Ebonics and Educational Policy: Some Issues for the Next Millennium

Abstract

The recent debate over the Oakland (California) public schools' Ebonics proposal attracted considerable national attention, yet the ethnically identifiable language of African Americansand what to do about it-has long been the subject of controversy. This article discusses historical and contemporary issues surrounding this debate and suggests lessons to be learned from it. Chief among the former is whether teachers should negate Ebonics or use it as a bridge for teaching Standard English. Chief among the latter is the need for schools to identify strategies for teaching Standard to Ebonics speakers that validate these students' language and culture. INTRODUCTION The national debate during late 1996 and early 1997 on the subject of Ebonics-a learned variety of spoken by many, though by no means all, African Americans-has served to re-open the national conversation on the nature of as spoken by many African American children and the role of schools in addressing this issue. All too often, this conversation has been clouded by emotional, ill-informed rhetoric. However, three facts should undergird all discussions on the language of African American children: (a) many African American children speak a variety of American that differs from Standard English; (b) some African American children are bidialectal-that is, they speak more than one dialect of (e.g., Ebonics and Standard English); and (c) many African American children are not proficient enough in Standard to facilitate academic success and career mobility. The controversy over the legitimacy of the language systems that many African Americans use is not new, nor is the question of how the educational community is to contend with the issues this controversy raises. Though many educators remember the Black English debates of the 1960s, the language systems of people of African descent have been a source of debate and controversy since the first contact between European and African people. To suggest that the problem is rooted in ethnocentrism and in the relegation of people of African heritage to second-class status in the United States is not a stretch in logic. Indeed, it is the case around the world that the status of a group's language within the larger society is often tied to the group's social status. Further, it is often the case that some members of lower-status groups elevate the status of the dominant group's language while devaluing that of their own group's language. This is especially true for those members of lower-status groups who have managed to assimilate into the dominant group. At the same time, some members of lower-status groups work assiduously to retain their language, either as an act of defiance or as an effort to preserve the continuity of their culture. These and other social forces are at work in the current Ebonics debate. THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT As stated earlier, the debate surrounding the legitimacy of the language systems utilized by Americans of African descent is not new. The diaries of European seamen and others from the era of early African explorations contain unflattering references to the languages spoken by the African people they encountered (Rickford, 1987). Judging by similar accounts from the era of slavery through that of the minstrel shows of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the dominant popular culture marginalized African American language systems, representing them as divergent from normal and even legitimate human communication. African American speech was often caricatured as buffoonery, child-like, and ignorant. This stereotype has continued throughout the 20th century in film, radio, and television (Bogle, 1973), although in more recent years, the vernacular language systems of African Americans (including slang) have been glamorized in the popular culture. In the early 20th century, some members of the academic community suggested that African American speech patterns resulted from linguistic deficiencies. …