By Major W. Cox
Recently, the slang spoken by inner-city African American children, sometimes referred to as "Black English," has garnered enormous media attention. This current interest in the subject stems from an action taken by the Oakland, California Board Of Education. The members of the Board voted to declare "Ebonics" (a contraction of ebony and phonics) the primary language of the inter-city African American children within the district. Therefore, these children should be taught standard English as a second language.
Many commentators and pundits have spoken or written on the subject in the weeks since. Most all have condemned Oakland’s action in harsh terms. Nevertheless, the sad reality for these children is that they are unable to speak standard English. The question society must answer is, why?
In search of an answer to this dilemma, one needs to look back in the nation’s history to the slave trade. History tells us that the first Dutch slave traders bringing slaves to America would collect their "cargo" from different locations. In so doing, they insured the slaves on ships traveling to America could not speak to each other. This provided the ship’s crew a measure of protection against being overthrown during the long journey to America. Once they landed at their destination, they found the purchasers of their peculiar cargo willing to pay a premium for a group of slaves who could not speak to each other.
As the demand for slaves increased, the muting of African languages in the United States continued. Slave traders found it more efficient to land in the Caribbean Islands, before coming to the United States. This allowed them to exchange and max their slave cargo with that of other traders in order to obtain a speechless language mix among the slaves being sold in the United States.
Once slaves reached their destination, the only communication allowed or possible was in the English language. Slave masters universally prohibited slaves from speaking any language other than English, yet it was unlawful for slaves to be taught to read or write. As a result, slaves developed a pidgin language, using the limited English taught by their masters as the basis of their vocabulary. Hence, if a slave wanted to express the concept of being wealthy or rich, he may have used these words: "I am eating high on the hog." Or if he wanted express a feeling of being safe and secure, he might have expressed this way: "I’m sleeping in tall cotton."
When slaves needed to communicate an idea, opinion or thought, which they had not learned an English word, they surely must have used words from their native African language. Mothers taught their children this African-English pidgin which slaves used to communicate among themselves. This was the language that slaves used to express their feelings of love to each other and hope for their children. This is the language slaves used to sing their songs and tell their stories. Slaves used their African-English pidgin language to teach survival strategy from one generation to the next. It became the language of slavery. When a slave escaped from the South to the North, it was the inability to speak proper English that frequently branded him an escape slave.
When slavery ended in 1865, most conditions of life for the millions of former slaves improved enormously. But a close look at the years following emancipation finds little improvement in opportunity or ability for former slaves to learn and use standard English. Jim Crow segregation laws in the South culturally isolated generations of descendants of former slaves, they spoke the only language they knew; the African-English pidgin learned from their slave ancestors. In the North, conditions were little better. There, generations of descendants of former slaves found themselves segregated into urban ghettos. In these poor slums, isolated from opportunities to learn and speak standard English, Black children continued to learn and speak the language of love and hope, the language of survival at the breasts of mothers who only spoke the African-English pidgin handed down from their slave ancestors.
American’s poor black children speaking "Ebonics" today, are speaking the language of a culturally isolated people. The solution to these children’s problem of not being able to speak standard English is simple! We need to embrace each as one of us. Instead of encouraging them to create their own language of cultural deprivation; teachers need to manifest enough dedication and devotion toward their students to teach them how to speak correct English without destroying their self-esteem.
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Originally Published: 15 January 1997, Montgomery Advertiser
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