Dare To Ask Talk And News About Our Differences
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Ebonics is a major, 400 year old language variant, as old and as real as the black experience here itself. Questions of its acceptance are irrelevant. Its speakers will never master standard English, however, through the sloppy, worn and incompetent techniques embraced by our public education system. Linguistically, Ebonics is no more bad English than it is not English at all. An uninformed person may call it bad English because its vocabulary is essentially English. But a language is determined by its grammar, not its vocabulary. The grammar of Ebonics is substantially based on the mother tongues of Africans brought here as slaves 400 years ago. Forbidden from being taught to even read during their first 250 years here blacks created their on ‘language’ by superimposing an English vocabulary over the grammar of their mother tongues. If this process, known as reflexification, is allowed to reinforce itself without intervention for 250 years, the end result is effectively a new language. English, a romance language, is dramatically more foreign to the African languages than it is to its western European based sister languages. Persons whose mother tongues are any of these other romance languages should have significantly less difficulty mastering English than someone whose mother tongue is African, though they too will have to be formally and carefully taught English as a foreign language. With the grammar of Ebonics being fundamentally derived from African languages the need for a specialized, almost foreign-language like approach in teaching standard English to Ebonics speakers becomes evident. No informed persons have been suggesting teaching Ebonics, but linguists do argue that there are features of Ebonics which must be taken into account when teaching standard English to Ebonics speakers, or the efforts are likely to be wasted. Treating a student’s Ebonics as ‘bad English’ is akin to treating Italian as bad Latin. Nothing inspiring and beneficial to the student can come of this approach, which explains the public school system’s dismal failure in competently teaching standard English. Blacks who mastered standard English for the first time were able to do so because it was effectively taught as if it were a foreign language. This is one area where most of us, and especially those disparaging whites who know nothing about Ebonics, should listen more to the experts, as un-American as that may be for many Americans.
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Name : I. Moses., Gender : M, Race : Black/African American, City : Columbia, State : MD, Country : United States, Education level : Over 4 Years of College,One cannot be sure if David A. is just deeply misinformed and believes the many criticisms he levels against blacks, or if there are deeper reasons for his sentiments. If there are more than a handful of Americans holding the views articulated in his posts, then that very ignorance is a threat to our national security.
For one to have studied blacks as seriously as David A. professes in one of his posts and then come to the shallow and often silly conclusions repeated throughout those posts may be, on first sight, baffling, but no subject is that difficult to understand by a competent, open-minded student. The problem lies not in the subject (blacks in this case), but most likely the student, his flawed study habits, such as employing blindly obsessive biases, and an overall incompetency to handle the subject.
Things or people ostensibly void of any redemptive value (as David A. would have us believe blacks are) normally do not occupy our focus – the way blacks seem to occupy that of David A. Obsessing on a group while articulating nothing but negative sentiments and loathing toward that group is often a defense mechanism of converting something desired (but unattainable) into something discredited and despised. His spending ‘many years trying to dig deeper into the reason why blacks do some of the things they do,’ of seeing blacks as having ‘more opportunities than anyone else in this country’ while ‘continually crying about being victims,’ or of persistently vilifying blacks as loud non-tippers who are disinterested in education, all the while claiming to have at least ‘one black friend,’ may sound like ignorance run amuck, but the deeper reason for this avalanche of nonsense may be an envy of something about blacks that he, being white, will never have.
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Name : I. Moses., Gender : M, Race : Black/African American, City : Columbia, State : MD, Country : United States, Education level : Over 4 Years of College,ArzaThoth’s argument is troubling, not just because it is such an insult to good judgment and common sense, but because it reminds us all of the thriving obsession among many in this country with inflaming and reinforcing prejudices. Blacks, who have been the victims of so much crime and suffering in this country, are probably more empathetic than most Americans to the suffering of others. After all, any man anywhere in the world who has ever been hit or kicked in the groin (and that includes most men) will instinctively groan when he sees it happen to another man. Those who have known suffering cannot help but empathize with another fellow sufferer, regardless of race, color or creed.
So the notion that blacks would somehow endorse these crimes is ludicrous. It is the classic psychological projection defense, in which whites go out of their way to find reasons for accusing blacks of having the very same unhealthy attitudes and motives held by so many whites. The overwhelming majority of the nearly 500 hate groups in this country are white, and 75 percent of them target their hate against blacks. There is little indication that white Americans are as outraged with the behavior of these groups as ArzaThoth would have us believe.
Blacks rely on the national media no less than whites, and if that media ignored those crimes, there is no reasonable basis for blaming blacks for not knowing about them, especially because the nearly 37 million blacks in this country do not all live next door to where those crimes occurred. Plus, black expressions of alarm and outrage have never garnered much attention in this country. That is why so many of our problems just fester and get worse.
That a white commits a crime against a black or a black against a white does not in and of itself make that crime ‘racially motivated.’ A crime becomes racially motivated if the principal reason for the crime is racial. If the principal reason is anything else, e.g. sex, money, drugs, etc., then the crime cannot be adjudged to be racially motivated. And any media, be it local or national, would be irresponsible in labeling it so.
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Name : I. Moses., Gender : M, Race : Black/African American, City : Columbia, State : MD, Country : United States, Education level : Over 4 Years of College,There is some real merit in Wam’s original question about the extremely hostile attitudes of some Italian Americans toward blacks, which should not be lost in the rush to criticize Sean’s response. Some of the most anti-black sentiments I have heard or have been informed of have come from Italian Americans, and not necessarily all on the East Coast. Choosing to see this as just an example of ‘insular communities’ comes across as a self-serving attempt to contort this ugly behavior into something acceptable, using the argument that ‘others do it’ under similar circumstances of insularity. But such a degree of insularity in any society as open as ours is viewed under most other circumstances as downright sickness, or at best medieval. Sean’s response, while colorful and somewhat extreme around the edges, may be much closer to the truth than many of his critics here are aware of or are willing to admit. The truth does not necessarily have to be cloaked in pretty dressing – especially if the truth itself is not pretty.
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Name : I. Moses., Gender : M, Race : Black/African American, City : Columbia, State : MD, Country : United States, Education level : Over 4 Years of College,Come to Columbia, Md., arguably one of the most thoroughly intergrated and diverse communities in the country. This roughly 35-year-old ‘new town’ of about 110,000 is midway between Baltimore and Washington, D.C. It was conceived and built by the late James Rouse (of shopping mall fame across the East Coast) and was created and advertised as a racially ‘open city.’ I came to Columbia in 1971 mostly because of this and found it an oasis of racial harmony and decency in the sea of racism and bigotry that so infested the surrounding Baltimore-D.C. megalopolis at that time. Things have improved consderably in many of the surrounding areas during the last 35 years, but Columbia remains the hub of diversity in the area. It has been a rewarding place to live. It is worth noting, however, that our country has a history of profound racism. And while the situation is slowly improving, chances are very slim that you will find any place in this country that is void of racism.
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Name : I. Moses., Gender : M, Race : Black/African American, City : Columbia, State : MD, Country : United States, Education level : Over 4 Years of College,
