Ebonics Article Obfuscates Issues

I am replying to register my disappointment with the inaccuracy of Rachel Barenbaum's op-ed on Ebonics. I do not pretend to speak for supporters of Ebonics, I am only writing as one supporter of Ebonics. With few exceptions, Ms. Barenbaum's entire analysis is completely incorrect. First, her worry that Ebonics will remove social fluidity and drive races and classes further apart is groundless. She seems to think that proponents of Ebonics want it to be taught to African-American students in classrooms across the country. On the contrary, Ebonics, as it currently stands, is going to be taught to teachers, who can then use this knowledge to facilitate their students' acquisition of standard English. This is what is commonly called a bridge program--using Ebonics to bridge the gap between Ebonics and standard English, thereby increasing these children's chances of getting good jobs and leaving their impoverished neighborhoods. This seems like an increase in social fluidity by any definition. As a matter of fact, Ebonics was proposed primarily because it seemed to have been helping these kids. It was suggested, according to the Washington Post, because members of the Oakland School Board noticed that an Ebonics program in Oakland was already helping 3,000 African-American students make strides academically, at a rate faster than their classmates in the regular classes. Furthermore, the country's largest group of linguists, the 6,000-member Linguistic Society of America, unanimously voted on Jan. 3 to support the use of Ebonics as a pedagogical tool because bridge programs, instead of creating some binary opposition, have actually been shown, from studies conducted in Sweden and this country, to accelerate the acquisition of what is considered the standard language. Thus, Ms. Barenbaum's assertion that Ebonics is going to further stratify lower-income blacks is simple hypothesizing with no substantial factual corroboration.

I am further confounded by Ms. Barenbaum's fears that Ebonics is going to create "a basic communication problem" between poor African-Americans and the rest of the country. She amazingly overlooks the reality that America is already divided by race, as evidenced by the unanimous support of the O.J. verdict among poor blacks, and the similarly unanimous disappointment among whites. Even if Ebonics operates as a divisive agent, as Ms. Barenbaum suspects, it will be reinforcing a division which already exists, not creating one. Perhaps the most ridiculous contention in the article is that our nation's print media automatically creates a binary opposition (Ebonics/standard English) by using standard English grammar when writing stories about Ebonics. By this logic, anytime a newspaper or magazine discusses Japan, it should be in Japanese, else there would be an English/Japanese binary. To use a more extreme example, anytime there is a story about blind people it should be written in braille, to avoid the braille/English binary, etc. The implications of this logic are grave indeed: language should only be utilized in a very narrow, self-descriptive sense. Ebonics should only be used in describing people and subjects that are particular to Ebonics. It seems to me that this limited, minimalist view of language leads to more "opposition" than using language to describe other languages, as Ms. Barenbaum fears, because it keeps language bounded and discrete. I hope Ms. Barenbaum does not propose that speakers of Ebonics found a newsmagazine to rival Newsweek to cover Ebonics and thus avoid "opposition."

My final point is a bit of an ironic one. Ms. Barenbaum spends too much of her entire piece talking about obscure theories, and forgets some fundamental rules about standard English grammar. She begins the last paragraph of her piece by arguing that Ebonics is going to create a division between those who speak it and "those who speaks, reads," and write standard English. Earlier she argues that, because of all this debate, "what is being established is binary opposition, is difference." These grammatically incorrect sentences, in an edited op-ed piece, should remind some of us that the basic question at hand is not only learning standard English grammar, but mastering it. I write this letter because I feel people are using the debate about Ebonics as a platform to overphilosophize about "binary classism" and other completely irrelevant phrases, which sound good in a term paper but only serve to obfuscate the real issue: the education and future of America's most disadvantaged youth. --Sozi T. Sozinho '97