presentation which he otherwise finds well done and convincing on the
basis of a single sociolinguistic variant; Harper’s prints his letter to the
Chancellor of Education without comment.
The authority cited here is the written language: aks is wrong because
we write ask. This kind of criticism is particularly illogical, given the
large-scale lack of correspondence between sound and symbol in English.
The call-in viewer, citing the authority of the written language, provided
excellent proof of this. She spoke what is commonly considered *SAE
(albeit with a strong Chicago accent), and like others who speak
unstigmatized varieties of American English, she did not aspirate the /h/ in
“what”; she pronounced spelled /spelt/, and she left out the /n/ and /t/ in
“sentence,” and substituted a glottal stop.
Uninformed or less than factual criticisms are troublesome, but they are
overshadowed by other more explicit and unapologetic condemnations of
AAVE which extend to unfounded criticisms of African American culture
and values. Such criticisms are often openly made, in particular by
newspaper columnists, as in a sports column:
Ungrammatical street talk by Black professional athletes, and other
Blacks in public professions such as the music industry, has come to
be accepted. Indeed, “Moses, you is a baaad damn shootin’
individual” comes a lot closer to proper English usage than many
public sentences uttered by Black athletes ... But there’s a problem
here. Black athletes – and Black musicians and TV performers, etc. –
are role models for young Black children. We in the media have
begun to pass on the street language of Black “superstars” verbatim
... and what this is doing is passing the message to a whole new
generation of Black children that it’s OK to talk that way; more than
OK, it’s terrific to talk that way ... the situation is compounded by
leading Black characters in several network television shows, who
use street grammar to advance the feeling that they are young and
cool.