JAC Volume 21 Issue 3

As I write, with an autographed first edition at my side, I congratulate the editors of Oxford University Press for asking John Baugh to write the book on the Ebonics controversy that became Beyond Ebonics: Linguistic Pride and Racial Prejudice. Baugh brings his considerable and distinguished expertise in black English linguistics to his analysis of the Oakland uproar, and, as a proud descendant of African slaves in America, he also brings the authority and insight of his personal experience. The highly charged topic of Ebonics and black English has plenty of hot buttons that, for most people, are better left untouched. Baugh's candid, personal, yet academic approach to the topic, in which he exposes the hot buttons and keeps the important issues alive, is thus most appropriate and welcome.

In nine chapters, Baugh takes a close look at the Oakland Resolution on Ebonics—its precedents and sequents, the origin and evolution of the term "Ebonics," the confusing use of the term in the Oakland Resolution, the negative political fallout to and legal implications of the resolution, and the racist and satirical media reactions to it, including a sample of the sometimes biting political cartoons responding to the resolution. The three appendices include the Linguistic Society of America's resolution on the Oakland Ebonics issue and legislative documents from California and Texas. The book as a whole brings understanding of the length and breadth of the issues surrounding Ebonics and is a veritable breadbasket of research and paper topics for an elective course on black English.

In a chapter on linguistic pride, Baugh reveals his own struggles as a youth not to appear "lame" to his "black street speech" speaking peers while acceding to the demands of his educated parents (both holding doctorates, one learns in Black Street Speech, also by Baugh) to speak "proper" standard English: "I felt as though I were trapped in a cultural vise consisting of two opposing linguistic barriers with each side offering situationally dependent rewards or sanctions"—the same "cultural vise" of the worlds of black English and standard English that grips so many African American youth. He also confesses his youthful linguistic pride and consequential prejudice against Hispanic-accented peers. His own early attitudes and struggles become symbolic of prejudicial linguistic attitudes across the nation and of the struggles of many black youth in the educational system. Baugh's personal development becomes a symbol of hope, not only for black English speakers but for speakers of other nonstandard varieties of English—or, as I am inclined to put it, other minority Englishes, or minority varieties of English, as well (with emphasis on the variety of English being a minority variety, so as to include, for example, Appalachian English).

On its highest plane, this book is infused with Baugh's lofty personal hopes for our society (a hope echoed in the foreword by Dell Hymes as "the true promise of America"). Today, most people can't even imagine black English as a potentially powerful catalyst in the "national quest for racial reconciliation," yet this idea is the passion that motivates Baugh's book. In fact, Baugh warns that unless we "redress the linguistic legacy of American slavery within the context of providing equal educational opportunity to all children, we will never be able to fully overcome our long history of race-based inequality." Fittingly, then, the book ends with a discussion about moving "beyond Ebonics" and toward linguistic tolerance. While many other factors admittedly play into questions of quality education and reconciliation, Baugh implies that language lies at the heart of the hope for change. The book needs to be read for this important and little understood perspective.

Much of the book grapples with definitions—of Ebonics, dialect, and language—and the problems that Baugh believes the term Ebonics has caused in the public, political, scholarly, and educational arenas. He points out that Ebonics—a blend of "ebony" and "phonics"—was coined in 1973 by Robert Williams to mean "the linguistic and paralinguistic features which on a concentric continuum represent the communicative competence of the West African, Caribbean, and United States slave descendant of African origin." Some interpreters of the term, like those in Oakland, shifted it to "a narrower domestic interpretation," and Blackshire-Belay extended it to a Pan-African meaning beyond its slave origins to include "all languages of African people on the continent and in the Diaspora." Thus, the term "Ebonics" has been used with a spectrum of meanings, sometimes referring to an international multiplicity of languages and sometimes to a single dialect sometimes called a language. Since Oakland and the media equated Ebonics with black English, Baugh believes "it would have been far more accurate for scholars, Oakland educators, and journalists to refer to (North?) American Ebonics." This is a point well taken and was why I titled my recent College English article, "Liberating American Ebonics from Euro-English" (January 2001).

Baugh is highly sympathetic with the intent of the Oakland Resolution, regarding it as "visionary," but he regrets the use of the term "Ebonics" to mean a language in its own right, one different from English and with African linguistic roots. For Baugh, this usage was in error and was ultimately the resolution's downfall. But it seems that part of Oakland's struggle, apart from its struggle for definition, was to give American black speech a name. The term Ebonics seemed a natural metonymy; even the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) made the same equation, to Baugh's dismay, in a resolution that he otherwise supports and that gives full support to the Oakland School Board's decision "to recognize the vernacular of African American students in teaching them Standard English." In its resolution, the LSA abbreviated the same litany of terms that is so common in linguistic articles for the variety known as "Ebonics," including "African American Vernacular English," "Vernacular Black English," "Black English Vernacular," "Black English," "Black Talk," "Spoken Soul," "African American English," and "Afro-American English"—a litany evidencing the general problem of terminology that Oakland may have been trying to resolve as it attempted to make a public pedagogical proposal. The question of whether black speech deserves its own name is significant in the discussion raised by Baugh.

Baugh reiterates the idea published in his Black Street Speech (an idea held universally among linguists) that black English is rule-governed, has its own grammar, and, of all widespread American dialects of English (omitting consideration of Gullah), is the most distant from standard English. For Baugh, however, the American descendants of African slaves speak English, albeit a dialect of it, not a different language that would merit funding under Title VII. This is not an argument against funding; it is an argument against the rubric under which funding would be justified. Oakland's emphasis on Ebonics as "a language" punched a major hot button.

Baugh spends a chapter analyzing the range of supporters and especially detractors of Oakland's resolution, with detractors being the most numerous, including major African American figures such as Maya Angelou, Bill Cosby, and Kweisi Mfume—detractors that cut across political, social, and racial lines. Many African Americans are insulted by the idea that Ebonics is supposed to be something other than English; many assert that "teaching Ebonics to children, of any background, is a retrograde step in American education" and is racially divisive. Some people suspect that Ebonics is an attempt to siphon money away from existing bilingual education programs. Some whites and even foreigners are concerned that Ebonics is another attempt to give special treatment to blacks. In fact, Baugh examines the strong federal reaction to the idea that black English is a language and suggests that this different-language tack lost the argument for funding in a very necessary cause. When Secretary of Education Richard Riley said that "elevating Black English to the status of a language is not the way to raise standards of achievement in our schools and for our students," he "dashed the hope that Oakland's resolution would ever be honored or viewed as educationally visionary."

The strong reaction to the Oakland resolution raises the question that constitutes "the very essence of the Ebonics controversy," a question raised—sometimes in heated anger, I may add from experience—especially by those many non-black Americans who are "the direct beneficiaries of their forebears' sacrifice and hard work in the face of [ethnic] discrimination" and who often know from family experience that African Americans do not have a monopoly on nonstandard English: "Why should we assume that black students who speak nonstandard English are any different from other immigrants who speak nonstandard English?" That is, "Are African Americans linguistically similar or dissimilar to other immigrants who came to the United States speaking languages other than English?" Baugh's contribution on this question is invaluable. He writes that "As we now know, the linguistic history of American slave descendants is unique and not truly comparable to any other voluntary group of immigrants."

An entire chapter is devoted to examining the Oakland Ebonics resolution and the changes it underwent to meet public and political pressure. The resolution was an outgrowth of California's Standard English Proficiency (SEP) program for Limited English Proficient (LEP) students and a departure from it. Baugh believes that the creators of the Oakland Resolution would have been more successful if they had stayed within the SEP framework because it "lifts all boats," not just the black English one. But the Resolution's creators took their cues from those who advocated the Ebonics-is-a-different-language approach and for whom, quoting Ernie Smith, the term "Ebonics" is not a "mere synonym" for "Black English" but is in fact "an antonym for Black English." Baugh's response is strong: "It is on this point that most linguists strongly disagree. . . . Any suggestion that American slave descendents speak a language other than English is overstated, linguistically uninformed, and—frankly—wrong." Baugh welcomed the Oakland Resolution's eventual concession that Ebonics is "not merely a dialect of English," thus acknowledging that Ebonics is a dialect of English and placing it "within the English speech community." These words need further discussion.

Definitions are all important. I want to bring to the discussion the idea that viewing black English as something more than and quite different from a "mere dialect" will strengthen Baugh's argument for the need to confront the linguistic legacy of slavery in America and make more attainable his dual goal of racial reconciliation and quality education for those who speak black English and other minority varieties of English. I will also suggest that, as a matter of equally valid linguistic perspectives, the dialect and different language views of black English can be held simultaneously. There is room to give on both sides and ground to take together.

Baugh's belief is based on the criterion of mutual intelligibility, the most widely used linguistic criterion for inclusion in a language. But it is easy to imagine, hypothetically, two languages with identical or highly overlapping vocabulary and very different, even opposing grammars. We can even imagine the overlapping vocabularies of these languages having overlapping but not identical meanings, sometimes very different meanings, and different usage. These languages might be mutually intelligible to a large degree but nevertheless may be classified as different languages or different language types from the point of view of grammatical typology—grammatical typology being another, completely different method for classifying languages. The question is to what extent black English fits this scenario. In fact, this raises the question of the extent to which any of the "Ebonic" languages, in the wider original sense of Ebonics, fit this scenario.

Baugh's conclusion is also apparently based on the usual view that dialects differ in "low level rules" and that black English and standard English differ in this way. For example, Bostonian r-lessness can be thought of as a low-level difference, whereby it differs from standard English by simple removal of the r-sound in certain definable locations in words. To what extent do such low-level differences characterize the differences between black English and standard English? Developments in theoretical linguistics confirm what simply had to be true: that those pesky little linguistic particles like tenses, possessives, and clause markers like that and if—apparently minor elements—are actually the governors of syntax, and their presence or absence is part of the mix that places languages typologically in the same or different camps from another. Such typological considerations led me to conclude in "Liberating American Ebonics from Euro-English" that black English could be considered a different language, or a different type of language, from standard English, while, from the perspective of mutual intelligibility, it could also be considered a dialect. (It should be noted that Ralph Fasold, one of the pioneer researchers on black English and author of Tense Marking in Black English: A Linguistic and Social Analysis, recently wrote an article entitled "Ebonics Need Not Be English," an article stored in ERIC.)

It is this perspective of high-level, typological disparity between black English and standard English that finally explained to me why standard English is so problematic for so many African American students. Even though I had had a linguist's sophisticated view of black English as a dialect among equals, this typological perspective revolutionized my relationship with my African American composition students—and Ebonics-speaking people as a whole. The two languages seem so similar but, in my new perspective, are very different in central respects at the heart of their organizational principles. I submit that so long as this duality is not grasped, by both student and teacher, psychological and pedagogical confusion will likely continue to reign. As I see it, and as a thirty-five or more year history of efforts affirms, so long as this duality is not grasped, the ability to promote legal and educational reform and the very need to confront the linguistic legacy of slavery is made all that much more difficult. This new dual understanding of black English, I believe, has the potential to overcome the inertia that prevents true educational reform and true understanding of the lingering linguistic consequences of American slavery.

There is a sense, then, in my view, in which black English speakers are bilingual and a sense in which they are not. This is different from the usual way of thinking about languages and requires different terminology. It is accurate, in this view, to say that black English speakers are "bi-English." This allows students the freedom to say they speak a real language, another language, and to conclude that they are bilingual while at the same time being able to acknowledge that what they speak is a kind of English. They speak another kind of English, typologically speaking, not just a dialect with only low-level language differences. Such understanding may have more power socially and politically because, for most people, the term "dialect" denotes a lesser variety parasitic on and subservient to a standard—not a scientifically equal but a different variety. This bi-English way of viewing black English mirrors historical and social reality and satisfies not only the intuitions of those who maintain that black English is a dialect, but the intuitions of those who maintain that black English is a language, and even the intuitions of those who maintain that black English has a non-European mix in its roots: the typological differences are most likely either from Africa or from the universal language creation process that was tapped for the establishment of a community-based African American linguistic communication system among slaves and their descendents. Some features may be from or affirmed by maritime or indentured servant varieties of English that may themselves be historically very divergent from the standard.

The dual view of black English also supports the idea that black English deserves a name of its own—one that does not make racial reference, one that does not automatically make it merely a dialect, one that captures an element of its history and ethnicity, and one that is espoused in common by the African American scholarly community. This is one of the near virtues of the term Ebonics, rightly qualified to reflect its American limitation; but the term is perhaps too controversial with too complicated a history of definition. Perhaps a fresh name (with some success, I have tried out in class the name "Afram," or "AfrAm," based on the name of an African American festival a few years ago in Newport Beach, VA) could be proposed at a unifying conference on the topic—although, along with it, the descriptive term black English will probably always be with us.

Baugh's book, touching on still other important issues related to black English (such as Afrocentrism, school choice, segregated schools, Afrocentric schools, standardized testing, and affirmative action) raises all the right issues for our times and, more than all else, raises our sights to the grand possibilities that right understanding can achieve for African American youth, other minority-speaking groups, and our nation.