One of my favorite sounds in the world is the voice of the late comedian Bernie Mac. I often think of an early performance of his, on the nineties standup showcase \u201cDef Comedy Jam.\u201d The routine, slightly less than six minutes long, is songlike in structure\u2014after each cluster of two or three jokes, Mac yells \u201cKick it!\u201d and a snippet of cheesy, drum-heavy hip-hop plays. Between these punctuations, he affects poses that would fit as comfortably within a twelve-bar blues as they do on the dimly lit Def Jam stage: sexual bravado, profane delight, sly self-deprecation, dismay and gathering confusion at a rapidly changing world. \u201cI ain\u2019t come here for no foolishness,\u201d he says toward the beginning of the set, his double negative signalling playfulness and threat in equal measure. \u201cYou don\u2019t understand,\u201d he says again and again, sometimes stretching \u201cunderstand\u201d into four or five syllables. Then, with swift, hilarious anger, like Jackie Gleason\u2019s: \u201cI ain\u2019t scared of you motherfuckers.\u201d The \u201cr\u201d in \u201cscared\u201d is barely audible, and the subsequent profanity is a fluid, tossed-off \u201cmuhfuckas.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Bernie Mac is, in other words\u2014and this is the source of my love\u2014an expert speaker of Black English, which is the subject of the recent book \u201cTalking Back, Talking Black\u201d (Bellevue), by the linguist, writer, and Columbia professor John McWhorter. In the book, McWhorter offers an explanation, a defense, and, most heartening, a celebration of the dialect that has become, he argues, an American lingua franca.<\/span><\/p>\n McWhorter\u2019s d\u00e9but as a public intellectual came twenty years ago, when a fracas erupted over a proposal to use Black English\u2014then often called Ebonics\u2014as a teaching tool in public schools in Oakland, California. The idea was roundly ridiculed. Ebonics, people said, was simply a collection of \u201cslang and bad grammar\u201d\u2014not nearly enough to make a language. The TV talking head Tucker Carlson, in a typically nasty flourish, called Black English \u201ca language where nobody knows how to conjugate the verbs,\u201d McWhorter recalls. The pungent reaction baffled linguists, who had long appreciated\u2014and begun to seriously study\u2014the \u201clanguageness\u201d of Black English and other informal speech variants, such as Jamaican Patois, Swiss German, and Haitian Creole. McWhorter, who is black, was then teaching at nearby U.C. Berkeley, and he had a long-standing scholarly interest in black speech. He became\u2014by dint of his race and his physical proximity to the uproar\u2014the most prominent authority on the validity of Black English as language.<\/span><\/p>\n Since then, McWhorter has built a career outside the academy as a quirky populist, committed to defending linguistic novelties often derided as erroneous or as harbingers of slackening standards. He sees in such innovations evidence of the only constant in language: its endless mutability, and its corresponding ability to surprise. He hosts Slate\u2019s popular linguistics podcast, \u201cLexicon Valley,\u201d and, in another recent book, \u201cWords on the Move\u201d (Henry Holt), writes acceptingly of such trends as \u201cuptalk\u201d (the tendency to end declarative sentences with the upward lilt of the voice that usually accompanies a question) and the peppering of \u201clike\u201d throughout the speech of younger Americans. McWhorter brooks no condescension toward the Valley Girl. \u201cAmericans,\u201d he laments in \u201cTalking Back, Talking Black,\u201d \u201chave trouble comprehending that any<\/em> vernacular way of speaking is legitimate language.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cTalking Back, Talking Black,\u201d then, is a kind of apologia. In five short essays, McWhorter demonstrates the \u201clegitimacy\u201d of Black English by uncovering its complexity and sophistication, as well as the still unfolding journey that has led to its creation. He also gently chides his fellow-linguists for their inability to present convincing arguments in favor of vernacular language. They have been mistaken, he believes, in emphasizing \u201csystematicity\u201d\u2014the fact that a language\u2019s particularities are \u201cnot just random, but based on rules.\u201d An oft-cited instance of systematicity in Black English is the lastingly useful \u201chabitual \u2018be,\u2019\u00a0\u201d whereby, Carlson\u2019s quip notwithstanding, the formulation \u201cShe be passin\u2019 by\u201d contains much more than an unconjugated verb. That naked \u201cbe,\u201d McWhorter explains, \u201cis very specific; it means that something happens on a regular basis, rather than something going on right now.\u201d He adds, \u201cNo black person would say \u2018She be passin\u2019 by right now,\u2019 because that isn\u2019t what be <\/em>in that sentence is supposed to mean. Rather, it would be \u2018She be passin\u2019 by every Tuesday when I\u2019m about to leave.\u2019\u00a0\u201d A mistake to untrained ears, the habitual \u201cbe\u201d is, \u201cof all things, grammar.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n However logical, examples like these have failed to garner respect, because to most Americans grammar does not inhere in linguistic rule-following generally but in a set of specific rules that they have been taught to obey. McWhorter offers a couple of typical directives: \u201cDon\u2019t say less<\/em> books, say fewer<\/em> books,\u201d and \u201cSay Billy and I <\/em>went to the store, not Billy and me<\/em> went to the store.\u201d This narrow notion of grammar has amounted to a peculiar snobbery: the more obscure and seemingly complex the grammatical rule, the more we tend to assert its importance and to esteem those who have managed to master it. \u201cPeople respect complexity,\u201d McWhorter writes. His smirking and somewhat subversive accommodation to this Pharisaism is to emphasize the ways in which Black English is more<\/em> complex than Standard English.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/a><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n One of these ways\u2014the truest, I should add, to my own experience of the language\u2014is the use of the word \u201cup\u201d in conjunction with a location. Hip-hop fans might recognize this construction from the chorus of the rapper DMX\u2019s hit song \u201cParty Up (Up in Here)\u201d: \u201cY\u2019all gon\u2019 make me lose my mind\u00a0\/\u00a0Up in here, up in here\u00a0\/\u00a0Y\u2019all gon\u2019 make me go all out\u00a0\/\u00a0Up in here, up in here,\u201d etc. McWhorter, playing the tone poet\u2019s patient exegete, scours several instances of the usage, settling on the idea that in this context \u201cup\u201d conveys the intimacy of the setting it qualifies. The sentence \u201cWe was sittin\u2019 up at Tony\u2019s,\u201d according to McWhorter, \u201cmeans that Tony is a friend of yours.\u201d This is an artful and convincing reading, and McWhorter carries it out in an impishly forensic manner, proving his thesis that, in some respects, Black English has \u201cmore going on\u201d than Standard English. The latter lacks such a succinct \u201cintimacy marker\u201d as Black English\u2019s \u201cup,\u201d and someone who studied Black English as a foreign language would have a hard time figuring out when, and how, to deploy it.<\/span><\/p>\n The passage on \u201cup\u201d is characteristic of McWhorter\u2019s strengths as a writer. In the years that he has spent popularizing ideas hatched in the halls of the academy, he has honed a friendly prose style. Some of the sentences in \u201cTalking Back\u201d seem designed to enact its author\u2019s loose, democratic approach to English, and to language more broadly: sentence-ending prepositions sit happily together with uses of the singular \u201cthey.\u201d This intelligent breeziness is the source of the book\u2019s considerable charm. It also helps McWhorter slide past the aspects of Black English that cannot be so cheerily explained.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n McWhorter\u2019s easygoing recounting of the Ebonics affair, with its emphasis on his ecumenical approach to language, elides the way in which the episode served as an opportunity to broadcast his somewhat stonier views on black American life. McWhorter opposed the Oakland proposal\u2014a fact that he scarcely makes clear in \u201cTalking Back, Talking Black.\u201d He told the story more fully in \u201cLosing the Race,\u201d a best-selling jeremiad published in 2000, which argued that the familiar litany of black American troubles\u2014low academic achievement, the absence of upward mobility, and so on\u2014were due more to cultural deficiencies like anti-intellectualism and a \u201ccult of victimology\u201d than to institutionalized racism. The support that some black leaders expressed for the Oakland proposal was, in McWhorter\u2019s view, evidence of their misguided sense that \u201cthe main issue\u201d was \u201cnot evaluating an educational policy but defending black America from racist abuse.\u201d Black English is perfectly legitimate as language, but its use in schools wouldn\u2019t help black students, he wrote in 1997, because, among other problems, \u201cinner city backgrounds do not prepare many children to be receptive to education in school.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n McWhorter\u2019s stance in \u201cLosing the Race\u201d won him fame as a commentator on race and society, and got him classified alongside an increasingly\u2014but, in retrospect, fleetingly\u2014visible cadre of black conservatives, including the economist Thomas Sowell and the writer Shelby Steele, with whom he frequently agreed on such matters. McWhorter, though, was an otherwise conventional, if slightly old-fashioned, liberal Democrat; he\u2019d arrived at sociology\u2019s doorstep with a bouquet of Daniel Patrick Moynihan\u2019s ideas just as they were beginning to wilt. He didn\u2019t deny the persistence of racism\u2014he still inveighs against mass incarceration and the drug war\u2014but insisted on the reality of post-sixties progress, and implored his fellow black Americans to reach out and grab their country\u2019s newly extended hand. This thinking has slipped further out of fashion in recent years, as smartphones around the country have delivered the bad old news about blacks and the police. McWhorter\u2019s response to the radicalism of the younger generation, notably embodied by the Black Lives Matter movement, has been an exasperated resignation. He writes about race less regularly these days, and, when he does, it is often to dismiss the new mood as a kind of cult, long on shibboleths and pieties but woefully short on methods for bettering the lives of black Americans. (A 2015 article that McWhorter wrote for the Daily Beast<\/em> was titled \u201cAntiracism, Our Flawed New Religion.\u201d)<\/span><\/p>\n Early in \u201cTalking Back, Talking Black,\u201d McWhorter brings up the legacy of racism, only to reject it as an adequate explanation for\u2014or tool in arguing against\u2014the derision levelled at Black English over the years. \u201cSurely racism plays a part in how Black English is heard,\u201d he concedes in the book\u2019s first chapter, before claiming that \u201cthe speech of Appalachian whites is condemned to an even greater degree.\u201d He offers this latter assertion\u2014doubtful, by my admittedly anecdotal lights\u2014without a hint of evidence. He is unimpressed by, and wary of, the \u201csociopolitically charged argument\u201d that \u201cto criticize a dialect is to criticize its speakers.\u201d McWhorter fears that its chief result is to make people\u2014white people\u2014\u201cclam up.\u201d Better, with evangelistic hopes like McWhorter\u2019s, to root around for the language\u2019s exceptional qualities: \u201cup\u201d and all the rest.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/a><\/span><\/p>\n The most energetic but also the most frustrating section of \u201cTalking Back\u201d is a short treatise on the word \u201cnigga.\u201d McWhorter takes the customary care in distinguishing the word from its uglier, older cousin, \u201cnigger,\u201d but he pushes the distinction further than most: for McWhorter, these are not simply two separate English words, let alone two pronunciations of the same word; they are, rather, words that belong to two different dialects. \u201cNigger<\/em> is Standard English and nigga<\/em> is Black English,\u201d he writes, matter-of-factly. \u201cNigga<\/em> means \u2018You\u2019re one of us.\u2019 Nigger<\/em> doesn\u2019t.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n
![\"MAY](\"http:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/new-yorker.jpg\")
<\/a>MAY 15, 2017<\/p><\/div>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n <\/p>\nTHE CASE FOR <\/span><\/h1>\n
BLACK ENGLISH<\/span><\/h1>\n
In his latest book, John McWhorter
\ncelebrates the dialect that has become
\nan American lingua franca.<\/span><\/h2>\n<\/hgroup>\n