NEWS
By MICHAEL OLESKER | January 9, 1997
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")
NEWS
By Lisa Alcalay Klug | January 12, 1997
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.
NEWS
By NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE | May 6, 1997
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...
NEWS
By Jamal E. Watson and Jamal E. Watson,SUN STAFF | August 16, 1999
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.
NEWS
February 2, 1997
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.
NEWS
By RON EMMONS | January 5, 1997
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,...