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Jul. 19th, 2005 11:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
taratemimaA community leader and scholar weighed in on the Oakland resolution when she heard that I was working on this special issue on Black Language/Ebonics. Without strong feelings, in a calm, centered manner, she recalled how her deceased father, a Black college president, in the evenings would read to her the dialect poetry of Paul Lawrence Dunbar, commenting on its beauty. She went on to note that in her community and family, it was expected that you would have fluency in and see the beauty, power, and possibilities in the formal and informal registers of Black Language (the language of the blues, the narrative of Frederick Douglass, the poetry of Langston Hughes, the sermons of James Weldon Johnson and Howard Thurman). It was also expected that you would have fluency in the so-called white Standard English. from this article
There are some posts I am glad I missed.
Because I would not be able to decide whether to quote linguists' work on African-American Vernacular English, or beat them with it.
Black and white people seem to think it's real funny to 'speak in jive' when the subject is discussed (and forget that much of Standard American English was made up of what used to be 'slang'). Let's set aside race for a minute. Yeah, I know, that's wacky, but let's. Let's set aside 'language' vs. 'dialect'--the joke goes that a language is a dialect with an army and navy, at any rate.
If someone said that the way I speak, my family speak, and my friends speak, is wrong, awful, broken, uneducated, and worthy of ridicule, without knowing a thing about the history or rules behind it, or that it can be used in so many ways, well, I won't be so hot to learn how they speak. Not even if the person saying this looked like me, dressed like me, listened to the same music as me.
It's one thing to speak differently in different settings. People do it all the time. It's another to say if I am to be noticed, to be successful, it's not enough to speak the language of power, I am to ostracize family and friends for not doing so. I'd have to pretend I never spoke it in the first place, that I was never a minority. What good is learning another tongue if all you are going to do is lie with it?
I'd tell them to fuck off too, in the language my family and friends speak. No, you want me to learn your language? Words aren't just to grease my way into 'society.' Show me how it can move, inspire, engage, and howl against injustice. Connect it with the multiple registers of my language. Above all, communicate with me. Otherwise, I will just use my way of communication to block you out. 'Covert prestige' is just a fancy word for 'just between us.'
That level of empathy is missing in discussing how to teach SAE, not just to English speakers who don't speak it, but to immigrants and people with limited language skills. I really don't think speakers of other languages, (Spanish, maybe Yiddish, aside), get this kind of abuse that speakers of AAVE get. A speaker of French, Vietnamese, Ibo, or Arabic will be seen as an intelligent person, even if the speaker has great difficulty learning English, and will gain respect when they do.
Oh, and a good article from the last time a shit storm was raised over AAVE. Oh, and James Baldwin gives his two cents.
Nanny, hip Williamsburg aspiring grad student she is, has a blog. Nanny's boss wants to be her friend, not just her boss, and convinces Nanny to give URL for blog. Yes, we know, Boss doesn't need to know your Internet life, but I think that Boss made like she was cool and unshockable.
Boss finds out that Nanny is bisexual, talks about her dating life and fantasies, write prose poems vaguely based on Boss and husband's fights she overhears (Boss says it, not Nanny) and Sylvia Plath, and occasionally drinks. For unrelated reasons (like Nanny getting annoyed that she has to take care of sick Boss as well as sick kids), Nanny is fired. Boss writes article about Nanny, how much she wishes she was still young and wild, how Nanny makes her feel old, omitting some details, adding a few more:
OUR former nanny, a 26-year-old former teacher with excellent references, liked to touch her breasts while reading The New Yorker and often woke her lovers in the night by biting them. She took sleeping pills, joked about offbeat erotic fantasies involving Tucker Carlson and determined she'd had more female sexual partners than her boyfriend.
How do I know these things? I read her blog.
Nanny fires back on . . .her blog.
Many deep thoughts in blogtopia center around class, older women jealousy, squeamishness over women handling children having lives and sex to boot, the sucktasticness of the New York Times, and such.
Me? I know some married women with children who could out-kink Nanny. I wonder if Boss would like to be introduced to them.
I found out things, paid the rent and got the keys. Maybe I should have waited until August to move in since I will be short of money now, but I guess I figured that I should move in as quickly as possible. Besides, with Mom asking how I will be able to afford food and not understanding the idea of buying in bulk and splitting it, I think that was the right thing, whatever discomfort I feel now.
At least I solved some things. Now I will need to transport others.
There are some posts I am glad I missed.
Because I would not be able to decide whether to quote linguists' work on African-American Vernacular English, or beat them with it.
Black and white people seem to think it's real funny to 'speak in jive' when the subject is discussed (and forget that much of Standard American English was made up of what used to be 'slang'). Let's set aside race for a minute. Yeah, I know, that's wacky, but let's. Let's set aside 'language' vs. 'dialect'--the joke goes that a language is a dialect with an army and navy, at any rate.
If someone said that the way I speak, my family speak, and my friends speak, is wrong, awful, broken, uneducated, and worthy of ridicule, without knowing a thing about the history or rules behind it, or that it can be used in so many ways, well, I won't be so hot to learn how they speak. Not even if the person saying this looked like me, dressed like me, listened to the same music as me.
It's one thing to speak differently in different settings. People do it all the time. It's another to say if I am to be noticed, to be successful, it's not enough to speak the language of power, I am to ostracize family and friends for not doing so. I'd have to pretend I never spoke it in the first place, that I was never a minority. What good is learning another tongue if all you are going to do is lie with it?
I'd tell them to fuck off too, in the language my family and friends speak. No, you want me to learn your language? Words aren't just to grease my way into 'society.' Show me how it can move, inspire, engage, and howl against injustice. Connect it with the multiple registers of my language. Above all, communicate with me. Otherwise, I will just use my way of communication to block you out. 'Covert prestige' is just a fancy word for 'just between us.'
That level of empathy is missing in discussing how to teach SAE, not just to English speakers who don't speak it, but to immigrants and people with limited language skills. I really don't think speakers of other languages, (Spanish, maybe Yiddish, aside), get this kind of abuse that speakers of AAVE get. A speaker of French, Vietnamese, Ibo, or Arabic will be seen as an intelligent person, even if the speaker has great difficulty learning English, and will gain respect when they do.
Oh, and a good article from the last time a shit storm was raised over AAVE. Oh, and James Baldwin gives his two cents.
Nanny, hip Williamsburg aspiring grad student she is, has a blog. Nanny's boss wants to be her friend, not just her boss, and convinces Nanny to give URL for blog. Yes, we know, Boss doesn't need to know your Internet life, but I think that Boss made like she was cool and unshockable.
Boss finds out that Nanny is bisexual, talks about her dating life and fantasies, write prose poems vaguely based on Boss and husband's fights she overhears (Boss says it, not Nanny) and Sylvia Plath, and occasionally drinks. For unrelated reasons (like Nanny getting annoyed that she has to take care of sick Boss as well as sick kids), Nanny is fired. Boss writes article about Nanny, how much she wishes she was still young and wild, how Nanny makes her feel old, omitting some details, adding a few more:
OUR former nanny, a 26-year-old former teacher with excellent references, liked to touch her breasts while reading The New Yorker and often woke her lovers in the night by biting them. She took sleeping pills, joked about offbeat erotic fantasies involving Tucker Carlson and determined she'd had more female sexual partners than her boyfriend.
How do I know these things? I read her blog.
Nanny fires back on . . .her blog.
Many deep thoughts in blogtopia center around class, older women jealousy, squeamishness over women handling children having lives and sex to boot, the sucktasticness of the New York Times, and such.
Me? I know some married women with children who could out-kink Nanny. I wonder if Boss would like to be introduced to them.
I found out things, paid the rent and got the keys. Maybe I should have waited until August to move in since I will be short of money now, but I guess I figured that I should move in as quickly as possible. Besides, with Mom asking how I will be able to afford food and not understanding the idea of buying in bulk and splitting it, I think that was the right thing, whatever discomfort I feel now.
At least I solved some things. Now I will need to transport others.
