Solomon 1990) which con-solidates appropriateness and economic
arguments with assimilationist rhetoric:
While we must continue to manifest pluralistic approaches to
integrating Black English into the curriculum, as necessary, we must
simultaneously teach those who speak with a dialect that a realistic
chance of success in American society is frequently based on mastery
of Standard English.Studies consistently demonstrate that educators manifest a generally
negative reaction to the “less familiar dialect” in favor of SAE. Black
educators are candid about the socioeconomic disadvantages of speaking
AAVE in a predominantly Anglo society. Often, African Americans are the
most vehement supporters of SAE and intolerant of the very idea of
AAVE. To further complicate this issue, those educators are
understandably hesitant to consider what it means if the language ideology
they have embraced turns out to be based on fallacies.
Vershawn Ashanti Young is an example of an African American teacher
and scholar who has looked carefully at these complex and sensitive
issues, which he has experienced from both sides: as a boy growing up in
Chicago’s Horner Projects, and as someone who left that life behind
himself and became a professor of rhetoric. Young writes about a student,
Cam, who comes into his classroom and deliberately uses AAVE to draw
attention to things that Young has taken great pains to suppress in himself.
Young asks: “What had I really achieved if Black males like Cam were
coming to college and being successful? And would not my validating his
use of the vernacular in order to affirm his Black masculine identity
demean my own?” (Young 2007: 93).
Evidence clearly suggests that speakers of Black English and Hawai’i
Creole English are presented with more obstacles to educational success
than professed speakers of SAE. The consequences are broad, not only in
the way individuals are silenced, but also because the community as a
whole is deprived of those voices, and the contributions that would have
been.
Those who argue that it is right and good to help those children
substitute SAE for their home languages never seem to carry the
argument to its ultimate conclusion. First, it has been established that