Black English

Across the United States, controversy rages over the decision of the Oakland School Board to recognize Black English as a distinct language form, and to train its teachers in its structure and usage.
In an age of white allowance of umbrage occasioned by the O.J. [criminal] trial, Oakland's School Board was savaged in ways that were eerily similar to the insults leveled at the Black jurors who acquitted Simpson. California's Gov. Pete Wilson's press spokesman deemed it a "ridiculous theory." U.S. Education Secretary Richard Riley termed Black English a mere "dialect," advising against "elevating Black English to the status of a language." A Newsweek Black columnist hit the School Board for its "stale, silly rhetoric." Time called it "goofy."
Predictably, much of the controversy, energized by the smug assurance that the Oakland School Board didn't know what it was talking about, was as passionate as it was uninformed, with the lamentable result that Black middle-class figures attacked other Black middle-class figures who sought to accurately address what is often a Black lower-class and Black working-class reality--the structure and usage of language, that is markedly distinct from what we like to call standard English--and English radically different from the English of England.
If the white majoritarian media was more concerned with informing people than stirring up controversy, the slant, research and presentation of the story would have been far different (but then, of course, not as many papers would've been sold. Readers would've learned, for example;
1 "Black English" (also know as Ebonics, Black speech, Black language found to be a legitimate language in a federal court case in 1977!
2 In the case, Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School Children v. Ann Arbor School District Board, the court ruled Ann Arbor must "take into account" Black English in the educational process;
3 The court ordered the school district to give special training and...