Ebonics Remark by Vaux No Cause for Offense

To the editors:

I am writing in reference to the article concerning Kuumba and Associate Professor of Linguistics Bert R. Vaux’s Wednesday lecture in Social Analysis 34, “Knowledge of Language” (News, “Kuumba Protests Professor’s Comment,” Dec. 13).

If I have learned anything studying linguistics, it is that people often have a great deal of anxiety regarding the way they speak. From the length of vowels to vocabulary choices, language reflects social and cultural status. Coupling that with a long history of struggling for cultural recognition, I can understand the Kuumba members’ reasons for being concerned about Vaux’s comments.

Their concern, however, cannot be more misplaced. Linguists—and dialectologists like Vaux, in particular—consider it to be their greatest project to explode negative stereotypes about language and to demonstrate that all speech varieties are likewise valid.

Though “Ebonics” has had a contentious history in the popular media from the mid 1990’s onward, concepts like Black English Vernacular and African-American Vernacular English have been studied systematically by sociolinguists since the early 1970’s. Though connotations of Ebonics in popular culture are negative, in linguistics, those connotations are emphatically positive, citing these speech varieties’ internal logic and rich history.

Some of the Kuumba members reportedly stayed for the lecture in order to talk with Vaux afterwards. I wonder whether they paid attention during the lecture. If they had, they would have seen Vaux treat the dialect with respect, seriousness and academic rigor. One Kuumba member’s belief is that the comment was, “really detrimental to the work a lot of members of Kuumba are trying to do in erasing misperceptions about what black culture and diversity are.” On the contrary, Vaux’s lecture supports their stated goal. The quotation from his final Ebonics slide speaks for itself: “Characterizations of Ebonics as ‘slang’...are nothing more than superficial observation, and are wildly inaccurate.”

Vaux’s segue comment, though perhaps both poorly phrased and poorly understood, is not the cause for concern that the Kuumba singers believe it is. I do not believe that this is a case of irresponsibly crying wolf, but rather a misunderstanding and false alarm. The Social Analysis 34 classroom is a forum for the science of language, not the politics of race.

Scott A. Golder '03

Dec. 13, 2002

The writer is a linguistics concentrator.