by John McWhorter

In their bashing last week in the National Review of some odd-sounding talks at the American Educational Research Association, Frederick Hess and Francesca Lowe are correct that something is way off--but in ways in a sense more depressing than they know. They call attention to talks with names like "Beyond the Anglicist and Creolist Debate and Toward Social Change" and "The Ebonics Phenomenon, Language Planning, and the Hegemony of Standard English." This sounds like people tossing around plainly absurd concepts--"Creol-ist," whatever Louisiana and crawfish could have to do with teaching kids to read, and that k-razy "Eubonics" notion from ten years ago that everybody knew was just a cash-strapped school district trying to get bilingual-ed funds. Not quite. The tradition in question is a small crowd of linguists, psychologists, and speech pathologists that grew out of Black Power sentiments in the early 1970s, had 15 minutes of fame amidst the Ebonics controversy in 1996, and has lived on quietly since. The idea is that black students are hindered from learning to read by the difference between, say, ain't and isn't, or She don't be tryin' rather than She doesn't try. The solution is to start kids out with Black English texts and classroom activities, and then transition them into the standard. Thus the "Anglicist and Creolist" debate refers to an academic one between those claiming that Black English is a mixture of regional British dialects and those claiming that it arose as a heavily Africanized hybrid like the Gullah spoken in South Carolina--with an implication that Black English is more "different" from standard than it seems. But there are two things problematic about the intent of this talk. First, to many, a driving reason for getting "beyond" the debate is that the Anglicists--given to hard-core, apolitical statistical argumentation--have largely won the debate in comparison to the Creolists--the "P.C." side, many of whose work holds just in check indignant sentiments carried over from the Black is Beautiful era, and is often less rigorously argued than the Anglicist work. If the general linguistics community saw the Creolists as winning, one suspects few would be as inclined to "get past" the debate altogether. Second, re "Social Change," the implication is that only this would teach black kids how to read. But this ignores that we have known how to teach poor minority kids how to read since the 1960s: Siegfried Englemann's Project Follow Through showed how Direct Instruction programs (translating into what we know today as phonics, for one) do the trick. Yet in the literature on "Ebonics" materials for black kids saddled with the "hegemony" of Big Bad Standard English, I am aware of not a whisper about Englemann, as if the project was never done. Are the writers aware of this work? Have they any structured critiques as to why it is irrelevant? The primum mobile would appear to be Opposition Uber Alles. An anthology by people of this stripe claims that it "re-orders the elitist and colonial elements of language studies" and "recognizes and formalizes the existence of a "Black Linguistic Perspective." But since the early seventies, academia, publishers and conference organizers have been falling all over themselves to get work out there by black academics (you know, the ones cherished as so "welcome" by "diversity" advocates). The white folks at meetings of the Linguistics Society of America and the Modern Language Association are not very gracefully susceptible to the label "elitist and colonial." Yet for authors writing introductions to anthologies like the one claiming that the "Black Linguistic Perspective" is just now managing to get its head above water amidst the slings and arrows of elitism and colonialism, it is always 1965. On the topic of 1965, I was interested to note that Bob Moses will be doing the keynote at Mercy College in New York's Conference on Math Education and Social Justice in a couple of weeks. Not Robert Moses the Master Builder, but the Bob Moses who was a key figure in organizing the Freedom Summer and was, in general, the Civil Rights movement's most serious intellectual. Moses these days is engaged in teaching kids of humble background algebra and geometry in Jackson, Mississippi. Yet the conference is shot through with the likes of "Non-European Contributions to Modern Mathematics," "Honoring Cultural Differences and Teaching with Integrity" and ominous notions such as "What Does It Mean to Be Good at Math?" The question is whether students learn to do math as well, or better, when given it along with lessons on how to be a good leftist. The literature on approaches like this is little concerned with that question. This is not what Bob Moses was fighting for back in the day despite his deeply felt political views, and it is not what he is about now. As Clive James once put it about the countercultural movement in general, "living philosophical insights curve away from history and re-enter it later on as psychodrama, posturings and myth."