The Times-Dispatch had a Sunday
column a couple weeks ago defending Jeremiah Wright, so of course I
had to read it. I dislike
Wright and his race-hustling contemporaries like Jesse Jackson. The author, Mark C. Hopson has this biographical info:
Mark C. Hopson teaches in the Department of Communication at George Mason University. He is completing a book entitled "The Talking Drum: Exploring the Role of Critical Memory in Intercultural Communication."
The larger point in the article seems to be that we should be sensitive to cultural minorities, this is a view I largely agree with. But being an academic, Hopson tries too hard to tie his defense of Wright into some larger context of language and clashing cultures. The real zinger was this:
Linguist Geneva Smitherman found that such stereotypes hinder the educational process for children. For example, a black child might be called "deficient" for using the phrase, "It be hot in here." But Smitherman and others recognize the interactivity of "be" as perpetually and concurrently encompassing the past, present, and future tense. Thus, "It be hot in here," indicates that it was hot yesterday, it is hot today, and undoubtedly it will be hot tomorrow. Three dimensions of time spoken in one simple word: Is this a deficiency, or a distinct rhetorical artifice? Perhaps it is time to re-present language and culture in our North American school systems.
Is this revisiting Ebonics? I'm all for admitting that language is dynamic, obviously, since Americans don't speak Elizabethan english these days. I freely admit that my diction is not perfect, and I'm sure you'll find some grammatical errors in this blog. But should schools really teach improper grammar to boost a minority's self-esteem? Barack Obama seems to speak the language relatively well.
