Black English is a myth. It is basically speaking English and violating the
correct rules of grammar” (Male audience member, Oprah Winfrey Show,
1987).
We have seen that AAVE is not accepted, and may never be accepted as
a socially viable language by the majority of U.S. English speakers. Thus,
for AAVE speakers one of the two statements (I acknowledge that my
home language is viable and expressive and sufficient to all my needs and
I acknowledge that my home language will never be accepted) cannot
stand. One of these positions must be challenged or amended if the
conflict is to be resolved.^19 Extreme examples of this are available, even
in print:
Although we were surrounded in New York by a number of poorly
spoken and frequently stereotypical Black and poor Southern dialects,
my siblings and I soon learned to hear it for what it was – the
language of the street, the language of Black trash. The language that
went right along with Saturday-night knife fights to settle a grudge.
(Hamblin 1995)Rachel Jones (1990) does not deny the existence of AAVE, but she does
refuse to admit that any successful African American might speak it. In
her view, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Toni Morrison, Alice
Walker, James Baldwin, Andrew Young, Tom Bradley and Barbara Jordan
do not talk Black or not Black; they “talk right.” For Jones, the fact that
most of these African Americans depend on AAVE intonation, phonology,
and rhetorical features to mark their spoken language for solidarity with
the Black community is irrelevant. In this way, the definition of AAVE
becomes very narrow: it encompasses only the grammar of the language in
so far as syntactical and morphological rules are distinct from *SAE.
The rationalizations found here and elsewhere are well-established steps
in the language subordination process. Note the appeal to written language
norms as a source of authority, the mystification of grammar and
disinformation in the following:
What Black children need is an end to this malarkey that tells them
they can fail to learn grammar, fail to develop vocabularies, ignore