individuals, and further, that a good role model will not sound Black. For
him, the two are mutually exclusive. His message is clearly stated:
If you’re a Black child, and you’re not one of the 100 or so best slam-
dunkers or wide receivers in the world, you can go ahead and emulate
the way you hear your heroes talk. But the chances are that you’ll
wind up as the hippest dude passing out towels in the men’s
washroom.
(ibid.)The stereotypes that underlie Greene’s assumptions are of course very
disturbing, but there are other issues here which are more subtle and
perhaps more damaging.
This is a good example of both explicit threat and unfounded promise in
one statement. The threat is real enough: Black children who don’t learn
white English will have limited choices; what he claims is demonstrably
true. But the inverse of this situation, the implied promise, is not equally
true: Black children who learn *SAE will not be given automatic access to
the rewards and possibilities of the Anglo middle-class world. Greene
actually touches upon the fallacy underlying this promise when he
acknowledges (later in his column) that successful Blacks who wear
uniforms (airline pilots, army officers) are often taken for service
personnel in public places.
Anglo discomfort with AAVE is often externalized in this paternalistic
voice. It can be seen to work in a variety of forums, including popular
fiction.^13 The novel is one of the most interesting points of access to
current language ideology, in that the way that characters in novels use
language and talk about language can be revealing. The following excerpt
from a romance novel entitled Family Blessings provides a typical social
construction of an idealized relationship between an *SAE speaker and an
AAVE speaker. Here the hero, a young Anglo police officer, has taken on
the job of setting an African American child straight:
“Yo.”
“What you talkin’ like a Black boy for?”
“I be Black.”