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textualdevianceBut forcing me to learn how to speak properly is KILLING MY CULTURE, MAN.
I fucking hate that. It usually comes from the same people who like to pretend that being a violent, misogynistic gangbanger is some sort of legitimate subculture.
For the record, I support bilingual education for immigrants. There's no sense in shortchanging a child's learning in other fields just to bang English into their heads. It's entirely possible to teach someone to speak English at the same time they're learning math and science in Spanish, Russian, Tagalog or whatever. And whatever someone wants to speak at home is fine with me. I also don't have a problem with immigrants or tourists speaking in their native language in public. No one is entitled to eavesdrop on someone else's conversation.
However, those things are not the same as someone who deliberately misuses English when their family has been in an English-speaking country for six generations. Accents? Regional or subcultural colloquialisms? Whatever. But bad grammar and spelling ARE NOT A CULTURAL THING. They are a symptom of several problems: poverty, poor education or a cultural lack of respect for education.
I understand that the school system is part of a larger "The Man" morass that a lot of oppressed subcultures fear and mistrust, but it's not going to do them any good to encourage that fear and mistrust. Legitimizing crappy language skills by slapping a Culturally Protected label on them is only fucking over people who really don't need to be fucked over any further.
This isn't about assimilation--there are plenty of legitimate cultural and subcultural distinctions. Improper use of the language is not one of them.
Ugh. This sort of cultural relativism is why I could never go into anthropology. And why I'm working my ass off to correct the problem of "all opinions are equal" in the media. Education, empiricism and expertise have to count for something, or we are well and truly fucked as a species.
I fucking hate that. It usually comes from the same people who like to pretend that being a violent, misogynistic gangbanger is some sort of legitimate subculture.
For the record, I support bilingual education for immigrants. There's no sense in shortchanging a child's learning in other fields just to bang English into their heads. It's entirely possible to teach someone to speak English at the same time they're learning math and science in Spanish, Russian, Tagalog or whatever. And whatever someone wants to speak at home is fine with me. I also don't have a problem with immigrants or tourists speaking in their native language in public. No one is entitled to eavesdrop on someone else's conversation.
However, those things are not the same as someone who deliberately misuses English when their family has been in an English-speaking country for six generations. Accents? Regional or subcultural colloquialisms? Whatever. But bad grammar and spelling ARE NOT A CULTURAL THING. They are a symptom of several problems: poverty, poor education or a cultural lack of respect for education.
I understand that the school system is part of a larger "The Man" morass that a lot of oppressed subcultures fear and mistrust, but it's not going to do them any good to encourage that fear and mistrust. Legitimizing crappy language skills by slapping a Culturally Protected label on them is only fucking over people who really don't need to be fucked over any further.
This isn't about assimilation--there are plenty of legitimate cultural and subcultural distinctions. Improper use of the language is not one of them.
Ugh. This sort of cultural relativism is why I could never go into anthropology. And why I'm working my ass off to correct the problem of "all opinions are equal" in the media. Education, empiricism and expertise have to count for something, or we are well and truly fucked as a species.
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(frozen) Re: A Question About Ebonics
There are plenty of language quirks that are cultural--accents, regional and cultural colloquialisms, slang--but a failure of the basics of grammar and spelling has nothing to do with that. It isn't ancestry that causes a person to put apostrophes where they don't belong.
My people--the Irish and Italians--came to this country 100-150 years ago. My great grandfather spoke nothing but Italian when he came here. My grandmother had an odd accent--Italian combined with the Scandinavian inflection common to where she grew up in Wisconsin. On my father's side, the folks speak with Oklahoma and Texas accents, with a slight hint of Irish diction. My mother grew up in Southern California, and has an interesting mix of her mother's Italian/Scandinavian diction with a slight SoCal tinge.
But this describes how they speak, not what they know about language itself, and as far as that's concerned, most of my family ranges from functionally illiterate to inept, at best. The few of us who do have a grasp on proper grammar were fortunate to have access to good schools and encouragement to learn.
I'm not going to make an excuse for my family's lack of grammar skills by blaming their ancestral heritage. They've been here for several generations, now. Whatever language quirks they had due to having spoken a different language (or different form of the language) originally are erased by time.
Instead, what has caused my family's poor grasp on language is lack of access to (and in some cases a cultural disregard for) good education. Part of this is because both Irish and Italians were discriminated against when they first came to this country. They were bare-bones working class, making a living as best they could. It took several generations of hard work to get to the point where my generation--and it is only my generation--could actually manage to get to college. Most everyone else was lucky to graduate from high school, and many didn't even do that.
The same is generally true for your ancestors. Once freed, they had to start with nothing and work their way up, and that meant a lack of access to education. Add in racism and segregation, and it's no wonder that language skills had a hard time developing.
This isn't a cultural issue, in other words, but a class issue. Poverty and discrimination block access to good education, and lack of good education results in poor language skills.
If poor grammar really is a racial thing, then black folks who have lived middle to upper class lives for the past century or so would still be using it and poor white folks would have a solid grasp on standard grammar. Clearly, this is not the case.
Embracing the vernacular--regardless of the race of people using it--as a valid form of formal communication only sets back progress in improving education for the poor. I see nothing wrong with cataloging subcultural slang and accents, but it must be understood that those things are separate from formal standardized language.
Neither Ebonics nor the vernacular used by poor white folks are foreign languages used by recent immigrants. We don't need to teach classes in those languages the way we teach classes in Spanish to new immigrants from Mexico. They are, rather, evidence of a serious problem with education among the poor. I think it's vitally important to recognize it as a that, or we risk creating another generation of kids who can't get good jobs because they sound uneducated, thus perpetuating the poverty cycle.