Seriously, he's so cool. I'm channeling Brian Johnson of John Hughes' The Breakfast Club in the scene where Bender's sitting on the railing in the library, methodically tearing pages out of a book. Andy accuses him, "That's real intelligent," and then Bender mockingly whines, "You're right. It's wrong to destroy literature. It's so fun to read. And... MO-LAY really pumps my nads." Claire corrects him, "It's Moliere." And that's where Brian's line comes in, and incidentally, where I end my gratuitous Breakfast Club quoting and get back to my original point, "I love his work."
Seriously. A favorite point of mine from his article "Hearing What's Not Said and Missing What Is: Black Language in White Public Space"? At the risk of over-simplifying his argument, I'd probably pull this series of poignant questions:
Why is it that, despite ample evidence from sociolinguistic studies and theory that different speech communities possess different, yet theoretically equivalent, linguistic rules and rules of language use, [Black Language] and linguistic practices continue to be denigrated and underappreciated by Whites, particularly in educational institutions? What is at the root of this denigration and misinterpretation? How is that ideology and practice of linguistic supremacy -- the unsubstantiated notion that White linguistic norms are inherently superior to the linguistic norms of other communities, and the practice of mapping White norms into 'the language of school,' 'the language of economic mobility,' and 'the language of success' -- persists, even within the subjugated group? What is the role of communicative misunderstanding in maintaining and perpetuating tensions between communities? How do we understand communicative differences not as the source of tensions but as a means of perpetuating and reinforcing those tensions? how do we move beyond searching for communicative mismatches to explain intercultural tensions and conflicts that already exist due to the larger and systematic social, political, and economic subjugation of a group? Or worse yet... will greater knowledge of communicative differences be used for or against justice?And in close second:
'What are you saying, Alim -- are you proposing that teachers should not teach 'standard English''? Here's what I'm proposing. First and foremost, we must begin with an understanding that there is nothing standard about 'standard English.' Standard simply means that this is the language variety that those in authority have constructed as the variety needed to gain access to resources. What we have, then, for a 'standard' in the US is nothing short of the imposition of White linguistic norms and ways of speaking in the service of granting access to resources to Whites and denying those same resources to as many others as possible, including poor Whites (linguistic supremacy goes for varieties of a language as well as languages other than the dominating language, whatever that may be).
If I was in the habit of using emoticons, which I'm not, I'd probably use something with a kissy-face, or that's blushing, or sighing.
Also: Um, today's NatGeo Photo of the Day? Very cool.
1 comment:
I've always been mildly fascinated with sociolinguistics, particularly with 'dialects' of English and uses of African American Vernacular English and other forms of English commonly spoken by black people in the U.S (dishearteningly referred to as 'ebonics' 'round these parts - ugh). The idea of the dialect being derogated even within the subjugated group rang a bell with me -- going to a historically black college, I hear people consistently 'correcting' students' AAVE to 'standard' English and posing disdain towards AAVE, as if the dialect single-handedly causes the oppression of black people or something :)
We talked about this, briefly, in the context of standardized tests in social psych (particularly the GRE). On one of those damn antonym questions, I got the word donnybrook. I didn't know what the hell a donnybrook was. I find out later that it's a brawl, and it comes from the name of an Irish town that was well known for it's brawls. Is this really a measure of intelligence, this kind of 'evolved colloquialism'?
Maybe I was just extremely bitter about donnybrooks, though. Enough to start one.
-melissa
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