Ebonics And African-American Vernacular English

Dr. Williams and a group of Black scholars first coined the terms Ebonics in 1973 when referring to the language spoken by African slaves and their descendants. Ebonics, which is derived from the word ebony, which means black, and phonetics, which means sound, was adopted as the new term for Black English and African-American Vernacular English. Mary Rhodes Hoover states, "Many who condemn Ebonics refer to it as "bad grammar," "lazy pronunciation," or "slang." However, linguist Dell Hymes notes that, viewed sociolinguistically, language is much more than characteristics such as grammar or pronunciation (phonology). In fact Ebonics/African-American Language has a number of other characteristics, including semantics, notation, favored genres,
Their grade point average was a D+," stated by Theresa Perry in her article "I ‘on know why they Be Trippin': Reflections on the Ebonics Debate". This painful reality called for action on December 18, 1997, the Oakland School Board passed a resolution to treat Ebonics as a second language. Many educated African-Americans were outraged by this decision. Jesse Jackson stated that the decision was "an unacceptable surrender border lining on disgrace." I cannot say that I disagree with Jackson because African-Americans have many opportunities available to learn to speak, read, and write Standard English. NAACP president Kweisi Mfume described the decision as "a cruel joke." A similar problem has surfaced in Mississippi were many students attending public school systems are considered illiterate by state educational standards. Despite the battle of determining whether Ebonics is a separate language or a dialect of the English language African-American children are being penalized for speaking
"The brutal truth is that the bulk of white people in America never had any interest in educating black people, except at this could serve white purposes," stated James Baldwin. Ebonics leaves a long trail of evidence of African-Americans present educational status may be a result of the struggle of their predecessors. Homi K. Bhabha explains that Ebonics is no difference between other dialects of English that have been formed by other non- African-American populations that have immigrated into America and the dialect spoken by African-Americans. "Reesle, the great-granddaughter of slaves; Pushpa T.S., the stepchild of the postcolonial state: What do they have in common? As their divergent "colonial histories- of American slavery and British imperialism- circumnavigate the globe in opposite directions, they meet on the margins of nonstandard "vernaculars" or hybriridized order of speech. These are twisted versions of the language of the master alienating the syntactical "eloquence" and intonational "elegance' through which "standard' English naturalizes itself as a national cultural norm" (Bhabha