What Have You Done For Me Lately?, Part II

Last week, I wrote about the problem of the Democratic Party losing black* voters, as the GOP begins to peel off black Christian Conservatives, using gay marriage as a wedge issue. It’s a big issue, and important issue, and we shouldn’t be afraid to talk about it. Pam writes about it a lot, and I highly recommend checking out her series (which, come Koufax time, I will be nominating for best series, not only because it is deserving, but also in the hope that tons of people will read it).

Anyway, one of the issues that irks me, as a person of empathy, and, rather cynically, from a political perspective, too, is the Dems’ unwavering tendency to take for granted their black constituency, hence the title of the post. An article I read this morning brought home how little our government has done, irrespective of who’s running it, to ensure equal opportunities for all children, regardless of race.

The article addresses a plan to incorporate Ebonics into a new school program, designed to help keep black students—who are the lowest-achieving group in the district, go to college the least, and have the most dropouts and suspensions—interested in school. I’m not going to get into examining whether this is a good or a bad idea, because I’m frankly not sure; I’ve read a lot on the subject, both in Ebonics integration and English as a Second Language programs, and one can find opinions, anecdotal evidence, and statistics that support both sides of the issue. What really caught my eye in the article was this (emphasis mine):

Mary Texeira, a sociology professor at Cal State San Bernardino, commended the San Bernardino Board of Education for approving the policy in June.

Texeira suggested that including Ebonics in the program would be beneficial for students. Ebonics, a dialect of American English that is spoken by many blacks throughout the country, was recognized as a separate language in 1996 by the Oakland school board.

"Ebonics is a different language, it's not slang as many believe,” Texeira said. "For many of these students Ebonics is their language, and it should be considered a foreign language. These students should be taught like other students who speak a foreign language.”

Texeira said research has shown that students learn better when they fully comprehend the language they are being taught in.

Linguistics can be a tricky thing, and a subjective thing; there’s not a definitive consensus on when a dialect stops being just a dialect and becomes its own language. There are areas within the United States—a small island off the east coast (the name of which escapes me at the moment) where the inhabitants speak a strange mix of German and English, certain remote enclaves in Appalachia, as examples—where the form of English spoken is so unique as to have spawned endless debate about whether it’s truly a rare American dialect or a language all its own. When one reads about these idiosyncratic tongues, in America or elsewhere, the thing that their native speakers have in common is geographical isolation.

Ebonics speakers are not geographically isolated—not in the same way residents of a small coastal island are, anyway. This dialect, or language, depending on the linguist or sociologist to whom you are speaking, is instead the result of cultural isolation. Whether Ebonics started and/or developed strictly due to immersion in a community of like speakers, or as a result of a search for unique cultural identity, or a combination of both, or different factors altogether, really doesn’t matter in terms of this discussion. The point is that a wholly distinct dialect, which has developed divergently from all other dominant regional dialects to the point of being recognized in some quarters as its own language, happened within a community that has not been given full equality in our society. This should be a wake-up call to anyone who's become complacent about the state of equal opportunity, in all its possible applications, in America.

So, what are Dems going to do about it? Continue to take black voters for granted as large swaths of their community languish at the margins, or do something about bringing them in from those margins? We can’t pretend full inclusion exists, when segments of our population are learning to speak a whole other language—which is, sadly, an appropriate metaphor in addition to its painful truth.

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* For anyone who questions my regular use of the term “black” as opposed to African-American, it’s because I know blacks who are not of African descent and who feel it doesn’t represent nor encompass their Caribbean heritage (for example), so I don’t use it.