I was once standing by a black woman and a white woman who worked together. A young man selling pirated DVD’s came up to the ladies, and to everyone’s surprise, spoke clear standard American English, despite his criminal activity and his Billy D. Williams with a time machine as Kid Rock appearance.
The white woman said, "My he was well-spoken.”
The black woman became angry, scolding her. She explained her twisted ghetto logic for believing that complimenting someone who came from a culture in which intentionally mutilated English was spoken as a form of dialectic underclass apartheid for becoming proficient with the language as spoken by the wealthy and powerful, was somehow racist.
A number of my black friends shake their heads at this notion of linguistic apartheid, and have asked me my opinion. This is what I said to the last person who complained to me about ‘ebonics’ becoming the American lingua franca, meaning that the most common word is the F-word, that all women are bitches, and that blacks are now overwhelmingly referring to themselves with the same demeaning Portuguese-English slur used to label 19th Century African-Americans slaves.
“Societies on the rise imitate the upper class. A hundred years ago when dirt poor Jews, Italians and Poles, come to this nation they made every effort to dress like the most successful Anglos, and made sure their children learned English.
“Societies in decline imitate the lower classes. When Rome began to rot you had senators and emperors playing gladiator in the arena. In post-modern America middle-aged suburban white adults imitate the language and dress of black urban youth. Everything is as it should be in an imploding stratified society.”
This is not a popular answer, but is the only one I have.
Below is an excerpt from a transcript of a black educator speaking on the subject from about a decade ago I think. I’d like to thank Akira for sending in the piece, which I once heard replayed over the radio. It’s nice to have a written record.
Excerpt
They're standing on the corner and they can't speak English.
I can't even talk the way these people talk:
Why you ain't...
Where you is,
What he drive,
Where he stay,
Where he work,
Who you be...
And I blamed the kid until I heard the mother talk.
And then I heard the father talk.
Everybody knows it's important to speak English except these knuckleheads. You can't be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth.
In fact you will never get any kind of job making a decent living.
People marched and were hit in the face with rocks to get an Education, and now we've got these knuckleheads walking around.
The lower economic people are not holding up their end in this deal.
These people are not parenting. They are buying things for kids.
$500 sneakers for what?
And they won't spend $200 for Hooked on Phonics.
I am talking about these people who cry when their son is standing there in an orange suit.
Where were you when he was 2?
Where were you when he was 12?
Where were you when he was 18 and how come you didn't know that he had a pistol?
And where is the father? Or who is his father?
People putting their clothes on backward:
Isn't that a sign of something gone wrong?
People with their hats on backward, pants down around the crack, isn't that a sign of something?
Isn't it a sign of something when she has her dress all the way up and got all type of needles [piercing] going through her body?
What part of Africa did this come from??
We are not Africans. Those people are not Africans; they don't know a thing about Africa...
I say this all of the time. It would be like white people saying they are European-American. That is totally stupid.
I was born here, and so were my parents and grandparents and, very likely my great grandparents. I don't have any connection to Africa, no more than white Americans have to Germany, Scotland, England, Ireland, or the Netherlands . The same applies to 99 percent of all the black Americans as regards to Africa . So stop, already!
With names like Shaniqua, Taliqua and Mohammed and all of that crap ... And all of them are in jail.
Brown or black versus the Board of Education is no longer the white person's problem.
We have got to take the neighborhood back.
People used to be ashamed. Today a woman has eight children with eight different 'husbands'—or men—or whatever you call them now.
We have millionaire football players who cannot read.
We have million-dollar basketball players who can't write two paragraphs. We, as black folks have to do a better job.
Someone working at Wal-Mart with seven kids, you are hurting us.
We have to start holding each other to a higher standard..
We cannot blame the white people any longer.
~Dr. William Henry 'Bill' Cosby, Jr., Ed. D.
I think that used to be called ‘spitting into the wind.’
If I remember correctly, Bill Cosby became persona non gratta after this rant. Interesting. A decade earlier and he would have been praised as an outspoken observer.
He had no idea that he was to become an obstacle to be removed by the current zeitgeist.
Personal responsibility and common sense are useless to the State and the Market now. We are bent and shaped (or discarded and marginalized) by them not the other way around.
Dom, That was profound, really.
You are officially no longer young—that's it, on the down side of the mountain with the rest of old geezers who thought we were scaling The Spire of Man only to look back and find we were crawling over a garbage heap.
Welcome to the ideological retirement home.
Sorry, they put away the shuffle board pucks after Miss Jane slipped and fell during a game...