It ain't only Rock & Roll, it's Jazz too

[Abdiel OAbdiel]

Implicit prescription? Irish kids from Cork? Truck
Stops and Bodegas? Everyone these days seems to be
able to talk a little Yo? Blacks are not coming to the
United States to work in Pubs and Restaurants for the
summer months. People in America generally like the
Irish brogue.  The Irish are not on the Black side of
a cultural divide in America. Regional dialects, such
as those spoken in truck stops in Ohio and Indiana are
not the same thing as Black Talk. Recent immigrants
from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Korea, Afghanistan,
etc., working in Bodegas, were not brought to this
country in chains. Isn't there an obvious difference
here? Of course there is. In so many of our American
schools we are asking kids to research and write about
their "native countries" and cultures. For most
students this is not too difficult. They go home and
ask their parents to tell them about their "homeland"
or about how their grandparent or great-grandparent
emigrated and so on.  However, for Black students,
this is often an impossible task. While a White blue
blood may be able to trace his/her family to
pre-Revolutionary America and back to Europe, many
Blacks, whose ancestors were bought and sold by those
blue bloods in Pre-Revolutionary times, can not.  It
was only in the 1960s that researchers began to really
look at how African languages have influenced language
in America. We learned so much and so much progress
was made because of what we learned and how what we
learned influenced the political and legal challenges
and changes that Black empowerment brought about.
There is anew Black middle class. A new Black
intellectual class.   The Black middle-class can code
switch from Black Talk to the language of the majority
of the Nation, the Black working class and un-working
class can't. Why does the Nation continue to fail
Blacks that can not speak the language of the
majority? Why has the Nation rejected and stigmatized
their culture and back round and made them
linguistically invisible? No one is suggesting that
they should not master the language of the majority,
the language of literacy, commerce, politics, the
media, and education. Progress ahs been slow, but we
are making progress. The language mavens want to turn
things back around. They have absolutely no support
from linguists or people that have been working to
educate the majority about Black talk. They have no
support from the people that are teaching working
class and un-working class Blacks. 

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