Ebonics Promotes Cultural Balkanization
By Niger Innis - Spokesman, Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)

In a move inconsistent with the Clinton administration's pandering racial policies, the White House has said that no federal funds will be made available for bilingual "Ebonics" classes. The preemptive statement was made in anticipation of the Oakland, Calif., school board's request for federal dollars to teach their students standard English through the funnel of "black English," or Ebonics. The school board set the stage for this reaction recently when it declared that the slang spoken in Oakland's black community and in all our nation's black ghettoes was indeed a unique and authentic language. If this was not enough, the board will create Ebonics manuals, to be studied by any teacher who wants to teach black kids how to read and write in English. Delaine Eastin, California's superintendent of schools, says Ebonics won't help students get ahead in life.

Surprisingly, the action by Oakland's school board has been roundly condemned by liberal blacks -- including Maya Angelou, Al Sharpton and the leadership of the NAACP -- as well as right-wing whites such as Bill Bennett and Newt Gingrich. Conservative denunciation of this validation of cultural balkanization is par for the course. But it does seems strange that leading lights of Afrocentrism and affirmative action would so quickly abandon their ideological comrades on the Oakland school board. Still, their common sense is to be applauded, because Ebonics -- a commingling of the multicultural movement, bilingual education and racial preferences -- would hasten the destructive racial separatism that already has taken root in this country. The school board declared that the slang spoken in Oakland's black community was indeed a unique language.

The multicultural or Afrocentric movement began in the '60s as an attempt to broaden the education that our children were receiving by including the historic contributions of blacks. While quite a laudable initial goal, Afrocentrism quickly degenerated into the promotion of mythology and as a weapon used not to uplift black culture so much as to abuse Western Civilization curricula. It is common to hear black students on our college campuses say, "I'm tired of learning about DWM (dead white males)." Undoubtedly these students -- referring to the works of intellectual pioneers such as Shakespeare, Socrates and Freud -- have been greatly influenced by leaders such as Jesse Jackson who have pushed very hard for changing the curriculum of our history classes. After all, it was Jackson who in 1985 led a protest at Berkeley to change the core curriculum with the chant, "Hey! Hey! Ho! Ho! Western Civ has got to go!" (Tellingly, Jackson has backed off his initial criticism of Ebonics.)

Bilingual education is now a huge industry. Tons of taxpayers dollars are spent to teach non-English-speaking students the three Rs in their native tongues. What's more, tens of thousands of dollars are available, privately, in the form of scholarships, to teachers and/or workshop organizers who do the same. In fact, it was the subsidies for bilingual programs aimed at Latinos and Asian-Americans that left blacks feeling left out and spawned recognition of Ebonics in the first place. The Afrocentrists want their piece of the pie. While it is obvious that these programs cause dissension, it is not so obvious that the benefits are worth the pain.

While it is obvious that these programs cause dissension, it is not so obvious that the alleged benefits are worth the pain. Teachers always tell me that children have an infinite capacity to learn new languages. For decades, immigrants to the United States have managed to grasp the language and the culture that makes America tick without the benefit of bilingual classes. Are Mexican and Vietnamese children raised in the America of the 1990s so different than the Italian and Polish children of the 1890s? A look at the troubling linguistic and cultural problems of our neighbors to the north in Canada portends our own path if we don't reexamine the bilingual question.

Racial preferences, the most troubling form of affirmative action, engender the same resentment as bilingualism, as the continuing fight around California's Proposition 209 demonstrates. It causes people to look at themselves not as individuals with unique hearts, minds and souls, but as members of eternally victimized minority groups who must be perpetually compensated. Racial preferences, in spite of noble intent, cause us all to look at ourselves as competing racial, ethnic and sexual cliques instead of diverse branches of a unified family of Americans.

The United States is at a crossroads. By the year 2050, white Americans will be in the minority for the first time. For the great American experiment to continue to be successful we must promote ideas and values that bind us, not break us. Ebonics is just a symptom of a much broader disease of cultural balkanization that is ripping us apart.