Ebonics: A Farce That Masks The True Problem Of Poverty

JUDGING from the irresponsible initiative of the Oakland, Calif., school board, you'd think that teachers have never before struggled to teach standard English to students from less-educated households. Note to Oakland schoolteachers: This is not new. You have plenty of successful teaching experience to draw on.

This is not about race or racism or the remnants of African languages. This is about children of poverty, children from homes with no books and little appreciation for learning. Teachers have labored to teach those children - black and white- the King's English since schooling began.

To be fair to the beleaguered Oakland educators, they never suggested they would not endeavor to teach poor black children standard English. In fact, the Ebonics imbroglio began over an effort to improve the educational accomplishments of Oakland's black students, whose average grade is D.

But Oakland school-board members veered off into foolishness with a resolution that decreed Ebonics (a word coined from a fusion of "ebony" and "phonics") to be a legitimate language and stated that students should be "taught in Ebonics for the combined purposes of maintaining the legitimacy and richness of such language and to facilitate their acquisition and mastery of English-language skills."

But Ebonics is not a language, as most well-educated Africans would attest. (Listen to a lecture by Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka, who has an excellent command of English.) And declaring it to be one creates problems more profound than making the Oakland school board "a national laughingstock," as Jesse Jackson initially called it.

The more serious problem is that the Oakland school board perpetrates an idea any racist would love: Substandard scholarship - including poor grammar and diction - is "a black thing."

There is no such thing as black English or ebony linguistics. There is standard English and substandard English, proper usage and improper usage. Nobody refers to the substandard English of Appalachia as "white English" or "Apponics."

Black schoolchildren face a peculiar ethic that suggests that rigorous scholarship is somehow outside the bounds of blackness and that kids who aspire to academic excellence are "trying to be white." Thus the current rage among middle-class black kids of trying to look and sound like they come from the ghetto. How perverse!

It is foolish of some black educators to perpetuate those stereotypes. It was not the sincere effort to reach underachieving black kids that was so outrageous but rather this sort of foolishness mouthed by Oakland school-board member Toni Cook: "In my day, they would teach you how to talk like the white folks. . . ." Like the "white folks"? Or like well-educated English-speakers of all colors?

This self-defeating denunciation of standard English is not new. As the daughter of an English teacher who tolerated no Ebonics in her household, I was often ridiculed by other kids: "Why you talk so proper? You trying to be white?"

But back then, teachers did not legitimize the odd notion that the King's English was the sole property of white folks, to be used only when conversing in mixed company. My teachers - even in segregated black schools - tried to teach children that standard English was universal.

It is condescending - indeed, racist - to suggest that black children cannot or should not speak standard English all the time.

(Copyright, 1997, Chronicle Features) Cynthia Tucker's column appears Monday on editorial pages of The Times.