Market

Darius  i

clutches brown paper bag

all his dreams, packaged at liquor store

his eyes are red

I tell myself its because he don't sleep at night

he's up counting

he knows how many stars are in the sky

he can hear the ocean lapping at the edge of the world

he can tell you how-:rnany times it hits the shore

but folks don't ask him things like that

so he counts dubs, counts 8ths

drinks fifths and forties

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on 18th and Myrtle

Darius

He's dying beneath billboards for DeBeers

Wants to put diamonds in his teeth

He counts rocks

And sniffs sacks of cum

On easy Fridays

Its 3:30

He'll soon be dangling from streetlight like strange fruit

from poplar trees.

Asked about the imagery, Ghinaka says, "It's our generation's sad­ness. There's not as many, you know, lynchings going on as, you know, in Billie Holiday's time, but at the same time there's a lot of death that's going unnoticed and a lot of black folks are dying in Oakland. So, I mean, it's not the same death but its important anyway, it's important, and just as urgent, if not more."

That ability to use the black vernacular creatively while mastering standard English is the grail that schools ideally impart to their stu­dents—in effect, to create the kind of bilingualism Dennis Preston talked about in Europe.

In Los Angeles, we visited the city's most listened-to morning drive-time radio host, Steve Harvey, a handsome and confident man, who wears a gray homburg hat tilted back on his head as he sits at a micro­phone in a studio overlooking the sprawling city, and talks in his own version of Black English. Like Chinaka Hodge, he calls it slang. When we asked jokingly, "Do you speak American?" he laughed and said, "I speak good enough American. You know, I think there's variations of speaking American. I don't think there's any one set way, because America's so di­verse. You know, man, regardless as to how I talk, you know, I relax and just let it hang out and flow. Suburban America or upward America is

Bad-mouthing Black English   *    137

not my audience. My audience is mostly grassroots people. And I sound mostly like they uncle, so. See, like I said, I sound mostly like they uncle. And I was cool with that. That sound good to me. Isn't. You know, isn't is not in my vocabulary. The word isn't requires my mouth to stretch in a way that it don't stretch—isn't—and then I leave it out there too long, you know, I look really stupid. I actually almost black out when I say that." As far as he is concerned, the correct word is ain't.

When he thought about it a bit more, Steve Harvey said, "Well, you know, you do have to be bilingual in this country. Which means you can be very, very adept at slang, but you also have to be adept at getting through a job interview."

Los Angeles school authorities know that their minority students will need to be, in effect, bilingual. Since 1991, sixty schools have been us­ing an experimental program called Academic English Mastery. At PS 100, in Watts, we watched a fifth-grade class going through a drill on the differences between what they termed African American English and Mainstream American English. Then they divided into four teams to play a game like Jeopardy! in which they were awarded points for get­ting the right answers to language questions.

Daniel Russell, a Korean American teacher, put up ajtest sentence— My grandpa cook dinner every night—and asked, "Which feature is not Mainstream American English?"

One of the kids, named Maiso, said, "Third person singular."

the teacher:   And, Maiso, how do you code-switch it into

Mainstream American English?
maiso:            My grandpa cooks dinner every night.

The teacher said that was right and gave that team five hundred points, and a big cheer went up.

The teacher gave another example: He funny. A student said, "He is funny," and the teacher said, "Excellent translation."

138    if   do you speak amerkan?

Another sentence from the teacher: We don't have nothin' to do.

A boy: "We don't have nothinguh to do." But the teacher said, "Oh, I'm sorry. That is not an accurate translation into Mainstream American English, so you're at minus two hundred," to groans from the team. He rolled the dice again; the team won another chance and got it right: "We don't have anything to do." More points and more cheers. These kids were clearly turned on by the game, and most of the questions they got right.

The director of the project, Noma LeMoine, said they ran into some flak from critics, who thought they were teaching African American lan­guage, teaching Ebonics, which they don't need to do, because the kids already know it. She said, "Our task is to help move them towards mas­tery of the language at school, in its oral and written form, but to do that in a way where they are not devalued, or where they feel deni­grated in any way by virtue of their cultural and linguistic differences."

When we asked why that was better than telling them it's incorrect, she said, "It's important to validate who they are, their culture, their ex­periences, their language. Because when you begin to devalue young­sters and make them feel that who they are doesn't count, then we've turned them off on education."

We listened a little longer to the students and the teacher, who put up the sentence Last night we bake cookies and asked, "Are you ready? Num­ber one, what language is it in?"

student:   AAL.

teacher:   It is in African American language. Number

two, what linguistic feature is in AAL? student:   Past-tense marker -ed. teacher:   Past-tense marker -ed. That's cool! And how do

you code-switch it to Mainstream American

English?

student:   Last night we baked cookies. teacher:   You got five hundred more points. Is it too easy,

Bad-mouthing Black English    *     139

or I just taught you well this year? [This was fol­lowed by big cheering.]

Students in the program show significant gains in written English, and those behind the program would like to extend it to more schools and to more grades. They believe that unless more teachers treat home language sympathetically they'll condemn more generations to school failure. Language remains a formidable frontier in the legacy of slav­ery.

John Baugh says, "For far too long the quest for racial equity has pushed hot buttons like affirmative action, while ignoring the impor­tance of corresponding linguistic buttons altogether; that cycle must be broken if race relations in this country are ever to improve."

His fellow linguist Dennis Preston stressed how hard it is for a per­son to change his dialect. Americans across the social spectrum have a real distaste for people who fail to pull themselves up by their bootstraps linguistically, and don't understand that this bootstrapping is not easy. In fact, Preston believes it is as difficult as learning a foreign language, a task most Americans shrink from. Preston says, "Even in schools it seems to me that teachers believe that kids should just pay attention and not use what they think of as sloppy speech. But sloppy speech of course is their native language, and so not to do that requires the acqui­sition of something else."

Two other linguists, Cecilia Cutler and Renee Blake of the Linguis­tics Department at New York University, studied the attitudes of teach­ers in six New York high schools. They concluded that over the past quarter-century teachers have become more positive in their opinions about the structure of Black English, but that their attitudes depended heavily on the philosophy of the school, and on how many black stu­dents they had. The more black students these teachers had to deal with, the less they thought Black English had rules, and the more they thought it was just a lazy form of English.

HO    it   do you speak american?

These teachers may have encountered what the writer Mark Halpern found when teaching at Richard Green High School for Teaching in New York City. He said that many of his black students be­came furious and shouted, " 'Who are you trying to be?' when another student used standard English in class." Recounting this in the New York Times, Felicia R. Lees said that educators once predicted that, as more black people entered the mainstream, the dialect would fade not only among the middle class, as it has done, but also among the poor. Lin­guists say, however, that the current generation of inner-city youth re­lies more heavily on black vernacular than ever. "The persistence of the dialect reflects, in part, the growing resistance of some young blacks to assimilate and their efforts to use language as part of a value system that prizes cultural distinction. It also stems from the increasing isola­tion of black inner-city residents from both whites and middle-class blacks, and stems as well from a deep cynicism about the payoffs of conforming. While the dialect is used as a kind of in-group code among many blacks of all stations, educators are concerned about those young people who never master standard English at all."

Whatever teachers or the general public think, however, no observer of our general culture can ignore the vitality and appeal of black cul­ture and language for white, especially young white, people.

As rock and roll revolutionized the popular-music culture from the mid-1950s, the hip-hop phenomenon has for this generation, not just in music, dance, and language but in its national commercial exploitation in clothing and accessories. Hip-hop had modest beginnings on the streets of New York and Philadelphia in the late 1970s with a combina­tion of break dancing, graffiti art, or "writing" on city walls and trains, and rappers talking, or MC-ing, to a beat from records jerked forward and backward by disk jockeys. In 1983, for The Story of English, we filmed a street party in Philadelphia featuring an early group, the Scan­ner Boys, with two MCs, Perrey P, or Voice Master, and Grandmaster Tone, two artists in a black tradition going all the way back to Africa,

Bad-mouthing Black English   *    141

to the highly admired "man of words." What is interesting two decades later is how many of their words and expressions have since passed into the general language, in common use among white Americans. The Scanner Boys used check it out (pay attention to what's going on), chill out and max out (be cool and relaxed), fresh (good), that's bad (it's good), that's good (it's bad), funky fresh (real, real bad), wassup (what's going on), and they called a break dancer they were watching the hip-hop kid, the first time we'd heard hip-hop.

These expressions would sound stale, too used, to young hip-hop performers today. We visited a group called the Athletic Mic League performing at the Blind Pig club in Ann Arbor. Some of the group are college students, and all speak standard American but use street talk among themselves and for their lyrics. In their dressing room, Wesley Taylor said, "Everything follows the streets in America. So that what-ever's going on there, it goes from here to here, then eventually main­stream America, which is, you know, white America."

>

Their talk is filled with fresh meanings for worlds such as stacked, live, vibing, sick, and ill. Trey Alien said that when he comes down for the per­formance, "I'm edgy about what I'm about to walk into. I hope the place is stacked. I hope that the audience is live. I hope ivhen I step out this door that they are ready and anxious, they gonna feel us, are gonna connect with us. You got to come out there confident, for me it's almost on the borderline of being cocky. All of a sudden you've got that con­nection—you're vibing."

Wesley said, "This whole game is just based on how ill you are, and how sick a cat you can be. Sometimes it's about finesse, sometimes we're just on there spitting, so we try and be as raw as we can be onstage. So you have to rock as hard as you can. We use the word nasty for everything."

trey:       We have a saying, pro nasty, professionally nasty, that means it's quality—this is not just good, this is the top.

142    *   do you speak american?

wesley:   That's our Grade A, that's our professional

grade. trey:       If you want the best and you want the top, you

want something from us that's pro nasty.

Their lyrics avoid the violence and misogynistic tone of some hip-hop, but the social message is the same, because, they said, it's a por­trayal of life: "We're just people that are just talking about what, what's going on, right in front of your eyes, and what people go through on a daily basis, and it's not that hard to relate to it, you know, 'cause a lot of, of America lives this way, you know." Here is a sample of their lyrics from one number performed that night:

What's the difference, at a distance or resistance.

How many times must you hear it before you start to listen,

Before you start the fission of your imagination and jour intuition.

'Cause street wisdom don't mean any thing for those eh.

Street wisdom don't mean, when there're smarter guys in prison.

'Cause I'm building with men, women and children,

Through the sixth sense, our next level comprehension.

Specifics, but if it's about how loud you play it,

But it past nine, until you're eyes are drumming.

Abuse it 'cause good music is soul soothing as well as mind numbing.

'Cause I'm wondering if my kind's weird for asking this here.

Or spiritually and physically you're just afraid to feel.

And when asked to lend an ear, most people laugh in fear,

Mentally ill prepared to try to see what's really there, or is he scared?

Wesley said, "To give hip-hop its own credit, it's a very powerful me­dia. The words are spoken to you. Storytelling is a huge aspect of hip-hop, so, when you have these vivid stories going on by extremely articulate people, they can reach anybody."

Bad-mouthing Black English   *    143

H. Samy Alim, a linguist at Duke University, has studied what he calls Hip Hop Nation Language. He says that hip-hop guards its "street-conscious" identity, using "slang" to connect with African Americans but standard English grammar to appeal to the white audience: "Many hip hop artists know that white suburban fans are attracted to those artists that maintain a core Black urban audience. In a sense many whites play 'cultural catch-up,' letting the Black masses dictate what is in vogue and authentic." He says that the more attention hip-hop artists pay to their speech, the more nonstandard it becomes, raising an inter­esting question: "Can the conscious use of these forms in the hip hop and the society as a whole, contribute to the continued Afro-American­ization' of African American Language," making it "more and more distinct from other varieties of English?"

One aspect of the hip-hop phenomenon that now resonates across the culture is its cross-racial appeal. The TV comedy series Whoopi, de­veloped by actress Whoopi Goldberg, features a^ young white woman acting blacker than her black boyfriend. Commenting on the show, the New York Times said that hip-hop has "turned the hilarious improbabil­ity of white people who experiment with blackness into a perfectly fa­miliar everyday fact of American life."

Whoopi Goldberg herself said that such racial elision is increasingly the norm in American youth culture: "Eminem is a viable strong male character, who is white and black. There's no right or wrong of it, no judgment of it, but it's what's happening in our culture."

The cross-racial appeal was apparent on a rainy day on Sixth Av­enue in Manhattan in a store called Fat Beats. Walking up a narrow flight of stairs, we could hear the characteristic scratch, beat, and pulse of the hip-hop music. Fat Beats is not a place to bring people who fear for the future of American English. The record labels don't merely cel­ebrate nonstandard English, they exult in misuse and misspelling, as if it's cool to show that you have learned nothing at school. Some might see this as a cult of illiteracy.

144    *   do you speak american?

Flipping through the record stacks, we found MCs and hip-hop crews with names like Mobb Deep, Ludacris, Rah Digga, Geto Boys, Outkast, and, of course, Snoop Dogg. The titles of their tracks include "So Now UA Me?," "Enta da Stage," "What U Waitin'," "Who You Wit," "Paid tha Cost to Be da Bo$$," and "Baby aka da #1 Stunna."

This kind of talk is not confined to inner-city ghettos. A whole gen­eration of young, white, and suburban American males is in thrall to the macho swagger of black rappers and MCs. There is even a word to describe them: wiggers (for white niggers). That word made many wince when it first surfaced in the 1980s. Since 2001, wigger has made it into the New Oxford American Dictionary.

It was striking how many of the customers were middle-class white teenage boys out to add to their collection of hip-hop and rap music. We listened to these teenagers talking, as they flipped through the once-obsolete vinyl LPs the genre has made essential again. The following is a sample culled from fifteen minutes of conversation between two young men aged about eighteen in June 2003. Caps reversed and baggy pants slung low on their hips, they began by talking about the music.

"The beat is hot. The beat is like shit. And the ladies love it, man."

"What about P. Diddy?"

"Oh yes, he's the man. He's such an ill rapper. . . . Death Jerks, yes, when I was really into underground, I did see him live. He's ill. His freestyle is mad. . . . They had mad beef, there was mad beef between them. . . . When they first, like, both came out of it, it was like they were both like very raw sort. He was half something ill or half—whatever."

Still flipping through the record stacks, they went on to talk about the young women they were meeting at parties.

"Were there bitches at the party?"

"Yeah, there were a couple."

"For real?"

"Sure, man. There Ve been more ho's recently. I've noticed at under­ground events. Thank goodness for us, man."

Bad-mouthing Black English   *     145

Hip-hop and rap have given new currency to words like whore (ho) and bitch. Cecilia Cutler is a linguist who has studied the appeal of hip-hop for "white male teenagers who are in the process of forming their identities as young men." She believes that the kind of masculinity por­trayed is especially appealing: "The urban black male represents some­one who knows how to pick up women, who knows how to handle himself on the street, who perhaps knows how to handle a weapon and can take care of himself, and so for the white suburban male these kinds of symbols, this kind of way of walking or talking or dressing, can give one the trappings of a masculinity that doesn't perhaps exist in the safe white suburbs."

Does it appeal to adolescent boys because it comes at a time when a young male is most insecure about his own masculinity? "And the fear of women itself," Cutier said, "where, you know, in rap music there is quite a bit of misogynistic rhyming going on amongst some of the

hard-core. That may appeal to young men who are sort of afraid of

> women or young women and are in the process of trying to figure out

how it is that one deals with them."

To call them bitches and ho's is a way of getting rid of the problem?

Cutler: "Or putting away one's fear of those individuals."

Whatever the psychological motivation, the craze has shoveled a lot of urban black street talk into Mainstream American. Cecilia Cutler gives some examples: "Well, everybody has heard of She got game or He got game, to mean someone who can play basketball effectively. We have terms like mad as a quantifier, so you can say, It's mad real, or It's mad raining. There are terms like It's my bad, to mean, Oh, I just made a mis­take, or more colorful bling bling, to refer to expensive, gaudy jewelry, but can be applied to any other kind of noun. You could say, Wassup? to ask how somebody is, or the term phat, which has very positive con­notations."

Just after that conversation, we heard a golf commentator on televi-

146    *   do you speak american?

sion saying, "That's my bad," about a mistake he had made. We were told of a young African American woman who asked in a jewelry store, "You got any bling bling for my grid?"—meaning a jewel she could attach to her teeth.

These things move so quickly though the culture that, by November 2003, William Safire noted that bling bling for a glitzy look in clothing had already moved into the fashion trade and out again, as had the term ghetto fabulous. Both were now history, because the fashion trend toward ostentation had passed. BG, a rap artist with the group Cash Money Millionaires, apparently coined bling bling in the late 1990s. According to Safire, he told MTV News, "But I knew it was serious when I was amazed to see the two words written in diamonds on the NBA champi­onship ring for the Los Angeles Lakers."

The influence of Black English and hip-hop expressions is obvious in another novelty that is driving language change, IM-ing or Instant Messaging. We watched and listened to two fourteen-year-olds, Tom Keller and Kate Stoeckle, IM-ing in a cybercafe in midtown Manhat­tan, rapidly typing, as they do hours a day after school. Besides the fun of using as many abbreviations as possible—LOL for "laugh out loud," OMG for "Oh my God!" and G2G for "got to go," their IM-ing language is full of words like Wassup or Sup for "What's up with you?"; Ima for "I'm going"; and Just chillin', dis weekend, I'm doin', You betta call me, Call on ma cell—phonetic spellings of pronunciations that resemble Black English. It is certainly possible that, just as hip-hop is influencing the way we speak, IM-ing and e-mailing are beginning to alter die way we write.

Baz Dreisinger, who teaches at Queens College, New York, speaks of "a new racial frontier that shaped American culture and especially American music—the frontier that optimists call racial hybridity and pessimists call cultural theft."

How far it is shaping American language remains to be seen. In his

Bad-mouthing Black English   *    147

book Doing Our Own Thing, John McWhorter of Stanford University writes of Black English, "Ebonics has a symbolic meaning to blacks and to the increasing number of non-blacks who incorporate it into their verbal tool kit these days. That meaning is down with the people, real: Black English is today the language of protest par excellence—lan­guage from below."

But McWhorter worries that it is moving us further from the norms of written language: "As wonderful as this evidence is that we are truly getting past race, it also means that increasing numbers of Americans are taking as a badge of authenticity a speech style that, with all of its marvels, is very much a spoken one. Ebonics is increasingly a lingua franca among Latino and some Asian teens as well as black ones, for ex­ample. More and more we associate genuineness, honesty, and warmth with a kind of English that falls further from the written pole than white-bread spoken English does."

The interesting paradox remains for the nation^ African Americans have made huge strides in this society, climbing to the top in every pro­fession, and at the level of popular culture, creating a revolution. Yet for millions of black Americans the language that is so much the expres­sion of that revolution still works to block access to the American Dream.

That is not true for one group that is leading a remarkable turn­around. Millions of black Americans are leaving the North to move back to the South their parents and grandparents fled. Warmer climate, better race relations, and rising prosperity in the region are magnets, but so is a sense of coming "home," and of a stronger black social sol­idarity. This reverse migration began in the 1970s but accelerated in the next two decades. The black population of the South grew by 1.9 mil­lion people between 1970 and 1980, by 1.7 million in the 1980s, and by 3.5 million in the 1990s—in total, already more than left the South from 1914 to 1970. Many of these migrants are well educated and

148    *   do you speak american?

skilled: 30 percent professionals and managers, 19 percent with college degrees. Most of them have settled in middle-class black suburbs around big cities—Atlanta and Orlando the most popular. This phe­nomenon is so recent that linguists don't know how it will affect Black English—or white English in the South.

Bad-mouthing Black English   *    149