Bad Jokes & Ebonics

[David Casseres]

>No, quite frankly I *don't* understand how Ebonics jokes constitute hate 
>speech. Ebonics jokes merely indicate that those who have proposed 
>that Ebonics be recognised as a language have made an unwise proposition.  
>If Ebonics jokes are an example of hate speech, then to use non-Ebonic 
>English in any context is also hate speech, because it is equally 
>disrespectful 
>towards those who recognise the validity of Ebonics.

Craig, you're misinformed about what was intended by a very badly worded 
document that a great many malicious people immediately made the worst of.

The proposal was not that Ebonics "be recognised as a language."  It was 
that teachers be taught to recognize that Ebonics is the language (i.e. 
the speech pattern) that some of their students use everywhere except at 
school, and deal with it by some other means than denouncing it as "bad 
English."  This is a really simple and obvious matter of basic pedagogy, 
if the goal is to teach students to use Standard English.

As for Ebonics "jokes," they're just the latest in a long American 
tradition of using exaggerated dialect to portray blacks as mentally 
inferior.  In this context, they are unmistakably hate speech.



Cheers,
David