The Skin That We Speak: Thoughts on Language and Culture in the Classroom

Preface

No One Should Judge Another Soul

LISA DELPIT

There are individuals you encounter in life who touch your heart, there are those who touch your mind, and there are those who touch your spirit. And then there is Asa G. Hilliard III, contributor to this volume, who managed by his brilliance, his love, his willingness to battle, and his commitment to justice to touch all three. Although this world lost Asa’s physical presence on August 12, 2007, his memory and his phenomenal body of work in history, psychology, and education will continue to inspire scholars who seek to do what is right in the world.

One of Asa’s primary lessons was that we must leave no stone unturned, no battle unfought, to allow the brilliance of our children—of children of color—to bring light to the world. He knew the forces aligned against our young: those who would tell them that they were not smart enough, strong enough, good enough; those who would say that they did not speak right; those who would cause them to question their own worth and thus stunt their growth; those who would suggest that they were anything other than phenomenal. I have learned from my Brother Asa to seek out those dark forces and work to extinguish their power.

Asa also knew that our children are currently in pain. They hurt from the stereotypes that this country perpetrates about them. They hurt because televisions across the country portray them as violent deviants but never show the black teenage boys who spent days helping cars out of frozen embankments one winter in Baltimore, or black teenagers in Miami who spend their free time tutoring elementary school kids. They hurt because they are told that they cannot achieve but are never shown their brilliant ancestors—from pharaohs to scholars to artists to mathematicians to ministers to scientists to philosophers to writers, etc., etc., etc. They hurt because the gift of language their mothers and fathers and grandmothers and grandfathers gave them is considered inadequate, inappropriate, and unacceptable. This book is about both the pain and the promise of children who have been least well served by the school systems of this country.

Living in south Florida brings the opportunity to interact with a plethora of cultures, and to see such cultures interact with each other. As I was sitting in the waiting room of my optometrist recently, an older white woman, accompanied by her Pakistani caretaker, was being fitted for glasses by a Dominican optician. We were all chatting amiably when an older Hispanic woman wheeled a toddler, possibly her grandson, into the waiting room. The little boy was adorable and exceptionally friendly. He waved to everyone, smiled, and played peek-a-boo with whomever he could get to pay attention to him. When everyone was otherwise occupied, he and his grandmother conversed animatedly in Spanish. After a while the older white woman said to the grandmother, Doesn’t he speak English? The grandmother answered haltingly that he did not. The white woman continued adamantly, Well, you should speak to him in English. You know you’re in America now and he needs to speak English. Clearly the grandmother knew she was being admonished but did not know enough English to reply. She said something in Spanish and the Cuban receptionist, perhaps translating or perhaps stating her own opinion, said in English, He’ll learn when he goes to school. Visibly upset, the older white woman continued, Well, that’s too late. You need to teach him now. You need to speak to him in English. You are in America.

Uncomfortable with the Spanish-speaking grandmother’s discomfort and not able to hold back, I chimed in, "Well, he will learn in school and from television and isn’t it great that he’ll be bilingual? The older woman turned to me and said, her voice rising, He needs to speak English. People come here and think they don’t have to learn English. My daughter couldn’t get a job because she couldn’t speak Spanish. In her own country they expected her to speak Spanish! Can you imagine?! Not willing to back down, I countered with, Well, wouldn’t it be great if we were all bilingual? She went on to inform me that even people in Europe speak English. When she was there, she let me know, everyone she met spoke English to her. Why couldn’t the people who came here learn to speak English? Fortunately, the receptionist called me to the exam room before I pointed out the flaw in her argument—didn’t the fact that the people in Europe spoke English support the notion that we should all be bilingual? Once again I was reminded of the linguistic barriers our children face. Rather than building on their existing linguistic strengths, so many in this country instead demand, Why can’t they talk like us? Who do they think they are?"

This past summer, the renowned Bob Moses, former civil rights leader in Mississippi and present founder and head of the Algebra Project, organized a summer institute for a group of forty low-income, low-performing Haitian, African American, and Hispanic ninth graders. The program, organized through the Center for Urban Education and Innovation—which I currently direct—allowed the students to stay on Florida International University’s campus for the entire six weeks. The young people spent ten-hour days working with Bob and several other instructors in mathematics, language arts, linguistics, sociology, and the arts. Although the adults in charge were run ragged by the end of the six-week period—keeping up with forty fifteen-year-olds for twenty-four hours a day is no easy task—the young people begged to stay longer. Despite their initial status as low performers, they were excited about learning new things and all indicated that they, as one young man declared, learned more in six weeks than they had in nine years of school!

One afternoon toward the end of the program, one of the instructors asked a group of students what was the most interesting thing they had learned that summer. Their list was impressive: Grimm’s Law, also known as the First Germanic Sound Shift (from their study of linguistics), polynomial structures, the geometry of pop-up books, and critical race theory. Quite a sophisticated bundle of knowledge in six weeks. I wondered, though, if the students really understood the meaning of the topics they named, so I asked one, "What is critical race theory? Well, said Samantha, I always knew that racism exists, but critical race theory lets you see how racism exists below the surface of things." What a concise and meaningful definition.

I describe the learning of these young people, who are such gifts to the world, for a reason. First, the struggle to initiate the program Bob Moses and the other teachers devised is indicative of the kind of battle Asa left us to wage to reveal the promise and brilliance of our children. But, despite their brilliance, their excitement about learning, their verve for life, these young high schoolers are in pain. As I spent time with them and talked with them about school, about life, about sense of self, I learned that, just as will be likely for the Spanish-speaking toddler in the doctor’s office, these young people have been hurt by others’ responses to the skin that they speak.

One afternoon I spoke with a group of the young people in their language arts/linguistics class. I talked about this book and read several passages to them. I asked them what they thought about language issues in their own schools. One young man named Edynce started out with, If you don’t speak proper English then they don’t want you in their little world. Others chimed in, with increasing intensity:

They put us in the ‘F’ schools [those designated as failing by the school system] to try to separate us. Then they give less money to the black schools than to the white schools.

They talk about ‘no child left behind,’ but they taking us down little by little.

They classify black people as loud and ignorant. If you be out in the street with your family, they say, ‘These people so ghetto.’

Yeah, they try to hide it, but it rises to the surface. Racism gets in everything.

Then they suspend us if we try to protest.

Things will never change. That’s just the way it is.

The Haitian students were quieter at first, but began to add to the conversation:

People call you a ‘boat [person]’ when they hear how you talk.

Yeah, they get upset when you don’t understand what they’re trying to say.

When you try to take a part of a child’s culture away, it’s wrong. It makes you feel like you’re dumb, like your parents and community are wrong.

You shouldn’t crush a child’s spirit. They will just want to stop participating, to stop speaking.

Edynce looked up with sorrowful eyes and said, No one should ever judge another soul. It can destroy someone.

Yes, it can destroy someone. It can destroy all of us if we do not find a way to create classrooms, communities, and societies that fulfill the promise of all of our young.

Thank you, Asa, for helping us to understand what must be done.

Introduction

LISA DELPIT

In a study conducted in 1974 to assess the development of attitudes in preschool children toward Black English (BE)and Standard English (SE), Marilyn Rosenthal, the researcher, painted two identical cardboard boxes with similarly drawn faces. Two tapes had previously been made by the same bi-dialectal African American speaker, one in African American language (as distinguished by vocabulary, syntax, and pronunciation)and one in American Standard English. A tape player with one of the tapes was put into each box, out of the children’s view. Each box was described as a head and each relayed the same messages. The voice in each box introduced itself to the children and indicated that it had a present for the child. Later, each box also asked the children if they would give the speaker their crayons. The children were then asked a number of questions, including these: Which head, Steve [Standard English] or Kenneth [Black English], would you like to get the present from? Whom do you like better? Whom would you like to play with? Whom would you give your crayons to?

Over 70 percent of the time, both African American and European American three- to five-year-olds categorized the BE speaker as African American and the SE speaker as white. Further, most of them wanted the present from the SE speaker because he had nicer presents. The majority of the children of both ethnicities believed that the BE speaker, Kenneth, needed the crayons more, with one European American boy, aged five and a half, saying that he would give his crayons to Kenneth cause he don’t have nothing and one four-year-old European American girl indicating that she was afraid of Kenneth (Rosenthal, p. 62).

The findings are fascinating. They indicate, according to the researcher, that very young children have developed attitudes toward African American language and assumptions about its speakers that closely parallel adult American views:

Interestingly, the African American and white children reflected differences in their personal preferences towards the representative speakers of the two language forms, with the white children preferring the SE speaker and the African American children preferring the BE speaker. Futhermore, there were expressions of learned stereotyped images associated with both speakers. Many of these were pejorative toward the BE speaker—identifying him as talking silly, being unintelligible, being harmful, having nothing, and not having drawing ability. … The SE speaker was stereotyped as being more gentle, looking better, having better drawing ability, and being the symbol of success (the last idea was expressed by Population B [African American]).*

It should not be surprising that these attitudes carry over into school. In another study done in the 1970s, student teachers were asked to assess eight hypothetical schoolchildren on the scales of intelligence, being a good student, being privileged, enthusiastic, self-confident, and gentle [Giles & Powesland, 1975:3, cited in R. A. Hudson, Sociolinguistics, Cambridge University Press, 1980]. The eight hypothetical students were each defined by three types of information: a photograph, a tape-recorded sample of speech, and a sample of school work (consisting of an essay and a drawing). Each piece of information was based on a real child, but the pieces were recombined to give equal numbers of occasions in which each type of information would be judged positively and negatively.

Hudson (1980) describes the study results:

The question to be answered by this experiment was: what would happen if information from one source gave a favourable impression but that from another source gave an unfavourable one? The very clear answer was that information from the speech sample always [emphasis added] took priority over that from the photograph or the school-work: a favourable impression on the speech sample overrode unfavourable impressions from the other sources, and conversely. (p. 208)

As Michael Stubbs contends (in chapter 5), if school considers someone’s language inadequate, they’ll probably fail.

Our language embraces us long before we are defined by any other medium of identity. In our mother’s womb we hear and feel the sounds, the rhythms, the cadences of our mother tongue. We learn to associate contentment with certain qualities of voice and physical disequilibrium with others. Our home language is as viscerally tied to our beings as existence itself—as the sweet sounds of love accompany our first milk, as our father’s pride permeates our bones and flesh when he shows us off to his friends, as a gentle lullaby or soft murmurs signal release into restful sleep. It is no wonder that our first language becomes intimately connected to our identity.

Just as our skin provides us with a means to negotiate our interactions with the world—both in how we perceive our surroundings and in how those around us perceive us—our language plays an equally pivotal role in determining who we are: it is The Skin That We Speak.

For better or worse, in our stratified society our appearance can serve to create an expectation of success or failure, of brilliance or stupidity, of power or impotence. Those whose skin color or hair texture or facial features do not place them within the dominant phenotype are often viewed as lesser than. But our language skin provides an even more precise mechanism for determining status. The omission of an s, an unusual inflection, or a nasalized word ending can indicate to listeners exactly where in the social hierarchy a speaker should be assigned. Victoria Purcell-Gates sums it up in the title of her chapter, … As Soon As She Opened Her Mouth!

The purpose of this 2002 collection is to explore the links between language and identity, between language and political hierarchy, and between language and cultural conflict.

Most of the articles in this collection make reference to African American language (also called Black English, Ebonics, or African American Vernacular English), which is, without question, one of the most vigorously debated linguistic codes in our nation’s history. As early as 1884, J. Harrison attempted to detail in a fifty-seven-page treatise that the language of Negroes was an oddity that only vaguely resembled language at all.*

This volume also concerns itself primarily with language and education. This issue of language use in school is particularly volatile. The commencement of formal education is usually one of the first settings in a person’s life when their language may be judged as right or wrong; when assumptions may be made about their intelligence, family life, future potential, or moral fiber every time a sentence is uttered. African American language has had a particularly stormy relationship with the educational power structure. Schools often see themselves, and are seen by the larger society, as the arbiters of what is proper, correct, and decent. African American language forms have been considered none of the above. Thus, there have been continual moves to eliminate its presence in classrooms, and raging debates whenever it appears that there might be some move to suggest otherwise.

The most recent flare-up, the so-called Ebonics Debate, took the country by storm during 1996 and 1997. The Oakland School District put forth a proposal that named the language form spoken by many of its African American students Ebonics. It not only provided a moniker, but the proposal also declared Ebonics a distinct language, not a dialect or substandard form of English. Further, it recommended that teachers be trained in the elements of Ebonics and steeped in aspects of African American culture. Such training, they argued, would enable teachers to create instruction for African American students that would allow them not only to excel in learning standard English, but to excel in all school subjects. This result had already been achieved on a small scale using the program the board advocated, the Standard English Proficiency Program. Despite the school board’s good intentions, the country went on a rampage, with reporter after reporter declaring that Oakland was planning to teach Black slang and ghetto language to its schoolchildren. Several of the essays in this volume refer to the debate, and more details of the battle are described in chapter 3, No Kinda Sense. Also included, as an appendix, is the formal response of the Linguistic Society of America on the Oakland Ebonics debate.

However, this was not the first time African American language and the education establishment engaged in a very awkward, painful, and public dance. After the riots of the 1960s the general public became aware that African American children were failing in schools in large numbers. African American leaders and, later, President Johnson’s War on Poverty demanded solutions. Educational scholars, casting about for blame, speculated about the cause of the problem and hit upon the idea that the children’s inferior language was the cause of their learning problem. With little or no empirical research to back the claims, what amounted to rumors were circulated through articles, essays, and speeches indicating that African American children had a miniscule vocabulary, were nonverbal, had no substantive communicative exchanges with their parents, and were crushed by the noise and confusion in their homes. The Head Start Program, in large part, was initiated to mitigate the culturally and linguistically deprived homes of poor African American children.

Linguists, mostly white, began to study the question. The language was mapped and its unique grammatical features, phonology, and semantics were identified. In contrast to the educators, most linguists concluded that there was nothing inherently inferior about the language of African Americans, but that problems might arise when the language of school and the language of home met. Some African American scholars began to take issue with the work of the white linguists, suggesting that, at best, they were unable to really understand Black language because the language did not exist apart from the culture and they had insufficient access to the culture. It was during this period that the term Ebonics (black + phonics, i.e., black sounds) was coined by Professor Robert Williams in the early 1970s, when he convened a meeting of African American scholars to study the question from a culturally specific perspective. He proposed that the white linguists were wrong to consider African American language to be a dialect of English, since the linguistic code really had its roots in West African languages. As the controversy continued, accusations of opportunism, self-aggrandizement, and being in league with the government’s attempts to keep African Americans disenfranchised eventually led many white linguists to seek other areas of study (Shuy in Farr-Whiteman).

The next major public explosion concerning African American language and the schools was in 1979, when, in what came to be known as "the King case, parents from the Green Road Housing Project in Detroit sued the school system for not educating their children, specifically for failing to teach them to read. The judge in the case, Judge Joiner, eventually dismissed all of the plaintiffs’ claims except one, forcing the lawsuit to be tried only on 1703(f), which reads in part: No state shall deny equal educational opportunity to an individual on account of his