Teaching New Worlds, New Words and the Status of Black English
The Disruptive Power and Nature of Language
Language is a force comparable to desire; it disrupts and refuses to be contained within established boundaries. It possesses the capacity to speak against the will, intruding upon and sometimes violating the most private spaces of the mind and body.
Language serves as a map of human failures. It reveals the speaker in an incontestable way, but it also attempts to define the "other." In many cases, the "other" refuses to be defined by a language that has historically failed to recognize their existence or humanity.
People evolve language as a means to describe and control their circumstances. Without the ability to articulate reality, individuals risk being submerged by it. For example, variation exists within the French language between speakers in Paris, Marseilles, Quebec, Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Senegal; each group pays a different "price" for a common language that must be adapted to articulate their unique realities.
What connects all humans and languages is the necessity to confront life and outwit death, which requires the acceptance and achievement of one's temporal identity.
History, Terror, and the Birth of Black English
Standard English is often heard as the sound of slaughter and conquest by those whose ancestors were colonized. Native Americans' diverse languages were historically dismissed by colonizers as mere "grunts" or "gibberish."
The experience of displaced Africans involved a unique form of grief: being forced to inhabit a world where they saw others sharing their skin color and condition but possessed no shared language to communicate.
The terror of Africans on slave ships and plantations extended beyond the fear of physical punishment to include the spiritual anguish of hearing a language they could not comprehend. This unfamiliar architecture and the sound of English itself were sources of profound terror.
Black English is a creation of the black diaspora, born from "brutal necessity." Africans were brought to the United States from different tribes and could not speak one another's languages. This linguistic division was a tool of the institution of chattel slavery; had these individuals been able to communicate immediately, the institution could not have endured as long as it did.
Under the constant surveillance of the master’s gun, enslaved people were given the Bible and spaces like Congo Square. Within this context, they formed the black church, an "unprecedented tabernacle" where Black English began to take shape.
The creation of Black English was an "alchemy" that transformed ancient elements into a new language. Its rules were dictated by the urgent need to convey messages that the white man could not understand, such as warning a family member of imminent danger from a white person standing just behind them.
The Vernacular as a Site of Resistance and Alternative Epistemologies
Learning the "alien tongue" of English was a method for enslaved Africans to reclaim personal power within a context of total domination. By possessing a shared language, they could build community and create the political solidarity necessary for resistance.
Enslaved people took "broken bits" of English and transformed them into a counter-language. They restructured words and sentences in a way that forced the colonizer to rethink the meaning of the English language itself.
There is a profound spirit of rebellion in the "incorrect" usage and placement of words. For example, in the spiritual "nobody knows de trouble I see," the use of the word "nobody" is more significant than the phrase "no one" because the slave’s body was the literal site of suffering.
Black vernacular speech provides a space for alternative cultural production and "alternative epistemologies"—different ways of thinking and knowing that are essential for a counter-hegemonic worldview.
The power of black vernacular resides in its ability to intervene on the boundaries and limitations of standard English. It allows for an intimacy and a depth of expression that is not permissible within the strictures of standard English.
Cultural Appropriation and the Transformation of American Speech
White Americans would not sound the way they do today if there had never been black people in the United States. Much of American speech is rooted in black linguistic innovation.
Many terms have been appropriated and sanitized by dominant culture:
- Jazz: Originally a specific sexual term ("jazz me, baby"), it was purified by white society into the "Jazz Age."
- Sock it to me: Roughly synonymous with the sexual meaning of jazz, this phrase was adopted by "Nathaniel Hawthorne's descendants" without hesitation.
- Beat to his socks: Originally a black image of total, despairing poverty, it was transformed into the "Beat Generation," a phenomenon of middle-class white people imitating poverty.
- Right on! and Let it all hang out: Adopted widely into mainstream American lexicon.
- Funky: While black people "were funky," white people in the Beat Generation were "doing their despairing best to be funky."
In contemporary culture, rap music is a primary site where black vernacular invites the dominant culture to hear and be transformed. However, this carries the risk of "cultural translation" trivializing the speech. When white youth imitate this speech to suggest the speaker is "stupid" or merely an entertainer, they undermine its subversive power.
Linguistic Hegemony and the Silence of Academia
In academic settings, there is often little effort to utilize black vernacular. In a course on black women writers, an ethnically diverse group of students was rendered speechless when asked why only standard English was spoken in the classroom. Many of these students spoke standard English as a second or third language but felt they had to repress their own tongues.
This repression is a political act of complicity with a culture of domination. Even within feminist movements, it was often assumed that standard English would be the primary vehicle for transmitting thought, ignoring the need for diverse voices to speak in their own words or vernacular.
Writing for academic journals in black vernacular is difficult; editors frequently return such work with the vernacular translated back into standard English. To reach an inclusive audience, the writer is often forced into a process of translation that can estrange them from their own culture.
Standard English has been used as a weapon to silence and censor. June Jordan describes official English as a "stolen currency" that has been homogenized to express "non-events" or "lies."
The Political Struggle for Democratic Language and Education
In a truly democratic state, language would conform to the "truth of our many selves" and lead toward an equality of power. It would "hurtle, fly, curse, and sing" in the voices of everyone present.
Pedagogically, the moment of not understanding what someone says should be viewed as a space for learning. It offers the opportunity to listen without "mastery" or the need to own the speech through interpretation.
In a multicultural society that remains white supremacist, listening to another tongue subverts the "capitalist frenzy" that demands immediate satisfaction of all desires and disrupts the cultural imperialism that suggests one is only worthy of being heard if they speak standard English.
The argument over Black English is rooted in history rather than linguistics. It is not the black child’s language that is despised by the American educational system, but their experience. A child cannot be taught by those who despise them or by those who demand they repudiate their own experience to enter a "limbo" where they are neither black nor white.
The refusal to learn within the American system may be a rational conclusion by both children and elders who realize they have nothing to learn from a country that makes heroes of "criminal mediocrities" and refuses to face the reality of why so many nonwhite people are futureless in the streets.