The Languages of the Classroom

The Skin That We Speak: Thoughts on Language and Culture in the Classroom. Edited by Lisa Delpit and Joanne Kilgour Dowdy. The New Press. $24.95.

Most people remember the Ebonics affair as one of the more ludicrous episodes of PC revisionism. In December 1996, the Oakland School Board issued a new curricular policy, officially recognizing "West and Niger-Congo African Language Systems [Ebonics], and each language as the predominantly primary language of African-American students." Teachers were asked to "immediately devise and implement the best possible academic program for imparting instruction to African-American students in their primary language." The response was instantaneous. Op-eds around the country ridiculed the proposal as a crazed specimen of identity politics. Jesse Jackson and Maya Angelou deplored it, and the Clinton administration promised to withhold federal funding. Ebonics jokes were heard on talk shows, and images of teachers lecturing in jive clogged fax machines. Commentators treated it as sensitivity gone wild, liberal guilt in the elementary school, a pathetic or cynical effort to explain away the poor performance of African-American students.

Not the contributors to The Skin That We Speak, though. One of them considers the outcry "one of the most hysterical and utterly misinformed social debates in the history of American education." Another says that "by not recognizing Ebonics, we keep white children trapped in myopic visions of world realities." The New Press news release calls the volume an "honest dialogue," but the entries speak with a unified voice, and every contributor believes the same thing: African-American students are plagued by a cultural norm called Standard English (SE). They leave their Ebonics-speaking homes and enter a classroom that labels their language ignorant, comical, deficient. Because "our language has always been a part of our very souls," they too suffer the stigma. On the playground, they shout freely and joyously. Under the teacher’s eye, they shrink and stutter, ashamed of their speech.

To learn SE, they must renounce their upbringing, their families, indeed, their racial identity, for this isn’t just an encounter of dialects, the contributors argue. It is a clash of cultures, an unequal one in which "African-American children are nothing more than incomplete copies of Western European white children." In social life, black culture carves out an uneasy space, celebrated in mass culture and feared in politics, though excluded from the professions. In the classroom, white culture reigns. The school is "one of the first settings in a person’s life when their [sic] language may be judged as right or wrong." Ebonics is forbidden, students demeaned.

It is easy to mock this volume as another broadside from the education establishment bearing the customary flaws. The arguments, such as they are, rely on selective anecdote and tendentious description. Contributors build a case on one student’s story, a scene in a classroom, and the behavior of their own children. They relate heated statements as patent truths: "The United States was created as a slave nation" and "It is probably true that all white people in the United States take in racism with their oatmeal." They turn ordinary slights of childhood into grave political traumas: a contributor remembers hitting a cricket ball over a fence and crying out to her Trinidadian friends in perfect Queen’s English, "Over there!" instead of "Ovuh dyuh!" As the other children fell to "giggling and snickering" at her propriety, she stood "frozen to the asphalt." Worst of all, the volume doesn’t include a single dissenting opinion.

But apart from the polemical drawbacks, the essays do outline changes in the classroom that mark reasonable steps to improving the disheartening record of African-American students. First, they require that teachers mute their disdain of Ebonics and black culture. Ebonics may be an inferior dialect of English (contributors vilify that notion), but communicating that to students won’t encourage them to practice SE. The cultural roots run too deep, and for every student who masters SE there are are a dozen who tune out, react in anger, and disappear. It is better, and eminently practicable, for teachers to respect the students’ home life and still impart SE. Second, contributors envision a different goal for language instruction. Instead of inculcating SE and suppressing Ebonics, educators should teach SE as an alternative language, appropriate for certain occasions, but not inherently superior. Ebonics for the street, SE for the interview. Students will acquire a verbal mobility, maintaining their native speech–and their self-respect–while slipping into SE when the situation requires. Rather than viewing Standard English vs. Ebonics as an all-or-nothing choice, students treat them as options, acting with a worldly irony and facility as flexible language users negotiating multiple social and political locales.

These are lucid, if debatable, pedagogical reforms. Unfortunately, though, readers of this book who don’t already share its outlook won’t agree with them–not because they reject the proposals outright, but because, strangely enough, the contributors violate them at every turn. They ask teachers to respect Ebonics so that students may learn SE without feeling like they compromise their heritage. And yet, references to SE simmer with resentment. Joanne Kilgour Dowdy calls it "the language that was used to enslave you and your forebears"; Joan Wynne says it "was used to bludgeon others into submission and feelings of inferiority." Standard English appears in quotation marks–a sneer at its putative authority. Contributors take pleasure in imagining canny fourteen-year-olds "rappin’" with friends and playing to white people with crisp pronunciation and subject-verb agreement. Meanwhile, Ebonics is hailed as an inventive, beautiful expression. Asa G. Hilliard III affirms, "Africans and African-Americans are a race of gifted speakers," while Dowdy terms Ebonics "flowers that had been dormant in the arid land of the desert of master discourse." This isn’t value-free equivalence of Ebonics and Standard English. It is a tactical concession to a dominant and pernicious language.

Furthermore, the contributors want to form pupils as lightsome, adroit speakers, "bicultural and facile," able to shift verbally from one situation to the next. And yet, the contributors themselves are inflexible and rancorous in their language and ethos. The persona they project is righteous and accusatory. Herbert Kohl observes, "It is probably true that all non-African-Americans are racist in some way." Geneva Smitherman wails at "the linguistic imperialism of the few," while Wynne wants white children to "look at their own ancestors and history in a way that might help them recognize their collective responsibility for injustices, as well as their collective potential for redemption." With such a firm grasp of the moral high ground, the contributors believe that the rhetorical play they propose for students and teachers doesn’t apply to them. Hilliard reveals how seriously they take themselves: "We are faced with nothing less than the need to re-educate our nation to the truth about language. The public in general is not equipped to understand the language issues."

Perhaps the contributors anoint themselves the nation’s race reformers because, they feel, the rest of the culture denigrates African-American experience and history. But that puts teachers in a strange role of educating students against the society they occupy. Shuaib Meacham says, "Mainstream common sense, like the teaching profession, is meant to perpetuate the well-being of the culture in power." If that is the case, one wonders what task the teacher fulfills. Lisa Delpit insists, "Just as Maya’s [her daughter’s] new friends made her feel beautiful, brilliant, and ‘part of the club,’ teachers have to create similar conditions for their students." Judith Baker wants to give students "control over the choices they make: to learn, or not learn, the languages associated with cultures in which they may decide to participate." In both cases, teachers abdicate intellectual authority.

This is a conception of teaching so leery of value judgments directed at the disenfranchised that it slights basic standards of knowledge. In the most extreme case in the book, the only one concerning non-African-American (Appalachian) students, Victoria Purcell-Gates cites a student named Donny, whose parents and siblings couldn’t read. In fact, "they did not understand that print existed as a meaningful semiotic system." But Purcell-Gates refuses to consider this a deficiency. It is merely a "cultural difference," and family members still "lived full and interesting lives without it [literacy]." Indeed, to interpret illiteracy as a deficit is to exceed our humanity: "when we do this, we play God."

Compare the words of Frederick Douglass, who recalls as a child overhearing his master instruct his wife not to teach him to read. "These words sank deep into my heart, stirred up sentiments within that lay slumbering, and called into existence an entirely new train of thought," he writes in his Narrative. "I now understood what had been to me a most perplexing difficulty–to wit, the white man’s power to enslave the black man." Identifying slavery with illiteracy, Douglass vows, "I set out with high hope, and a fixed purpose, at whatever cost of trouble, to learn how to read." But Purcell-Gates doesn’t need so distant an assertion of the deficiency of illiteracy. Donny’s mother acknowledges it: "I don’t want what happened to us to happen to my son," she implores. "It’s hard not knowing how to read! I know!"

Such scenes explain why teachers have so little credibility in the public sphere. There is no doubt that the contributors to this volume are earnest, conscientious educators, but when a principle of cultural difference levels all values and trumps intellectual judgment, when teachers themselves bear the resentments that learning strives to overcome, the enterprise stumbles. Controversies like the Ebonics affair erupt, and the public demands an accounting. What this volume shows is that instead of listening to the criticism, the education establishment has hardened its position, set its virtue against the racism and apathy of U.S. society, and so entangled academic subjects with identity politics that one rues the fate of culture in the nation’s schools.

Mark Bauerlein