Blog #5

For my blog post I decided to read the slam article From Africa to the New World and into the Space Age by Smitherman.

From reading this article I realized that there was a lot of information that I did not know in regards to black English. The one was this push pull method that the author talked about. In the article he discussed how this system ultimately pushes black Americans to use standard white English though when they do they are not as accepted into mainstream America. This can be seen when the author talks about an ex-slave known as Absalom Jones who converted to a “white man’s religion,” but when he tried to go to church he was kicked out and told that he did not belong there. This shows that the push was him being encouraged to join the dominant culture, yet when he does he is not accepted and forced to be excluded.

This article connects closely to my identity because being a black American I can see how it is viewed when you talk proper or when you talk in Ebonics. For me, many of my family members talk in what would be considered a mixture of proper and Ebonics and so for me I have grown up being able to switch between both depending on where I am and who I am around. I think this brings up an important issue on how some languages are seen as being lesser because it does not stick to grammar rules that we were taught and because of that it makes someone not want to speak openly in how they would normally talk. Because of this, I think it is important as teachers to be able to accept everyone’s difference in how they talk and realize that language differences do not mean that they are behind or don’t understand. It is simply that they are not familiar with mainstream English. I think for me issues that I might face is just being able to accept their differences especially in the way they write or organize papers. This is probably the hardest part because I’ve always been taught specific ways to speak and organize a paper so seeing someone do something differently makes me automatically think they don’t understand how to do it. Being able to break that mindset will help me in accepting student’s differences. This is why for my project I’ve thought about using Ebonics and showing how they play out in like hip hop lyrics or even books that are seen as highly acclaimed to show how Ebonics can be seen as a way of language.

In this article the author used a lot of patterns the one that was most distinctive was his use of his own personal dialect. He did that by adding Ebonics in his article to show the contrast between standard English and black English. This was important because it shows how effective black English can be used in academic writing. The author also used parenthetical dashes because he is trying to emphasize certain points that he made such as why the phrase “it bees dat way sometime” is such an important line and how it portrays to black culture.