Ugh

[textualdeviance]

But 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.

Comments

Re: Ebonics doesn't destroy Standard English...

[textualdeviance.livejournal.com]

I feel my point stands: standard English grammar is hard enough to learn without encouraging kids to learn improper grammar. It's not the same thing as teaching different standard languages. Kids can learn both Spanish and English simultaneously. They can't learn two different versions of English. Their brains aren't developed enough to remember which is which with the various rules and it's easy for critical errors to slip in. If you really want AA kids to have a cultural connection, why not teach them an African language along with English instead? That way the correct forms of both are learned.

Grammar is only one component of a dialect, but it's a critical one when it comes to communication and literacy. It should be possible to retain the other features of a dialect (accents, slang, colloquialisms) while still correcting the problem grammar. That goes for any dialect, including the ones my relatives speak.

I really feel that including bad grammar as some sort of protected part of a dialect is shirking the responsibility to give kids the best education possible. Instead of addressing the problems that created the bad grammar in the first place, those problems are being blown off as just cultural things.

Illiteracy is a critical issue among poor AA and Latino populations. In the case of Latinos, it is easy to understand due to so many Latino families in the U.S. being only first or second generation. AAs don't have that issue. Rather, the problem is due to poverty and failures of education (both due to a long history of institutionalized racism, of course.)

With this being such a huge problem, and one that contributes to the continuation of poverty, criminal behavior and other big problems, I don't understand why any AA--or any person concerned about the conditions too many AAs live in--would not want to do as much as possible to correct the underlying problems.

Any teen or adult using bad grammar in anything but the most deliberate way should be a warning sign that something has gone wrong with that person's education. The mere existence of middle and upper class AAs who speak this vernacular casually as well as speaking correct standard English doesn't erase the problem of poor AAs who speak that way not as a choice but due to education failures.

Please excuse me if I don't continue the conversation past this post. I get caught up in these things too easily, and I have a lot to do next week. Understand, though, that I respect your point of view. I just think that the promotion of the bad grammar portions of any vernacular is ultimately damaging to the cause of literacy. There are so many other ways to preserve a culture or subculture that don't involve making education more difficult for at-risk children.