contexts, while she uses a more formal English in most public situations.
During this filming she acted as a host to her invited guests, a facilitator to
the audience discussion, and simultaneously as a participant with opinions
of her own. The introductions she reads from cue cards are perhaps not
entirely her own formulations; her statements may sometimes be made in
a spirit of fostering discussion. But in general, it is clear that she is willing
to give her opinion on the questions at hand: on occasion she claims the
floor when audience members want to speak. Her comments are peppered
with formulations such as I know, to me, I think, I don’t understand. She
also uses constructions like if you don’t know, you must know, don’t you
know, in those instances where she puts her own opinions forth. Her tone is
not coercive, but it does border on the frustrated and pleading at times.
At the time the segment in question was filmed, Winfrey’s stance on
AAVE was a complex and conflicted one. At first glance, it might seem
that she stands firmly on the side of standardization and linguistic
assimilation. As has been seen with other African Americans, she does not
directly deny the existence of AAVE (which she consistently calls “so-
called” Black English, perhaps because she is uncomfortable with the term
rather than the language itself), but she challenges AAVE using many of
the strategies seen earlier in this book.
She first attempts to relegate AAVE to the realm of the secondary: “Are
we talking about correct English or are we talking about dialect?”; when
audience members protest this, she regroups by defining for them the
difference between Black English and SAE, a difference which turns out
to rest exclusively on subject–verb agreement. She defines SAE very
simply: in SAE, verbs and subjects agree. She asks the audience if a
person should feel ashamed for speaking SAE, for choosing “to speak
correctly.”
Winfrey seems to have a definition of AAVE which focuses only on
grammatical agreement and excludes phonology and rhetorical devices.
She identifies Martin Luther King, Jr., Whitney Young, Mary McCleod
Bethune as speakers not of Black English, but of *SAE. Once again, Jesse
Jackson is raised as an example of someone who speaks AAVE but knows
how to shift in his public discourse to a style appropriate for the most
formal settings. The fact that Jesse Jackson strongly marks his public
discourse with AAVE rhetorical devices, and sometimes uses AAVE
grammatical strategies regardless of his audience, does not come up.
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