Ebonics and the Politics of English

Abstract

In 1996 the Oakland Unified School District passed a resolution declaring Ebonics to be the primary language of the African‐American students in its schools. The resolution further declared Ebonics to be a language in its own right, not a dialect of English. In the face of massive national opposition to the Oakland Ebonics resolution, this radical, separatist move shifted to a conservative, assimilationist one: Oakland retracted its declaration of linguistic independence and reaffirmed the traditional pedagogical goal of teaching students standard English. But the Oakland Ebonics controversy reminds us that, although the English of former British colonies has come into its own in the literary, cultural, and political scene, to the point where we speak of world Englishes, the English varieties of what may be regarded as internal colonies – inner cities and the socially disenfranchised – continues to be stigmatized by speakers of more esteemed varieties. Anyway what was the use of my having come from Oakland. It was not natural to have come from there … there is no there there. Gertrude Stein, Everybody's Autobiography, 1937

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