institutionalized subordination tactics. Such outpourings are useful,
because they get right to the heart of the matter:
I am sitting here just burning ... the ones that want to speak or care to
speak that way, they want to be different. I believe they put
themselves that way to be separate.
(European American call-in viewer, Oprah Winfrey Show, 1987,
emphasis added)AAVE seems to symbolize African American resistance to a cultural
mainstreaming process which is seen as the logical and reasonable cost of
equality – and following from that, success – in other realms. Alternately,
AAVE evokes a kind of panic, a realization that desegregation has not
done its job. The reasoning seems to be that the logical conclusion to a
successful civil rights movement is the end of racism not because we have
come to accept difference, but because we have eliminated difference.
There will be no need for a distinct African American (or Honduran, or
Vietnamese) culture (or language), because those people will have full
access to, and control of, the superior European American one.
When an African American woman tells a reporter about the unifying
function of AAVE in her community, his response first acknowledges that
language as viable, but then he rejects her construction of the language as
one with a positive function. Instead, he recasts AAVE as a willful act of
political resistance:
Woman: So we gotta have our survival mechanism within our
community. And our language is it. It lets us know that we all in
this thing together.
Reporter: Black English is not Standard English spoken badly –
Black English is revenge.
(CBS Evening News, December 5, 1985)The Oxford English Dictionary defines “revenge” as “The act of doing
hurt or harm to another in return for wrong or injury suffered; satisfaction
obtained by repayment of injuries.” Thus AAVE is not seen as first and
foremost a positive feature of a vibrant Black community. Instead it is
willful act of rebellion: destructive, hurtful, and primitive in its
motivations. The reporter attempts to construct an objective picture and