is found in the highly autobiographical account of the Simpson murder
trial by the African American prosecutor, Christopher Darden:
[It] isn’t to say all Black people sound alike; of course not. But who
can deny that we have our own dialect and our own accent? ... It
seemed to me that by the time I got to college, we were given a
choice. We could learn to speak more mainstream, to sound more
white, or we could be proud of our heritage and acknowledge that
culture extends to language as well as paintings and books. I was
proficient in English. I could read it and write it expertly, and I knew
the rules for speaking it. And so I felt no need to change the way I
spoke, to ignore the heritage and the background that formed my
diction, my speech patterns, and the phrases I used.
(Darden and Walter 1996: 77)The push–pull AAVE speakers must reconcile comes into real focus with
the first day of school, where the dominant philosophy is one that
promotes code-switching. Children are not to be deprived of their home
language (in theory); instead they learn an additional language (which
might be called Standard English or academic English or “the language of
wider communication”) which is to be used outside the home and
community. On the surface this looks to be a balanced and fair approach,
but it does not bear up to close examination. Stanley Fish’s series of essays
on higher education, his description and rationalization of this approach
reveal it for the separate-but-equal policy it is:
If students infected with the facile egalitarianism of soft
multiculturalism declare, “I have a right to my own language,” reply,
“Yes, you do, and I am not here to take that language from you; I’m
here to teach you another one.” (Who could object to learning a
second language?) And then get on with it.
(Fish 2009)A growing body of work challenges the institutionalized belief that giving
up AAVE is necessary for African American students to succeed in
traditional academic settings (Young 2007; Young and Martinez 2011).
Quite to the contrary, Young et al. believe that a reliance on code-
switching is counterproductive: