Week 9, Post 2: Shafer & Grandma

My Take
I very much enjoyed Shafer's pre-writing presentation/exercises.  He has his students look at the various uses of language -- to control women, to control Black people, for example.  Studying the way language is used, especially to manipulate people, is fascinating and can be empowering, particularly for young people who have never considered such media manipulations.  Shafer's end goal, apparently, is to drive home the Ebonics agenda, and it's at this point that Shafer loses me.  I'm all for honoring our students individually and culturally.  But, unless I'm teaching an all-African American class, I have no reason to believe I would spend a great amount of time studying Ebonics, any more than I would focus on the patois of Filipinos and Brooklynese and Redneckese.

The hardest part of Shafer's paper to take seriously presents one of his students' ranting about the latest oppression: White kids co-opting Ebonics, the result of which is degrade it (!) into a "more crass, less disciplined language," because, above all, Ebonics is known for its discipline.  Really? 

Bottom line, if I had a very mixed class, I would definitely work some ethnographic studies into the course to ensure that all my students feel proud of their own culture and history before launching into the "wonders" of Standard English.  Of course I would.  Not to do so would be to avoid the elephant in the room, complicating or barring any real language instruction and acquisition.

My Arkansas Grandma
My real misgivings about AAVE being legit stem from the fact that most people I've met who have trouble switching to Broadcast English (or whatever you wanna call this here stuff we talk, us White folks) are typically hamstrung by poor education in general.  That goes for my Arkansas grandma (God rest her soul) and all my Arkansas kin, for that matter.  These people are the salt of the earth; they would give their life for a stranger.  Get 'em a-jawin', though, and they're liable to say, along with Jed Clampit: "Ya gotta get nekked to warsh yasef."  Fine.  But is that a legitimate dialect or a lack of education?  I would lean to the latter.  I think most folks would.  I know Blacks, Latinos, East Indians, Russians and Japanese, etc., who tend to speak a certain speech (language or dialect) at home and a different speech with the general public.  The difference is that they are consciously able to make the switch.  Others, like my grandma, never knew the difference, which is why I would chalk that up to a lack of education.

Then again, I could be wrong.  Aside from the AAVE tendency to drop the verb to be, my Arkansas grandma's dialect was about 90% the same as AAVE, so maybe my grandma was perfectly justified.  She simply spoke a version of Ebonics, so who am I to judge?