“Black English” – a barrier or a failure?

Press, 20 August 1979, Page 18

“Black English” - a barrier or a failure?

From the “Economist,” London

A recent ruling by a Federal court in Detroit has uncovered a long-simmering controversy among educators about whether “Black English” represents a learning barrier or a learning failure for the children who apeak it. By deciding in favour of a claim that 11 black pupils in the Martin Luther King Jr. elementary school of Ann Arbor, Michigan, had been unfairly classified as slow learners because they failed to speak stanaard English, judge Charles Joiner in effect sided with those who hold that black English is not a mistaken version of standard English, but a separate and distinct linguistic system requiring special attention by school authorities. Professor J. L. Dillard, a linguist whose testimony at the trial influenced the judge’s decision has argued in a numb-’r of books and articles that about 80 per cent of blacx Americans have inherited much of tiieir grammar and syntax from the pidgin English that developed in the course of the African slave trade. A pidgin language, says Professor Dillard, is one that is developed among people who cannot communicate with each other in any of their native tongues, and that has no native speakers. It borrows from several languages — black English shows West African and even Portuguese influences along with English ones. It also evolves its own

rules, violations of which are both recognisable and recognised by the speakers. In black English, for example, “He sick” expresses the standard English idea, “He is sick at this moment,” but not the idea, “He is sick all the time.” For the latter, the black English speaker says, “He be sick.” Conversely, the sentence “He sick all the time,” or the sentence “He be sick right now,” would be recognised as wrong by users of black English. Schoolteachers, however, especially white ones, regard both the correct and incorrect black English usages as wrong, for obvious reasons. Moreover, they often interpret the use of black English as a sign of ignorance or thickheadedness. Thus, says Professor Dillard. a teachet who hears a pupil say, “Can he go there. I'll see him” — instead of “If he can go there, I’ll see him” — may assume that the child lacks the concept of conditionality. It may never occur to the teacher that a declarative “Can he" is, in black English, the syntax that connotes conditionality. Or the teacher may think of the sentence as merely slang to be “cleaned up.” This was in effect the position taken bv the Ann Arbor school board, when it argued that a Federal law requiring schools to overcome “language barriers” caused by race or national origin was inapplicable in the Michigan case.

It Is generally thought the law was drawn up largely with Hispanics in mind, but, according to Mr Gabriel Kaimowitz, the lawyer for the 11 children, the legislative history leaves Congressional intentions unclear: “We may have slipped through a loophole,” he says. Ironically, he adds, the problem of black English was “compounded” and made “especially poignant” by the success of school moves towards racial integration since the historic case of Brown v. Board of Education. Black children now find themselves in integrated settings, where the elimination of possessives (“He book”) and the dropping of tenses (“I swim” for “I swam”) are unacceptable to — and subject to ridicule from — white children and teachers. “Before Brown.” says Mr Kaimowitz, “They were separate, but at least comfort’able.” As a result, the Ann Arbor school board has been ordered to draw up a plan for increasing teachers’ sensitivity to black English and to provide the pupils with special instruction in the standard English they must have in later life. "Similar orders may soon go out elsewhere. But whether or not teachers — more and more a group with language problems of their own — have the skill to carry out such plans remains a question.