terminology that alleges to have scientific validity cannot survive
with multiple definitions.
(Baugh 2000: 86)Anglo attitudes toward AAVE^8
African Americans who speak American English without any grammatical
or stylistic features of AAVE – for example, those who grow up with no
contact of any kind to an African American family or community –
certainly do exist, although their number would be very hard to estimate.
It’s important to remember that for most Anglos, the primary and
sometimes sole experience of African Americans comes through mass
media, where Black men and women in power suits sound Anglo or very
close to it, for as Smitherman (1997) explains: “Blacks have believed that
the price of the ticket for Black education and survival and success in
White America is eradication of Black Talk.” In the information industry,
those who do speak AAVE are seen primarily when someone – usually
somebody poor, possibly victimized and/or suspected of a criminal
offence – is interviewed. It is hardly a surprise that most Anglos have a
skewed impression of AAVE and AAVE speakers (see also the earlier
Smitherman quote on stereotypes in the media).^9
These practices do not go unnoticed by African American media
professionals:
A few years ago most of the blacks at CNN lodged a protest about the
material we were using on the air. They complained that every time
we did a story on poverty, we rolled out “b-roll” showing blacks, and
every time we did a story on crime, we rolled out “b-roll” with blacks
in it. We went back and looked at our file tape and, in fact, it was all
black.
(Westin 2000: 24, as cited in Abraham and Appiah 2006)We take in ideas and pictures – Black men being arrested, a stockpile of
guns – like a daily dose of medicine lest we forget the way the world
works: More evidence of a gulf between them and us, African ancestry and
Anglo, criminal and victim.