472
PARTISAN REVIEW
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 Sp eak,
though. One of
them considers the outcry "one of the most hysterical and utterly mis–
informed 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 lan–
guage 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 for–
bidden, students demeaned.
It
is easy to mock this volume as another broadside from the educa–
tion establishment bearing the customary flaws. The arguments, such as
they are, rely on selective anecdote and tendentious description. Con–
tributors 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 Eng–
lish, "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
Opl11lOn.
But apart from the polemical drawbacks, the essays do outline
changes in the classroom that mark reasonable steps to improving the
