The Black Californians United for Early Care & Education (BlackECE) demanded that California force preschoolers to learn Black English.
What the what?
BlackECE wants to advance “language justice” for black children by challenging “harmful language hierarchies and affirm Black English as a legitimate, rule-governed language rooted in Black history, culture, and community.”
What is Black English? From KQED:
Whether at home or at work as a policy strategist and university lecturer, Ashley Williams said she feels relaxed sliding between Black English and standard English.She didn’t feel comfortable communicating this way growing up in South Los Angeles.Williams said that when she was 3 or 4 years old, her grandmother would correct the way she pronounced words like “napkin” whenever she dropped the “p” sound. Her older sister and cousin also told her the way she spoke: “amongst our community wasn’t OK at the schoolhouse.”Generations of Black children grew up learning that their home language wasn’t acceptable in school or the workplace. Many internalized the belief that Black English — sometimes referred to as African American Vernacular English, or AAVE, African American language or Ebonics — is bad English, loaded with slang and grammatical errors.“But with that comes a lot of shame and embarrassment because you’re being constantly corrected when you’re still in a moment when you’re just learning language,” she said.
You…you do realize that people of all colors and cultures tend to speak differently at home than they are taught in school, right? The way I still speak at home isn’t acceptable in a school or workplace.
I’m having a hard time writing this post because I’m just flabbergasted.
Williams said, “Black English is full of slangs and grammatical errors so it came with a lot of embarrassment.”
Lady… white people use plenty of slang and make grammatical errors. Maybe get out of your bubble and listen to other people? I saw a commercial for the medicine Skyrizi and thought, “That sounds like something kids say nowadays.”
“We talk about multilinguals, but we don’t include Black children who may be African-American English speakers,” said Xigrid Soto-Boykin, director of the Children’s Equity Project at Arizona State University, told KQED. “We completely miss this subgroup of children that could also benefit from their language backgrounds to be sustained, but also to be leveraged for their own learning.”
Yeah, um, I’d like Williams and the rest of BlackECE to know that when you learn other languages in school, you’re taught the proper way to speak them. The lessons don’t include casual talk or slang.
In other words, it’s no different than learning English grammar and language.
Williams said when she came from a summer camp, “her sister and cousin teasing her for ‘talking white.’”
Teaching a child of any race how to properly pronounce a word or use proper grammar isn’t “white talk.” You’re learning a language everyone knows and can understand, whether you’re white, black, Hispanic, Asian, etc.
Again, when you’re learning Spanish, Italian, Russian, Japanese, or any other language, you’re taught the proper way to speak and use it.
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