This ideology is so deeply rooted that the lack of logic, the incongruity
is left to stand unchallenged. The Oakland School Board did not question
this status quo; they affirmed their commitment to it without hesitation.
But there was an element of anger – certainly well placed, but
counterproductive in its timing – in the way they worded their affirmation
and their resolution and in the way they described AAVE. Unfortunately
the approach they took hindered rather than helped their cause.
Linguist Geoff Nunberg (1997) put it quite bluntly: “The language of
the board’s declaration seemed calculated to play to all the worst
stereotypes of education jargon and afrocentric twaddle.”
A basic tenet of persuasive writing is to never give detractors an
inaccuracy to focus on, because they will use it to distract away from the
real issue. In this case, detractors latched onto poor wording and
inaccuracies and yanked very, very hard. The original version of the
resolution was made public on December 18, 1996. Despite its flaws, the
first media reports were fairly even-handed, for example, this opening
from The San Francisco Chronicle dated December 19, 1996:
The Oakland school board approved a landmark policy last night that
recognizes Ebonics, or Black English, as a primary language of its
African American students ... The district’s resolution, passed
unanimously, declares that all teachers in the Oakland Unified School
District should be trained to respect the Ebonics language of their
students as distinct from standard American English – not a dialect
that is “wrong.”There is no mention here of “teaching AAVE” to the students, as would be
reported later, even in the same paper. Nor is there any implication that
*SAE was to be abandoned or replaced. And still, despite reasonable
reports in the immediate aftermath of the resolution, the media coverage
soon slipped into the realm of language mythology, and whatever good
might have come from the original proposal was a lost cause.
Linguists have spent a lot of time looking at the original proposal,
analyzing problem areas and addressing generalizations or factual errors
step by step, documenting everything along the way. This is a reasonable
and useful thing for linguists to do, but in the tradition of all such