What Ever Happened to “Ebonics”?

Ten years ago today, on December 18, 1996, the city of Oakland, California provoked national outrage when its Board of Education voted to classify “Ebonics,” or black English, as a distinct language, rather than a dialect of standard English.

From across the political spectrum and across the racial divide, commentators heaped scorn on city officials. Ellen Goodman, a liberal political columnist, complained that Oakland officials “have made ‘I be’ the linguistic equivalent of ‘je suis.’” Republican Congressman Peter King of New York argued that “Ebonics is the product of radical political correctness and ridiculous Afrocentrism. It is a racial stew of inner-city street slang and bad grammar. It is not a language.”

The New York Times editorial page, usually very liberal on race politics, called Ebonics “urban slang” and warned that regarding it as a legitimate language “will actually stigmatize African-American children.” Even civil rights figures like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton criticized the Oakland Board of Education, while Hermene Hartman, the editor of a Chicago newspaper geared toward middle-class black readers, wondered, “Why not also resurrect the images of Amos & Andy, Stepin Fetchit, Mammy, Little Black Sambo, the Minstrel, rolling dark eyes dancing the instant jig, and the cotton fields where we were 100 percent employed, well-fed and happy.”

The political reaction to Oakland’s decision was inflamed by several historical and policy misunderstandings.

First, the Oakland Unified School District never intended to introduce classes in Ebonics or to substitute it for standard English. It hoped that by classifying Ebonics as a language, it could compel teachers to treat Ebonics-speakers in much the same way they treated native Spanish-speakers—that is, it would get them to develop curricula that would acknowledge the linguistic heritage of black students while helping them master standard English, rather than criticize them for their linguistic deficiencies. “We do recognize the reality that our kids are coming to schools with language that is not standard English,” a city official explained. “We’re trying to be culturally sensitive and culturally respectful.”

Second, few people, even critics of the Oakland school board, would have disagreed that the city’s was facing a very real and grave education problem. Black children represented 53 percent of the district’s enrollment, and roughly 71 percent of them were in special education classes, while 64 percent had been held back a grade. Black students accounted for 67 percent of truancy cases and 80 percent of suspensions and had an average GPA of 1.8 on a standard 4.0 scale. Something had to be done. But was recognizing Ebonics as linguistically legitimate the answer?

Third, Ebonics was a highly defensible intellectual concept. The term Ebonics was coined in 1973 when a group of black scholars, chief among them Dr. Robert Williams, a psychologist, held a conference in St. Louis to discuss the “Cognitive and Language Development of the Black Child.” (Studies in at the time suggested that at least 80 percent of all African-Americans used Ebonics, though not necessarily exclusively.) From an academic standpoint, their identification of a distinct language spoken by descendents of West Africans, and its specific North American dialect, known to scholars as United States Ebonics, was perfectly legitimate. Keith Gilyard, who was then the director of the writing program at Syracuse University, wrote that “like spoken languages worldwide, AAVE”—African-American Vernacular English, another scholarly term for Ebonics—“is fully conceptual, composed of 10 to 70 meaningful sounds; has consonants and the requisite number of vowels; has noun and verb elements; has rules of syntax; and contains statements, commands, questions, and exclamations. No contemporary linguist would talk about AAVE as slang, substandard, incorrect, deficient, or jive talk. In other words, linguists do not regard AAVE the same way as the pundits and politicians who have garnered most of the media spotlight.”

Many linguists agreed that Ebonics’ syntax and pronunciation had highly traceable roots in West African language patterns, most notably in the conjugation of the verb “to be.” Where standard English speakers would say, “The coffee is cold today,” Ebonics speakers would say, “The coffee cold”; where standard English speakers would say, “The coffee is generally cold,” Ebonics speakers would say, “The coffee be cold.” However grating such verb constructions might be to speakers of standard English, they are entirely familiar to students of West African languages. For that matter, such verb constructions would be familiar to most Israelis; the verb “to be” is absent but implied in most present-tense contexts in Hebrew.

Even if Ebonics could be classified as a language in academic terms, and even if most people agreed that there was a profound racial gap in the Oakland schools, it was unlikely that American policymakers would embrace the Board of Education’s gambit. Oakland had long been host to a vibrant black-nationalist culture, stretching back at least as far as the Black Panther party of the late 1960s, which was founded in the Bay Area. To many white Americans, Ebonics smacked of militant separatism, a notion that Conrad Worrill, a leading secular black nationalist, did little to discredit when he said, “This Ebonics debate is really about power and culture. This is an attack on our culture, when we have white people deciding that our indigenous modes of expression are deficient, worthy of ridicule, or so-called bad English.”

For many white commentators, the Ebonics decision harked back to the bad old days of the 1968 New York City school strike, when black parents clashed with the white-dominated teachers union over community control of the public schools, including control over curricula and pedagogy. In both 1968 and 1996 many white observers missed the frustration of black parents and civil rights activists who had been clamoring for more resources and more integration for years. Black city residents turned to innovative solutions like community control, which held out the promise of schools that would be more culturally accepting of black students, in 1968, and Ebonics, which held out the same promise, as well as the prospect of additional resources for the city’s struggling schools, in 1996.

Moreover in 1974 Congress had passed the Equal Educational Opportunities Act, which provided a federal mandate and funding for language assistance in schools with large populations of non-English speakers. If Oakland could claim that 53 percent of its students were not English speakers, it could theoretically demand increased federal assistance.

For better or worse, though, increased aid was not forthcoming. “Elevating ‘black English’ to the status of a language is not the way to raise standards of achievement in our schools and for our students,” declared U.S. Education Secretary Richard W. Riley. “The [Clinton] administration’s policy is that ‘Ebonics’ is a nonstandard form of English and not a foreign language.” In the absence of any meaningful federal intervention, the Oakland schools turned to new solutions to address the performance disparities in their student population.

Ten years later, the debate over Ebonics is a footnote in a larger and continuing story about the pervasive racial gap in educational achievement. Whether because of culture or resources, the inner-city schools that many black students continue to attend are lagging behind. Ebonics was one answer to that problem. It had too much political baggage to work.