Addressing Ideologies Around African American English

Abstract

In 1998, in the wake of the Oakland Unified School District Board Resolution on Ebonics, the Journal of English Linguistics published a special issue focused specifically on the Ebonics controversy. The contributors attempted to make sense of what had happened in the public debate around Ebonics, to clarify public misunderstandings, and to rearticulate the educational goals that underlay the Oakland Resolution. Now, seven years later, in the year when America is observing the fiftieth anniversary of Brown vs. Board, the 1954 Supreme Court decision that removed legal segregation in education, this special issue attempts to take stock of where studies of African American English stand and to envision some of the next steps. One of the many things that we learned after the Oakland Resolution was how vast the gap is between public knowledge about African American English (AAE) and linguistic research about the variety. It may be more appropriate, however, to say that we “relearned” this. As Geneva Smitherman pointed out in the 1998 special issue and elaborates in this issue, the public response in 1979 to what is often called the Ann Arbor Black English Case revealed many of the same public misunderstandings as those apparent in the late 1990s about the legitimacy of AAE as a dialect and about educational goals that involve fostering bidialectalism. We are currently at a moment when the public is not talking about AAE—questions about the variety’s legitimacy and its role in the educational system have, for the moment, disappeared from the public eye. At the same time, linguistic scholarship on this language variety continues to develop, public policy that affects the sta-