DIALECTS 239
The Place of BEV in our Schools
During the 1960s, as a result of the Civil Rights Movement, we saw a signifi-
cant effort to reexamine the place of BEV in our schools. School policies at the
time did not allow the use of Black English for recitation and writing and in-
sisted, instead, on fairly strict adherence to standard conventions. Many educa-
tors, parents, and social activists charged that these policies were discrimin-
atory and placed an unfair burden on African-American children. Robinson
(1990), for example, suggested that Standard English is an obstacle to learning
and that BEV should be legitimized in the schools. Several years later, in what
may be seen as a logical conclusion to the reexamination that began in the
1960s, the Oakland, California, school district made national headlines by pro-
claiming that BEV—or “ebonics,” as the district labeled it—was not a dialect
but rather an independent language and decided that it would be the language of
instruction in the district’s predominantly black schools.
This approach was not really new. In the 1970s, several schools in California’s
Bay Area issued specially prepared textbooks written in BEV rather than Stan-
dard English and used BEV as the language of instruction. The situation in Oak-
land, however, garnered much more attention and hostility. The question is why.
The school board’s declaration that BEV is “genetic” may have been one
reason; its decision to ignore decades of linguistic research into BEV as a dia-
lect may have been another. I would suggest, however, that a number of other
factors were also at work.
In the 1970s, the Civil Rights Movement was still strong, and there generally
was wide support for policies intended to improve the academic performance
of minority students. Affirmative action programs, for example, were endorsed
by a significant majority of the population. Over time, however, this support be-
gan to wane. Blacks made impressive and highly visible advances politically
(at one point, nearly every major city in the country had a black mayor), educa-
tionally, and economically, and many whites began to feel that society had done
enough to level the playing field. When Dinesh D’Souza publishedIlliberal
Educationin 1991 and reported that a black applicant to UC Berkeley was
8,000 times more likely to be admitted than an Asian applicant with better qual-
ifications, the resulting outrage laid the foundation for the slow but steady dis-
mantling of affirmative action programs nationwide. Also, other issues began
to press: women’s rights, gay rights, abortion rights, illegal immigration, and
the steady erosion of middle-class buying power. The well of compassion for
just causes was being sucked dry.
For many, what exacerbated matters beyond measure was the sudden influ-
ence of postmodernism. Any significant discussion is far beyond the scope of