Total Embarassment by a US Congresswoman

[Malacasta]

If Ebonics is a form of English that is spoken at home, or amongst ones friends, or at the local shop whose owners also speak Ebonics or in the workplace, if you work with people who all come from the same background, then I honestly can't see any difference between that and people who speak 'Spanglish' in Australia, or any other form of Pidgin English or non English in their local environment.

I don't get cross when I'm on a tram and I hear people speaking in Spanish or Korean or Chinese or Sudanese. I wouldn't dream of telling them to stop speaking their language in public, or at home, nor would I tell them that their language is a 'movement' that will cripple them.

Obviously everyone should be given the opportunity to gain a good education in the dominant language of whatever country they are living in. Obviously without a good grasp of the main language in that country, a person will face obstacles, sometimes crippling obstacles.

But just as many non English speaking people who learn English as a second language do exceedingly well, so too could people with Ebonics as their first language. It's not Ebonics or the 'Ebonics movement' that stops people speaking 'proper English' - there's nothing inherently stupefying about it that stunts people's intellectual growth.

One of my best mates is the most occa, skin headed bogan you could picture (he's from near Moe, which will help some of our Australian readers understand the extent of his boganhood). He makes Steve Irwin sound like Henry Higgins. You'd write him off as a moron and a gun toting redneck until he starts discussing astrophysics and his job as one of the heads of a modelling department at CSIRO. He also played a brass instrument (I can't remember which) in the Royal Melbourne Philharmonic Orchestra. He also is a lefty and militant unionist (which is where I come in I guess). Probably my friend speaks quite nice English in his job - I wouldn't know - or maybe he's such a talent that his thick, almost impenetrable, accent is seen as some sort of handicap that he has overcome.

But people who assume he is a moron do so because of their own prejudice and class based misconceptions - his accent tells you very little about him. Someone who uses Ebonics tells me very little about them, except that they are in some way associated with a Black culture that uses that dialect.

This woman has given a piss poor performance on a topic that she clearly knows very little about in a venue where it couldn't be less relevant. If she is using Ebonics because she always uses Ebonics, then she got elected as someone who speaks that way - possibly she represents an electorate that speaks similarly. If that's the case then whatever. If she was being cute then that's pretty pathetic - but whatever.

I don't think you can conclude from this woman though, any of the conclusions that seem to be being drawn from this thread.

I don't know how to put this next comment without making the situation worse, but I honestly believe that you often post with a lot of venom Ari, that's how your posts read to me. When I read something like this "It wasn't until modern, bed wetting, apologist, self-hating, white guilt academics started inventing crap like "African American Vernacular" that garbage like this even existed. " as a response to Pelic indicating that he was an academic who used AAVE, it is clear that you are being intentionally insulting. And then later on when you say both Pelic and myself are using the term AAVE in a dishonest way (because we are presumably bed wetting apologist self hating white guilt posters), you are also being insulting so it strikes me as odd that you'd be balking at people responding in kind.

I can't help but wonder if both sides of the left right divide on this board have ideological blinkers that excuse their own vitriol and yet read bad intent from the other side without much reason.