Harvard Has Ebonic Fever

I received a forwarded e-mail that had circulated through Penn, Andover, Hotchkiss, Princeton and Yale (to name a few of the schools) titled "Ebonics Test." The forward begins with the explanation, "A friend of mine has an 18 year-old son named Leroy. He attends Oakland High School where they teach Ebonics as a second language. Last week he was given a homework assignment. All he had to do was use each of the following words in a sentence."

It then reads, "This is what Leroy did:

1. 'Hotel': I gave my girlfriend da crabs and the hotel everybody.

2. 'Income': I just got in bed wit dee hoe and income my wife.

3. 'Disappointment': My parole officer tol me if I miss disappointment they gonna send me back to da big house."

This e-mail letter continues with 16 examples, and ends with the note, "Needless to say, Leroy got an 'A.'"

Awful. Horrible. These are my reactions. But laughter--that's really the key. Everyone that I have shown this forwarded e-mail to has laughed, and then commented on how awful it was. Sure, maybe it is funny. But humor is not always good. Just what is it that is so funny? Jokes certainly spring up quickly, and are usually tasteless, but this joke is far from just that, for it clearly illustrates the divide between the haves and have-nots.

This piece of filth is circulating in tightly-knit, highly-privileged circles, and is further establishing the opposition between Us and Them. The outright insults to black people are most insidious. To begin with, Leroy is doing his homework (notice that it's not Lawrence, Buffy, Jane or Joe) and all he has to do is vocab--as a senior in high school. But beyond this, notice the constant subject of prison, cheating and stupidity among other things.

Moreover, the very media in which this horrendous message is being communicated lends an implicit air of classism to the situation. Harvard students and anyone with an e-mail account has access to this trash. Does Leroy? I would venture to guess not. This shows that a class is being established, rallying around Ebonics, in which inside jokes, allusions and references are made. Only the select and privileged have access to this circle and so the class is clearly pulling away from the likes of Leroy. If you inquired after the fictional Leroy, he would never even know that his homework was circulating across the country and being laughed at.

Ebonic fever is the term that I use to describe the current national obsession with the American dialect spoken mostly by the black lower-class community. The dialect has been identified and studied for years, but only in small academic circles. Only since the recent decision by the Oakland, Calif. school board to officially recognize Ebonics as a second language has the public at large cared about it, or even bothered to listen to the academics. Since then, Ebonics has made the front page of every major newspaper across the country, has been the main subject on every major news program on the major networks, and has been the subject of debates on college campuses across the country.

The effect of this new fever is to pull the divide between race and class further apart, and faster. Take a close look at where Ebonics is being debated and examined: Time, Newsweek, the college debate teams and op-ed sections of the papers. Who reads and writes these articles and who participates in these debates? More importantly, how is the dialect explained and portrayed?

The debate over Ebonics has essentially become an Us v. Them debate. Newsweek certainly does not use the Ebonic grammatical structure. Newsweek uses standard English to explain what Ebonics is, and how California is using it--and thereby automatically creates opposition. This opposition is the dreaded binary: male/female, cat/dog, English/Ebonics.

The binary opposition, feminist the-orists have argued for years, always creates definition through the establishment of difference where one side is superior to the other. (No, I am not going to drop any fancy names here). In the articles devoted to Ebonics covering dozens of glossy pages and smudged newsprint, as well as in the debates on college campuses, what is being established is binary opposition, is difference.

The problem with recognizing Ebonics as a language in the classroom is that it fundamentally separates students across the country along the lines of class and race--a sad fact which its supporters fail to recognize. And beyond this fundamental problem lies the disgraceful disaster waiting to happen: the eventual complete demise of social fluidity.

Difference is clearly never equal; we can all agree that separate but equal just does not work. It can't, and in creating two separate schools--those who speak, read and write Ebonics v. those who don't (or, those who read Newsweek and those who don't)--the difference is being established beyond any reasonable boundary.

Certainly, difference is inevitable. I am not trying to paint a rosy picture in which we are all the same and all equal. My point is simply that the difference being established through institutionalization and under the consent of the great American system is creating a rift that I fear will never be mended.

If America develops a population divided by those who speak, read, and write Ebonics and those who speaks, reads, and write standard English, there will be a basic communication problem in the United States, and one side just won't be able to understand what the other is trying to say. If we can't communicate with one another, how can a division ever be erased or at least fluid?

Rachel L. Barenbaum is a junior living in Eliot House.