desegregation will follow linguistic assimilation and the gradual
disappearance of AAVE:
If the mixed populations of our Philadelphia schools should actually
be integrated, we may even reach a time when young black children
use elements of the white vernacular ... At that point, AAVE as a
whole might be in danger of losing its own distinct and characteristic
forms of speech. I expect that some among us would regret the loss of
the eloquent syntactic and semantic options that I have presented
here. But we might also reflect at that time that the loss of a dialect is
a lesser evil than the current condition of an endangered people.
(ibid.: 25)Consider the way AAVE is seen here. It is not the language of a vibrant,
active community; it is the product of segregation. Labov uses words like
resource and elegant, but he seems to be seeing its use as restricted to
those times when African Americans “reflect most thoughtfully on the
oppression and misery of daily life” – a very narrow and pessimistic view
of AAVE (for a closer reading and rebuttal of many of the points in
Labov’s 2007 paper, see Rickford 2010.)^15 Labov equates regressive and
discriminatory practices with the existence, persistence and spread of
AAVE. The end to segregation brings – in Labov’s view of the world –
linguist assimilation, loss of AAVE, improved reading scores and
generally a happier, more congenial U.S. Each of those points has been
challenged multiple times in this book. It is hard to imagine a better
example of the insidious nature of language ideology and the way it digs
itself into otherwise open minds.
Anglo attitudes toward AAVE are complex, because AAVE taps into the
most difficult and contentious issues around race. AAVE makes
Americans uncomfortable because it is persistent, and because it will not
go away, no matter how extreme the measures to denigrate and exclude.
Official policies around this (and other) stigmatized varieties of language
are policies of patronage and tolerance rather than acceptance. The irony is
that AAVE is the distinctive language of a cultural community we don’t
want to acknowledge as separate; at the same time, the only way we know
how to deal with our discomfort about AAVE is to set it apart.