Not since the Oakland, Calif. School Board voted in 1996 to recognize Ebonics as a language to be factored into its speakers’ English classes — sparking a national debate — has there been so much focus on African-American speech patterns. Fast forward to 2007, and we now have the appalling case of the Houston Independent School District (HISD) police officer who, for whatever reason, saw fit to produce and distribute the Ghetto Handbook: Ebonics 101 to fellow school district officers. From the debasing cover illustration of two Black men, one brandishing a gun, to the offensive subtitle “Wacha dun did now?” — including the outrageous poem thrown into the mix — this document is rife with racist and offensive African-American stereotypes.
The good news here is that this is a rare and profound teaching moment, and it should be treated as such. It is clear that ignorance abounds in this country with regard to African-American language, and this unfortunate incident speaks to the need for greater education and understanding in this area. To begin with, it must be made clear that Ebonics and slang are not one and the same. Words like “hoodrat,” “gank,” “bling,” and much of the list in the “Handbook” are not Ebonics, but slang words promulgated in urban America and in some hip hop songs and music videos.
American Ebonics is a contact language that resulted from the mingling of non-English-speaking, displaced and enslaved Africans with English speakers. Hence, its lexicon is English, but many of its grammatical structures and its syntax, according to some linguists, closely resemble those found in West African languages. This is not unlike the practice of African-descended persons melding traditional African religions, whose practice were forbidden, with Catholicism, creating the widely practiced Santeria.
At any rate, Ebonics is the primary language spoken by many African-Americans, particularly those lacking formal schooling. Still, there are even countless middle class African-Americans (this writer included) who are fully capable of speaking formal English — and who do so on a regular basis except on those occasions, in relaxed, informal settings among family and/or friends, when Ebonics is sometimes spoken. This phenomenon, which is almost second-nature, is called code-switching, and it is very common among people who speak more than one language. It is also worth noting that Ebonics is a graduate level course offered, and completed by this writer, in the doctoral African-American Studies program at Temple University. Of course, there is an ongoing debate about whether Ebonics is an actual language, or just a dialect; however, that is a matter that will not be resolved here, and is best left to the socio-linguistic community.
