Arkady
President
Slate has an article examining whether there really is a strong stigma, in black culture, associated with black people talking or acting white:
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_..._proper_english_and_academic_achievement.html
Although I have a couple black people I'm fairly close to, I don't have a good window to look into this. But it is an area I'd be interested to know more about.
Is the stigma against standard English stronger among black people, on average, than among white people? I know I've been ridiculed, even as a white person, for using a big vocabulary and proper pronunciation and grammar. Especially when a person is younger, that's an issue, and I developed a tendency to "code-switch" to fit in better with whatever crowd I was with.
You hear white politicians doing that, too, especially if they're based in the South. When they go home to their districts, suddenly they're drawling words, dropping the endings of their gerunds, using slang like "y'all," and otherwise taking great liberties with the English language, in order to come across as more "homey." A politician can be the scion of an old-money New England aristocratic family, with his high school, college, and grad school having been in Massachusetts and Connecticut, but he sure wouldn't want to be caught sounding like a Yankee while campaigning in Midland. Jewish politicians tend to do it, too. When among Jews and those familiar with the Jewish culture, they tend to slide into heavier Long Island/Brooklyn accents with Yiddish words thrown in, and with some stereotypical Jewish word inversions. Then, in other settings, the accent fades, the Yiddish vanishes, and standard word order is routinely used.
The Slate article, at least, casts some doubt on the idea that academic achievement is coded as "acting white" in the black community as a whole.... it suggests that such coding only happens in certain circumstances, where blacks are in a minority and few of them are among the high academic achievers. In other settings, smart kids are still teased, but no more among blacks than other groups.
The article also makes the point that sometimes teasing may be a reaction to the perceived pretentiousness of refusing to "code-switch" in informal settings. In other words, a person who insists on using standard English in settings where informal dialect normally predominates, could be seen as putting on airs, but perhaps no more in the black community than the white." If I'm with a poor white New England crowd and everyone is describing something as a "wicked pissah," and I respond, "yes, that is indubitably a delightful eventuality," I'm going to be seen as having a rod up my ass. Presumably something similar happens in settings where an "ebonic" dialect is standard, but someone insists on using standard English instead.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_..._proper_english_and_academic_achievement.html
Although I have a couple black people I'm fairly close to, I don't have a good window to look into this. But it is an area I'd be interested to know more about.
Is the stigma against standard English stronger among black people, on average, than among white people? I know I've been ridiculed, even as a white person, for using a big vocabulary and proper pronunciation and grammar. Especially when a person is younger, that's an issue, and I developed a tendency to "code-switch" to fit in better with whatever crowd I was with.
You hear white politicians doing that, too, especially if they're based in the South. When they go home to their districts, suddenly they're drawling words, dropping the endings of their gerunds, using slang like "y'all," and otherwise taking great liberties with the English language, in order to come across as more "homey." A politician can be the scion of an old-money New England aristocratic family, with his high school, college, and grad school having been in Massachusetts and Connecticut, but he sure wouldn't want to be caught sounding like a Yankee while campaigning in Midland. Jewish politicians tend to do it, too. When among Jews and those familiar with the Jewish culture, they tend to slide into heavier Long Island/Brooklyn accents with Yiddish words thrown in, and with some stereotypical Jewish word inversions. Then, in other settings, the accent fades, the Yiddish vanishes, and standard word order is routinely used.
The Slate article, at least, casts some doubt on the idea that academic achievement is coded as "acting white" in the black community as a whole.... it suggests that such coding only happens in certain circumstances, where blacks are in a minority and few of them are among the high academic achievers. In other settings, smart kids are still teased, but no more among blacks than other groups.
The article also makes the point that sometimes teasing may be a reaction to the perceived pretentiousness of refusing to "code-switch" in informal settings. In other words, a person who insists on using standard English in settings where informal dialect normally predominates, could be seen as putting on airs, but perhaps no more in the black community than the white." If I'm with a poor white New England crowd and everyone is describing something as a "wicked pissah," and I respond, "yes, that is indubitably a delightful eventuality," I'm going to be seen as having a rod up my ass. Presumably something similar happens in settings where an "ebonic" dialect is standard, but someone insists on using standard English instead.
