Day #6

Rach brought this video to my attention yesterday:



After I saw this I decided to go back to a spoken word record I've had lying around for a while, but never listened to all the way through: The Dialect of the Black American.

Side A
Side B

I mostly had kept this around in my iTunes library because it's where a bunch of the vocal samples in Anarchist Bookstore Pt. 2 by MC Paul Barman are from.

The narrator pulls the same "translate the ghetto slang" trick towards the end of Side A, something I've seen done quite a few times with humorous intent. The narrator, however, is making the point that when such translations occur, much of the "overtones of meaning" are lost. I agree, this dialect can often be more descriptive than Scholastic English, and can better illustrate feelings, situations, expressions, etc. in ways such English is unable to do.

It is his views of how this dialect is, and how he thinks it should be, treated and integrated with education that I like the most:

"Many white Americans as well as some blacks attach a stigma to the black way of talking, rather than considering it as a rich and patterned dialect of English, with its own well-established structure. Refusal to accept this as a legitimate mode of expression has long been the practice of many educational systems. The English teacher following this practice becomes the dedicated missionary of middle class values. His vehicle is the language, and the language means Standard English. There is no disagreement that fluency in Standard English is necessary for formal communications. But the black child from the ghetto simply isn’t learning it. Actually, the teacher is short-circuiting his own goals by rejecting the kid, his culture, and his language."

And later:

"Under no condition should the speaker’s use of the dialect be considered something inferior, bad, or an indicator of his intelligence. It should simply be considered something different, which is all it is. The important thing is to keep the ghetto child talking. Respecting the guarded language of his identity and survival will open the door to his learning something new."

And look, I'm not saying I don't find this stuff funny (shit, on my first post on this blog I linked to "A Charlie Brown Kwanzaa" for chrissakes). I just think the narrator makes some great points about the importance and substance of "the black dialect". Plus it's a fantastic spoken word record. Never fear, I'll get back to expressing White Guilt through The Boondocks or some shit now.

Hope you guys called up your old earths to tell them you love them yesterday.