wording that “lifts the veil on a tradition of prescriptive bigotry towards
non-standard varieties which is largely absent from the [Cox] Report”
(1992: 37).
Teachers and school administrators are not hesitant to put forward
appropriacy arguments in public, as was the case with the head of the
Philadelphia School Board, an African American woman, in explaining
why it was necessary to “drum Standard English into the heads” of AAVE
speakers:
In the process of young people applying for jobs, employers would
ask them a question which would elicit a response, “I bees ready for
coming here next week.” This – um – utilization of the word and
insertion of bees is rampant and I think really throws an employer off
in terms of what the young person’s talking about. “Uh, now that
you’re finished with me I bees going home.” ... If we relegate them
only to that narrow, limited, provincial dimension of life and
language, we do them a disservice because I see that they will not go
beyond the borderlines of their immediate neighborhood. And we
have no right to do that to any child.
(McCrum et al. 1986)The misinformation offered here is not uncommon: while AAVE invariant
“be” is one of those points of contrast between AAVE and other varieties
of English which elicits a lot of negative response, it is quite silly to claim
that it would cause a breakdown in understanding among speakers of
English. What this administrator is really saying is that employers have a
negative emotive reaction to this feature of AAVE, which may well cause
them to reject their fair share of the communicative burden.
And she is right in this point. Language-focused discrimination does
exist in the wider world, and it does have a negative impact on individuals.
From this, her logic follows, it is necessary to eradicate this offending
grammatical feature and all of AAVE in favor of the language – and the
prejudice – of the employer. Here AAVE is narrow, limited, provincial – by
which she means that it is restricted to inner city Philadelphia. This kind