Why ebonics is bad

It is a dialect spoken by a significant number of people in the South. Moreover, it has the added advantage of being completely unintelligible. Someone out there tell me that you can understand a word Justin Wilson said on Louisiana Cookin'.

The effect of the Oakland proposal on students in general, and black students specifically, could be damaging. It tells black students that Oakland does not expect them to be able to speak standard English without the use of a "dumbed down" version.

I know a few very articulate black students who would probably be insulted. Writer Maya Angelou is. It tells all students that a lack of English comprehension will be tolerated.

If there is one thing I have learned during my nearly six years of college study, it is that students will do no more than what is expected of them. As long as bad English is tolerated in the schools, the problem will exist. While I cannot agree with methods employed by the Oakland school district, I sympathize with the board's frustration over poor student performance.

According to U. Berkeley, and he had a long-standing scholarly interest in black speech. He became—by dint of his race and his physical proximity to the uproar—the most prominent authority on the validity of Black English as language. Since then, McWhorter has built a career outside the academy as a quirky populist, committed to defending linguistic novelties often derided as erroneous or as harbingers of slackening standards.

He sees in such innovations evidence of the only constant in language: its endless mutability, and its corresponding ability to surprise. McWhorter brooks no condescension toward the Valley Girl. He also gently chides his fellow-linguists for their inability to present convincing arguments in favor of vernacular language.

However logical, examples like these have failed to garner respect, because to most Americans grammar does not inhere in linguistic rule-following generally but in a set of specific rules that they have been taught to obey. His smirking and somewhat subversive accommodation to this Pharisaism is to emphasize the ways in which Black English is more complex than Standard English. In the years that he has spent popularizing ideas hatched in the halls of the academy, he has honed a friendly prose style.

It also helps McWhorter slide past the aspects of Black English that cannot be so cheerily explained. This thinking has slipped further out of fashion in recent years, as smartphones around the country have delivered the bad old news about blacks and the police. Some of its phrases "Outta sight. Go girl. The Oakland board 's Dec. The board also discarded any idea that it might apply for bilingual money to pay for the program.

These changes are welcome, and they spare the school board from further embarrassment. The board's spirit of compromise is to be applauded. Surely some critics will be converted.