On October 9, 1998, a distinctive quarter page
advertisement appeared in The New York Times. In it, an
African American figure reminiscent of Martin Luther King,
Jr. stands with his back turned to a bold proclamation in
white print: “I HAS A DREAM.”

The ad makes its case by appealing directly to African Americans:

“Does this bother you? It should. We’ve spent over 400 years fighting for the right to have a voice. Is this how we’ll use it? More importantly, is this how we’ll teach our children to use it? If we expect more of them, we must not throw our hands in the air and agree with those who say our children cannot be taught. By now, you’ve probably heard about Ebonics (aka, black English). And if you think it’s become a controversy because white America doesn’t want us messing with their precious language, don’t. White America couldn’t care less what we do to segregate ourselves. The fact is language is power. And we can’t take that power away from our children with Ebonics. Would Dr. Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and all the others who paid the price of obtaining our voice with the currency of their lives embrace this? If you haven’t used your voice lately, consider this an invitation.

SPEAK OUT AGAINST EBONICS
The National Head Start Association
1651 Prince Street, Alexandria, VA 22314″

The writers of this ad were trying to reach their intended audience and make an impression. They did this by juxtaposing Martin Luther King Jr, who is one of the most respected and honored African Americans of the last century, with African-American English. This is meant to be shocking and even insulting. To understand this reasoning, it’s necessary to look at the origins of the advertisement.

The National Head Start Association (NHSA) is a private, not-for-profit membership organization representing some two thousand federally funded Head Start programs across the country. These educational programs address the needs of poor children of all races to age five.

The NHSA message is quite clear: to succeed, the African American child must assimilate linguistically. To maintain allegiance to home and community by means of the community language is to embrace poverty, ignorance, and prejudice. Thus African-American English (or Ebonics) is not a fully functioning variety of English, the symbol of solidarity and allegiance, but a disaster for the African American community.

What is not generally known about this ad is that it was not conceptualized or written by the NHSA: it was the product of a collaboration between a group called Atlanta’s Black Professionals and three prominent ad agencies. The ad won the 1998 Grand Prize of the annual Athena Award offered by the Newspaper Association of America; The New York Times ran it free, as a public service announcement.

According to executives at the ad agencies, the advertisement was popular when it first ran in Atlanta and was requested by schools from Miami to Richmond. ¹

Given the date, you might not be surprised to hear that this advertisement was a direct response to what is generally known as the Oakland Ebonics controversy.

How did we come to this place where successful African American professionals, a national education organization and the most prominent daily newspaper not only collaborate to disseminate such divisive and exclusionary rhetoric, but award each other for it?

At the heart of this controversy is a simple fact: the variety of English under debate has had many names, including Ebonics, Black English (BE), Black English Vernacular (BEV), Black Vernacular
English (BVE), African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and African American Language. It’s no surprise that we have so many terms, because in fact, we do not agree about what to call this language, what it is, or even who speaks it.

For the most part, we do not even seem to realize that we do not agree on the most basic questions. When the subject is raised, it is usually as a source of mockery. A quick search of “Ebonics” will make it clear that many generally do not hesitate to criticize, mock, and demean the language and the people who speak it. So we have a language that is spoken by a large number of people in communities across the country. It is rejected by some proportion of the population who speaks it; it is repudiated by persons in positions of power; it is mocked. And yet, it persists. It more than persists: it thrives. To try to get to the bottom of what seems like inconsistency, a good place — maybe the only place — to start is to define what is meant by African-American English. Consider this statement:

Would Dr. Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and all the others who paid the price of obtaining our voice with the currency of their lives embrace this?

One reading of this, perhaps the simplest reading, goes like this: Dr. Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and others who worked for equal rights would reject the very idea of Ebonics as a viable and acceptable language. From this it seems that the writer was claiming that prominent leaders of the African American community are not speakers of African American English.

That is certainly true in some cases. Bill Cosby, for example, has been openly hostile to the idea of African-American English as viable and valuable. So have Oprah WInfrey and Jessie Jackson, Jr., among others. On the other hand, many prominent African Americans have spoken up in defense of the language of the black community. Toni Morrisson, James Baldwin, Audre Lord, June Jordan, dozens of others have made a case for that language they consider their own.

The people who wrote the ad above claim that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X would have rejected the idea of Ebonics as a pedagogical tool, and they come to this conclusion because, they seem to be saying, those two men did not speak African American English.

And this is where the discussion breaks down.

If you are not a native speaker of African American English, especially if you are not black, my guess is that you will be surprised to hear the claim that these two men did not speak African-American English. They sound African-American to most white people, even when they are speaking in the most formal way to a wider audience. In candid speech, they sound even more African-American.

So the first step toward understanding the complex emotions and opinions about this language of the black community it to try to pin down a definition. And not just one definition, because that’s the crux of the matter. Oprah Winfrey has one definition of AAVE, and James Baldwin had another. What I identify as AAVE they might not consider AAVE at all.

The complexities of this subject are tremendous, and this is just the beginning. A short poll might provide some insight into the range of perceptions and definitions.

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