The More Things Change
Slumbering Ebonics…
[by Ray Haynes] 7/25/05

In 1996, when I was the vice-chair of the Senate Education Committee, I began a campaign against Ebonics, the name given to that version of slang that ends up in most rap music, and which has been used to make several movies and commercials somewhat amusing. Who can forget the “Wasssuuup!” commercial or the white guy in “Scary Movie 3” trying to “be black” by using Ebonics when he talked to his friends and neighbors (ok, so it wasn’t amusing, but I should get some literary license to make my point).

In 1996, the Oakland School Board created a national story when it announced that it was going to introduce “Ebonics” into its curriculum. They declared that Ebonics was not English “slang,” but rather a separate language, with its roots in West Africa, and was spoken in many African American communities throughout this country. The whole thing was a rather lame attempt to access bilingual money in the state education budget, but it did make California, once again, the butt of jokes nationwide, as people drafted the Ebonics dictionary, and tried to write curricula for American History, mathematics, physics and chemistry using Ebonics. The whole idea died. In fact, the school district told the Senate Education Committee that they had dropped the idea months before the hearing on my bill, that they had never intended “Ebonics” to be a separate language. My Democrats colleagues on the committee bought their testimony, and killed my bill.

Well, like most of the bad ideas foisted upon us by the left under the guise of multiculturalism, Ebonics didn’t die, it just slumbered in academia. Now, like a very smelly Rip Van Winkle, it has been revived once again – this time in San Bernardino. The San Bernardino Unified School District has adopted a new school policy, directed at black students, already the lowest achieving group in the district, incorporating Ebonics into their curriculum, thereby ensuring that black students in their district will never learn English.

True to form, some sociology professor from Cal State San Bernardino has given this policy her blessing claiming (and this is no joke) that “[Ebonics] should be considered a foreign language and [black] students should be taught like other students who speak a foreign language.” This professor actually thought this program would be “beneficial” for African American students.

How do you respond to something like that? Has the world really gone this crazy, or is it just California? Someone, who teaches college students in our wonderful state, actually thinks that “Sup Peeps” or “Dam Who Dat” or “Phat” are part of a foreign language. It is hard for me to conceive of a policy designed to do more harm to these students. We might as well be teaching flat-earth theory in college these days.

OK, just for the sake of argument, say we declare it a foreign language. Remember Proposition 227, the initiative that built immersion into our curriculum. That was intended for the bilingual programs then in effect which emphasized native language instruction for our foreign speaking students (of course, they were talking about Spanish, Chinese, Russian, and languages like that which are actually spoken in another country). Proposition 227 said teach these students English though total immersion, and then put them into mainstream English speaking classes, don’t teach them in their native language.

Hmmm – maybe we should treat Ebonics like a foreign language. Prop 227 would then require these pseudo-educators in charge of our schools to immerse the students in English, and teach them the academic subjects in English as well.

These folks should be careful of what they ask for. They might actually have to do their job. CRO

Mr. Haynes is a California Assembleyman representing Riverside and Temecula and frequent contributor to CaliforniaRepublic.org.

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