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

[Malignd]

 Abdiel:

<<As I stated previously, none. No one speaks and/or
writes SE. It's an ideal. In the USA the ideal is SAE.
No one speaks or writes Standard American English.  No
one.>>

That's patently false.  Typographical errors and
occasional time-pressed errors aside, standard English
is the daily written language in the New York Times,
the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the LA
Times, The Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune, etc.,
etc., all scholarly and semi-scholarly journals, the
New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, etc. etc. etc.
   
<<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.>>

This may all be generally true, if embellished in the
details, but it has nothing remotely to do with
prescriptive grammar. 

<<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?>>

Blacks who cannot speak the "language of the
majority," as you call it, are failing themselves.

<<Why has the Nation rejected and stigmatized their
culture and back round and made them linguistically
invisible?>>

"The Nation"?  What constitutes "the Nation"?  In any
case, Blacks are far from linguisically invisible.  I
would argue just the opposite.


<< No one is suggesting that they should not master
the language of the majority, the language of
literacy, commerce, politics, the media, and
education.>>

I rather thought you were, with all that ranting
around prescriptive grammar being akin to the
slaveholder's whip, etc.

<<Progress has 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.>>

Care to cite?

<<They have no support from the people that are
teaching working class and un-working class Blacks.>>

This too is patently false.  If one uses the example
of of teaching Ebonics in Oakland schools, one finds
plenty of argument and disagreement around its
efficacy. 



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