Yo kid, what's so bad about ebonics? People be actin like ebonics is so bad like we ain't got no intelligence or somethin'. 'especially dem black college graduates...they act like they is better than everybody else.
LOL
Seriously though, what's so bad about ebonics?
Let's start with the word: EBONICS = Ebony + Phonics.
Or better, let's make a distinction between ebonics and slang.
Ebonics = "I ain't got no reason to be going ova dere".
Slang: "Yo wussup chickenhead, wuddup my nucca, I'ma bout to go to da sto and buy some blunts"
It's a fine line. But my definition of ebonics is DIALECT.
As a "community" of people in America, we have learned behaviors, some of which have taught us to view our own culture through a negative lens. In other words, we've adopted some of the racism that has caused our people a history of pain. Only, the same prejudice is directed toward our own.
When we hear whites speak with a brooklyn accent we think that person is from Brooklyn. When we hear a white person speak with a British Accent, we think, 'oh, that man must be English'. But when a black person is using a Jersey accent or a Brooklyn accent, to our eyes and ears they sound harsh, dumb and ghetto.
If we go to England and hear a English person speaking Cockney, or a Scottish man speak Gaelic, which are also dialects of British English and Scots English, we don't think of them as "ghetto" or lower clash, we think they have a dialect and the way they speak has no bearing on their character but is a reflection of their culture.
When black people use a dialect other than standard American English the first thing people think is 'welfare, ghetto, uneducated, ignorant, and embarrassing'. We just want to take them and usher them off and sweep them under the rug. We'll high brow them, and shun them out of our polite little circles as if they're not even human or as if they have fouled the air just being in our presence.
We have to accept some of it for what it is. People have DIALECTS, and regional dialects. Growing up in Chicago, we used phrases that didn't exist in other places. Ie, "I'm gonna get my lick back". "lick", was just another word for "hitting" someone. Or saying "Sho'll is", instead of "Sure is".
Southern people sometimes refer to "pants" as "britches" and there are people in Fargo who have their own way of speaking along with people from BAWSTON (or shall I say, Boston).
So let's give our brothers and sisters a chance and correctly identify what we are hearing as an accent. Believe it or not, people outside of AMerica view it accordingly.
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Wednesday, August 6th 2008 at 8:02PM
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