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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, appro–
priate 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 Eng–
lish 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 with–
out feeling like they compromise their heritage. And yet, references to
SE simmer with resentment. Joanne Kilgour Dowdy calls it "the lan–
guage 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 speak–
ers," 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
