Ebonics

THE NATIONAL debate over ebonics is far more coded and hard to translate than black English, its purported topic. Here are four truths behind the controversy that nobody wants to talk about in plain English.Black parents and educators envy -- and increasingly resent -- the millions of dollars going to Asian and Latino bilingual programs. As immigrant populations grow, these programs are eating up a growing share of bare-bones urban school budgets. While the media framed the issue as Black English vs. White America, the ebonics controversy was more a symptom of rising inter-minority tensions, a product of our zero-sum approach to race relations.

Hazelle Goodman is an actress with a penchant for portraying powerful women.She's played evil Georgia Rae Mahoney, head of a drug empire, on "Homicide: Life on the Street"; Cookie, the hooker who was the voice of reason in Woody Allen's "Deconstructing Harry"; the vicious Queen in the New York Shakespeare Festival's production of "Cymbeline"; and even Miss Millie, a Caribbean immigrant determined to make it "To the Top, Top, Top!" in Goodman's one-woman show of that name.Fresh from an off-Broadway engagement at Joe's Pub, Goodman's solo show -- originally titled "Ebonics" -- will be presented Saturday and Sunday as part of Center Stage's Off Center Festival.

The Ebonics debate has taken an alarming new twist.Thursday, school officials from Oakland, Calif., went before a U.S. Senate subcommittee to again state their case that the only way to get the poor, cognitively challenged black children of Oakland to learn standard English is to use Ebonics as a teaching aid.The Oakland "educators" -- to no one's surprise -- spewed forth much flapdoodle. But lost in the debate over whether Ebonics is a language was a quotation from Oakland's superintendent of schools.

OAKLAND, Calif. -- There was intense criticism from around the country and skepticism at home when Oakland school officials decided in 1996 to teach classes using ebonics, a speech pattern that the school board deemed a second language for many black students.Today, ebonics -- also known as black English -- is still used as a teaching tool in the classroom, and Oakland school officials say that the strategy, meant to help children move from the language they hear on the street to the standard English they'll use in school, works.

From Ebonics, I know a little bit, though it isn't my native tongue. Personally, I was raised on Yiddishonics, which is a variation on Polishonics and Italonics and, for that matter, the newly controversial Ebonics. It's a simple enough translation. You take the juiciest bits of your own people's dialect, and you mix touches of it with standard English, and from this you get the thing we've always called America.In Yiddishonics, generations of Jews rooted in eastern Europe led with the verb ("Make the window shut, it's cold outside")

OAKLAND, Calif. -- It's been more than three weeks now since the Oakland Board of Education took the action that unnerved the nation. Weeks of outraged reaction and recrimination, weeks of heated national debate over black English, or Ebonics, weeks of fallout about race, education and politics.Clearly, that outcome was not what the Oakland board had in mind when it adopted its Ebonics resolution Dec. 18. On the other hand, it was exactly the outcome it could have expected by its handling of such a volatile issue.

Four months after Oakland, Calif., became the nation's first school district to declare that blacks speak a separate language called ebonics, the Oakland schools task force studying the subject has come up with final recommendations in a report that does not mention ebonics at all.The report, a detailed proposal to spend $2 million over five years to help improve the English skills of black students, is an attempt to put the recommendations adopted by...

OAKLAND, Calif. -- There was intense criticism from around the country and skepticism at home when Oakland school officials decided in 1996 to teach classes using ebonics, a speech pattern that the school board deemed a second language for many black students.Today, ebonics -- also known as black English -- is still used as a teaching tool in the classroom, and Oakland school officials say that the strategy, meant to help children move from the language they hear on the street to the standard English they'll use in school, works.

Western Maryland College will offer activities throughout February in recognition of Black History Month, including a panel discussion on the introduction of Ebonics, or black English, as a recognized language in some areas of the country.Also featured is "Reflections," a one-person dramatic performance by Michelle Banks about her experiences as a black deaf woman. The celebration starts tomorrowwith African American Appreciation Day beginning at 11 a.m. in Ensor Lounge.Events are open to the public, and are sponsored by the Black Student Union, the College Activities Programming Board and the Office of Multicultural Student Services.

LIKE THOUSANDS of middle-class and middle-class-aspiring African-Americans, I was taught throughout childhood to loathe black English. I was taught it was a lazy tongue, used by people too "low-class" to learn the proper way to speak: Speaking black English would lower me in the eyes of society, and would deprive me of ever getting a good education or a good job.But in the hallways and on the basketball court of my Chicago high school or with my Mississippi-born grandparents,...

Four months after Oakland, Calif., became the nation's first school district to declare that blacks speak a separate language called ebonics, the Oakland schools task force studying the subject has come up with final recommendations in a report that does not mention ebonics at all.The report, a detailed proposal to spend $2 million over five years to help improve the English skills of black students, is an attempt to put the recommendations adopted by...

Western Maryland College will offer activities throughout February in recognition of Black History Month, including a panel discussion on the introduction of Ebonics, or black English, as a recognized language in some areas of the country.Also featured is "Reflections," a one-person dramatic performance by Michelle Banks about her experiences as a black deaf woman. The celebration starts tomorrowwith African American Appreciation Day beginning at 11 a.m. in Ensor Lounge.Events are open to the public, and are sponsored by the Black Student Union, the College Activities Programming Board and the Office of Multicultural Student Services.

The Ebonics debate has taken an alarming new twist.Thursday, school officials from Oakland, Calif., went before a U.S. Senate subcommittee to again state their case that the only way to get the poor, cognitively challenged black children of Oakland to learn standard English is to use Ebonics as a teaching aid.The Oakland "educators" -- to no one's surprise -- spewed forth much flapdoodle. But lost in the debate over whether Ebonics is a language was a quotation from Oakland's superintendent of schools.

OAKLAND, Calif. -- It's been more than three weeks now since the Oakland Board of Education took the action that unnerved the nation. Weeks of outraged reaction and recrimination, weeks of heated national debate over black English, or Ebonics, weeks of fallout about race, education and politics.Clearly, that outcome was not what the Oakland board had in mind when it adopted its Ebonics resolution Dec. 18. On the other hand, it was exactly the outcome it could have expected by its handling of such a volatile issue.

From Ebonics, I know a little bit, though it isn't my native tongue. Personally, I was raised on Yiddishonics, which is a variation on Polishonics and Italonics and, for that matter, the newly controversial Ebonics. It's a simple enough translation. You take the juiciest bits of your own people's dialect, and you mix touches of it with standard English, and from this you get the thing we've always called America.In Yiddishonics, generations of Jews rooted in eastern Europe led with the verb ("Make the window shut, it's cold outside")

THE NATIONAL debate over ebonics is far more coded and hard to translate than black English, its purported topic. Here are four truths behind the controversy that nobody wants to talk about in plain English.Black parents and educators envy -- and increasingly resent -- the millions of dollars going to Asian and Latino bilingual programs. As immigrant populations grow, these programs are eating up a growing share of bare-bones urban school budgets. While the media framed the issue as Black English vs. White America, the ebonics controversy was more a symptom of rising inter-minority tensions, a product of our zero-sum approach to race relations.

AFTER YEARS of struggling with black student underachievement, the Oakland, Calif., school board has just confessed to an "F" grade for its efforts and declared that it wants to attack the twin ills of illiteracy and verbal incompetence in English, epidemic among its black student population, by classifying "black English," or "Ebonics," as a second language of instruction. This we-can't-teach-'em-so-we-be-joinin'-'em surrender was the school board's first step in an attempt to qualify Ebonics for the same federal funds that fortify other bilingual education programs.

BOSTON -- What would Henry Higgins make of this? What if he went to teach a flower girl the King's English only to discover that her local school board had declared Cockney another language?In Oakland, California, they are involved in a modern remake of the Pygmalion story. A school board faced with the failure of too many African-American students has now decreed slang to be a valid and different language.Using the dense vocabulary of Academese, the board members also called for classes to be taught partially in Ebonics ''for the combined purposes of maintaining the legitimacy and richness of such language and to facilitate their acquisition and mastery of English language skills.

LIKE THOUSANDS of middle-class and middle-class-aspiring African-Americans, I was taught throughout childhood to loathe black English. I was taught it was a lazy tongue, used by people too "low-class" to learn the proper way to speak: Speaking black English would lower me in the eyes of society, and would deprive me of ever getting a good education or a good job.But in the hallways and on the basketball court of my Chicago high school or with my Mississippi-born grandparents,...

AFTER YEARS of struggling with black student underachievement, the Oakland, Calif., school board has just confessed to an "F" grade for its efforts and declared that it wants to attack the twin ills of illiteracy and verbal incompetence in English, epidemic among its black student population, by classifying "black English," or "Ebonics," as a second language of instruction. This we-can't-teach-'em-so-we-be-joinin'-'em surrender was the school board's first step in an attempt to qualify Ebonics for the same federal funds that fortify other bilingual education programs.