Black English is a rich part of American Speech
by William Raspberry
The Miami Herald
You would not be surprised to hear, say, your local judge use one style of speech as a participant in a neighborhood softball game, another when he's on the bench, and a third when he offers a prayer at church.
Linguists call it "code-switching," the ability to change from one language style to another, as circumstances dictate. It's what most successful adults do without thinking about it, and its' what most of us - including the parents at Burnt Mills Elementary School - want our children to learn.
But burnt Mills, in suburban Montgomery count, Md., is trying to accomplish a specific type of 'code-switching: to teach black children to shift easily between the "Black English" that many of them speak and the more formal dialect of the classroom, the public forum, and the personnel office.
For some black parents, it's too specific for comfort.
Too Specific for Comfort
Their objection is less to the idea of having their children learn Standard English than to having them singled out on the basis of race for the voluntary program. The letter announcing the after-school program went only to parents of the school's black fifth graders. The creators of the experimental project, a group of minority speech and language pathologists, believe that it makes more sense to work with students who speak more or less the same informal language rather than include white of foreign-language speakers, who may have different problems.
But for some parents, the singling out suggests racial insensitivity.
"Clearly I think all youngsters in this society need to be taught the standard language," Hanley Norment, president of the Montgomery Chapter of the NAACP, said. "Otherwise, they cannot be meaningfully employed as they grow up. But the assumption (at Burnt Mills) was that all black kids obviously have a problem whit the language and that their parents undoubtedly do, too, so we'll just use a broad-brush approach rather sensitively look at the needs of each child."
