America couldn’t care less what we do to segregate ourselves. The
fact is language is power. And we can’t take that power away from
our children with Ebonics.
(The National Head Start Association)The National Head Start Association (NHSA) is a private, not-for-profit
membership organization representing some two thousand federally
funded Head Start programs across the country. These educational
programs address the needs of poor children to age 5.
The message underwritten by NHSA is quite clear: to succeed, the
African American community must assimilate linguistically. To maintain
allegiance to home and community by linguistic means is to embrace
poverty, ignorance, and prejudice. The authorities called upon to give
credence to this message are the men who gave their lives for equal rights.
Here, Ebonics is not a fully functioning variety of English, the symbol of
solidarity and allegiance, but a disaster for the African American
community.
What is not generally known about this ad is that it was not
conceptualized or written by the NHSA: it was the product of a
collaboration between a group called Atlanta’s Black Professionals and
three prominent ad agencies. The ad won the 1998 Grand Prize of the
annual Athena Award offered by the Newspaper Association of America;
The New York Times ran it free, as a public service announcement.^8
According to executives at the ad agencies, the advertisement was popular
when it first ran in Atlanta and was requested by schools from Miami to
Richmond.^9
It is clear that this advertisement follows directly from the national
debate on the Oakland Ebonics controversy. What is unclear – and the far
more important question – is this: How did we come to this place where
successful African American professionals, a national education
organization and the most prominent daily newspaper not only collaborate
to disseminate such divisive and exclusionary rhetoric, but award each
other for it? Does an organization dedicated to the education of poor
children really intend to advocate that we turn our backs on speakers who
cannot or will not assimilate to corporate conceptions of “good” English?
And perhaps most difficult: what are linguists, parents and teachers who