[Code-switching] actually facilitates the illiteracy and failure that
educators seek to eliminate, promotes resistance to standard English
rather than encourage its use, and further stifles the expression of
lucid prose from people whose first language is something other than
English.Young and Martinez propose that the reasoning behind code switching
represents “acceptance, advocacy, and teaching of an outmoded view of
literacy that stems from dominant language ideology, a belief that places a
colonial vision/version of language above all others, if not ideologically,
definitely practically” (ibid.). Code-meshing, in contrast, does not set up
artificial boundaries between varieties of English,^17 nor does it try to
reconcile a policy of affirming a child’s right to his or her own language^18
with a policy that devalues AAVE (for example) and privileges *SAE.
Most efforts to seek public validation of AAVE are less visible, and still
are met with a great deal of resistance. An African American journalist
responds in an opinion piece to such a group organized in the Midwest:
In Madison, Wisconsin, for example, some Blacks are trying to push
the value of BEV, according to a recent report in the Wisconsin State
Journal. They want to change the way professionals, teachers and the
government view the lazy verbiage of the ghetto.
The group argues that Black English is merely different, not a
disability.
I disagree with that. I think it is dysfunctional to promote BEV – or
even legitimate it with an acronym. And the dysfunction exists not so
much among the students as with their ill-equipped African American
“leaders” and educators.
(Hamblin 1995)Some successful African Americans (for example, John Baugh and
Bernadette Anderson, above) acknowledge the schism between promises
and threats, but are resigned to the fact that there is nothing practical to be
done about it. Others rationalize linguistic subordination in a number of
ways. Denial – the simple refusal to admit to the existence of AAVE – is
not uncommon: “There is no such thing as Black English. The concept of