HOOKED ON EBONICS

Christopher Hitchens

America's black children are already being "branded on the tongue." A California school board's proposal to use "Ebonics" in the classroom offends history, culture, and common sense

In the course of "the trial of the century," on July 12, 1995, to be exact, a witness named Robert Heidstra was called to the stand and asked about his dog-walking experience in the vicinity of Nicole Simpson's home. He had, it seemed, been exercising the pooches and heard voices raised at or about the material time. Christopher Darden wanted to know if Mr. Heidstra had indeed told a friend that one of these voices sounded like that of a "black man." This was altogether too much for Johnnie Cochran, who objected strenuously and said, "You can't tell by somebody's voice whether they sounded black." In case anyone may have missed his drift, he added that the very idea was "entirely inappropriate . . . in America, at this time, in 1995."

Mr. Cochran's grammar was as confused as his thought, if we agree to give him the benefit of confusion. Anybody who owns a telephone in America and has average hearing can tell "by somebody's voice," not if they "sound" black, but if they are black. (Not all corollaries hold. You can't automatically tell that someone isn't. But you can damn sure tell that someone definitely is.) What are we noticing here? It's an accent, an inflection, a set of usages, and sometimes a grammatical or syntactical giveaway. In the public-school system of the city graced by Mr. Cochran, it is effectively recognized as a separate dialect. Farther north, in Oakland, it has recently become famous under the name of "Ebonics." In Hollywood not so long ago, the makers of Airplane! put subtitles under a conversation between two "jive" speakers. Nobody complained that the joke went over anybody's head.

If this point is as simple as it seems, then what's the problem with December's resolution of the Oakland School Board? Describing Ebonics as "genetically based" and derived from the tongues of the Niger-Congo, it advocated recognition of the distinct language of local black schoolchildren "for the combined purposes of maintaining the legitimacy and richness of such language . . . and to facilitate their acquisition and mastery of English language skills."

Well, there are actually three problems. The first is that the resolution itself is composed in no known language, though there are traces of bureaucratese, therapese, legalese, and business English to be found within it. The second is that "Ebonics" is a made-up term stressing two things—color and phonetics—which have absolutely nothing to do with the structure or definition of a language. The third is that language by its nature cannot be "genetically based." If the black kids in Oakland are in fact speaking a different tongue, then it's because of their real lives and not because of any notional ancestral connection to the Niger-Congo. The essence of language is its transmissibility, which cannot be through the bloodstream. So that's that for the Oakland School Board, which seems to have been interested in picking up some "bilingual" subsidy dough and which has since hastily reversed itself, stating for the record that Black English will only be honored as part of a campaign to make it disappear.

The truth of the matter is that a number of unemployable cultural nationalists from the 1960s have found a form of employment in the educational bureaucracy of our less Athenian inner cities. One West Coast activist is Ron Karenga (now known as Maulana, which he believes to be Swahili for "master teacher"), whom I remember distinctly as the leader of an Africanist nut group called Us—later found to be partially supported by the F.B.I.—and who in 1966 gave us the exciting concept of Kwanza. Mr. Karenga's slogan in those days was "Anywhere we are, Us is!" I liked the slogan then, and I like it even more now. But if only the whole question could be disposed of with such ease.

In my native British islands, homeland of this great universal language, there dwells a population that is famously "branded on the tongue." I can "place" anyone as soon as he or she begins to utter. James Baldwin once phrased it very well:

To open your mouth in England is (if I may use black English) to "put your business in the street": you have confessed your parents, your youth, your school, your salary, your self-esteem, and, alas, your future.

Which isn't exaggerating by very much. Margaret Thatcher had to take several courses in elocution to rid herself of bumpkin and awkward tones and to become the queenly figure that I left England to get away from. (To get away from whom, I mean to say, I left England.) And you would not have been able to see Trainspotting at your local multiplex last summer had it not been painstakingly dubbed. But it's a striking fact that black people born in England are not branded on the tongue, or at least not as blacks. They speak Cockney or South London or Manchester, or the BBC English, which is charmingly known as "Received Pronunciation," or "R.P." There are a few Caribbean vernacular imports in the language, and that's it. So there must be a reason why this is not true for these United States, and it certainly won't be a "genetic" one, but it may not be found just by having a free laugh at the expense of some mediocre officials in Oakland.

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'James Baldwin could write a stirring justification of black speech and black code, but he could not do so by employing that code itself.'

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Baldwin made the above observation in an essay entitled "If Black English Isn't a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?" His defense of the separate integrity of the language was a very striking one, though I think that, as a man whose favorite author was Henry James, he would have winced at terming it "Ebonics." He once wrote, in Notes of a Native Son, "I hazard that the King James Bible, the rhetoric of the storefront churches, something ironic and violent and perpetually understated in Negro speech—and something of Dickens' love for bravura—have something to do with me today; but I wouldn't stake my life on it." Now you're talking. For Baldwin, recognition of the language he didn't speak was a duty paid to history. Black people, he said, came to America "chained to each other, but from different tribes: Neither could speak the other's language. If two black people, at that bitter hour of the world's history, had been able to speak to each other, the institution of chattel slavery could never have lasted as long as it did." Baldwin, as it happens, was entirely correct about the deliberate policy of splitting up slaves by language group. In the mid-18th century, in his awful book A New Voyage to Guinea, the slave master Captain William Smith wrote that by "having some of every Sort on board, there will be no more Likelihood of their succeeding in a Plot, than of finishing the Tower of Babel."

Once landed in America, the slaves who had survived the Middle Passage had a bit of nautical Pidgin English, the memories of their own varying tongues, and many encounters with different sorts of English speakers. Cleanth Brooks, the great scholar of William Faulkner and of southern speech, argues that the habit of saying "dis" and "dat" originates with the peasants of Kent and Sussex in southern England, who did indeed speak in that fashion and who came to colonize Virginia and the Carol inas. By this reckoning, as he puts it, poor and illiterate southern blacks "held on to what their ancestors had learned by ear and which had been passed on to them through oral tradition. In short, they rather faithfully preserved what they had heard, were little influenced by spelling, and in general actually served as a conservative force."

Conservative," too, are the Sea Islanders, off the South Carolina coast, who as I write are still speaking in Gullah. Across the harbor from Charleston, perhaps a quarter of a million African-Americans use a dialect, or patois, that, according to Lorenzo Turner's celebrated book Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect, contains up to 6,000 African words and expressions. ("Baraka" is the word for "thanks," and its origin is Mandingo; "efi" is the word for "smoke," and its origin is Yoruba.) Unlike the children of Oakland, California, the Gullahs can claim a direct philological relation with the mother continent. But this turns out not to clarify much, since the mother continent is a place where languages and dialects metamorphose with the crossing of a river. I have been in the NigerCongo, and I didn't meet a single person who spoke only one language. To speak three is quite common, very often with a European colonial one as a kind of top layer or lingua franca. Inarticulacy is not the problem. Black English, then, is a product of the Babel effect of slavery, of pidgin and Creole, and of what Baldwin rightly calls "the unprecedented tabernacle" of the black church. Without it, we would be shorn of innumerable vigorous and humorous expressions. But it is only a tributary of English and can never substitute for it. That's why the cadences of black American oratory are imperishable, and why its greatest pulpit practitioners drew from the same well that Baldwin described, and eventually silenced their white audiences into thoughtfulness.

Take the example of Yiddish, the mother tongue of many impoverished immigrants and former serfs. When I say "What's not to like?" I am using a different syntax and one I wouldn't be without. (Without which, I mean to say, I would not be.) But it's English Yiddish, not Yiddish English. Can you imagine Jewish neighborhoods mandating "Hebronics" as a way of boosting morale? I don't think so. Nonetheless, I'm still a littie melancholy at the total eclipse of the language of Isaac Singer, and I don't look forward to the day when all New Yorkers routinely say "with regard to" and "as far as." At least Yiddish was a language in which things could be written. There's effectively nothing in print that's written in Black English, and the nearest approximation—the "Uncle Remus" narrative of Joel Chandler Harris—was the work of a white man with a good ear. Baldwin, in other words, could write a stirring justification of black speech and black code, but he could not do so by employing that code itself. And this is the Information Age, buster, in case you hadn't noticed. An age that doesn't sit well with the "oral tradition." Anyone instructing a child that this is irrelevant, or anyone prating about Homer and the Bible being "oral" too, is doing violence to that child's prospects.

'In Hollywood not so long ago, the makers of Airplane! put subtitles under a conversation between two jive speakers.'

Of course, violence is being done already. Not many years ago, it was predicted with confidence that Black English would die out because everyone would be watching the same television programs. (National broadcasting networks have contributed hugely to the erosion of Piedmontese in Italy, Provengal in France, and Ruthenian in the Ukraine and the Czech lands.) The use has declined, but in some areas it has also intensified. This is testimony to the persistence—or, rather, the re-emergence and consolidation—of segregation in American cities. Those who rush to say that Oakland teachers are failing the kids had better acknowledge that they had been "failed" well before now.

Whether we agree to call it a slang, an idiom, a vernacular, or a debased survival, the fact is that Black English does exist and is spoken, and does define (and circumscribe) the world of many Americans. I would not want to be an inner-city teacher and have no ear for it. Would it be good to have a manual for educators? Quite possibly. Can physics be taught in it? Quite obviously not. Does it have suggestive crossovers with the mainstream? Sure. Should it be taught? No—it's already been taught before the child gets to school. Would it, and its survival, make a good subject for a Ph.D. dissertation? Undoubtedly. Can its recognition help toward its abolition? That must be the hope.

But not complete abolition. I once had the amazing privilege of having Wynton Marsalis play in my apartment. (Play an instrument, I mean.) We talked later about rap and reggae, and he gave me a brilliantly lucid explanation of the no-goodness and second-rateness of it all. Finishing this up, he lapsed from the language of Chaucer and Milton for an instant and, pausing for finality, said, "It is some 6w//shit." That last pungent cadence drove the whole thing squarely home.

I called a few trusted friends in the week of the Ebonics brouhaha. Noam Chomsky, the founder of modern linguistics, said that while there's no difference in principle between "I be" and "Je suis," and while pre-modern and pre-technological languages can be extremely dynamic and complex, the chances of evolving one in a ghetto were distinctly slim. "If it's taught, it has to be like the way that Standard English is taught to unintelligible white kids in eastern Tennessee— as a means of making them fluent." Adolph Reed, professor of politics at Northwestern, said that he had two reactions to the Oakland news. "The first reaction was: Oh man, I'd better check that I still have my American passport. The second reaction was to go and have a consoling drink." Baldwin made a point of including irony as one of the necessary ingredients of the black vernacular style. And "irony," as the great Polish-American laureate Czeslaw Milosz once put it, "is the glory of slaves." There is tragedy and history and emotion involved in the survival of a black speech in America, and giggling at its expense is not good manners. But the worst irony of all would be to congratulate, hypocritically, the "richness" of something that threatens to imprison its speakers in the confines of a resentful, baffled, muttering serfdom.