Rafi D'Angelo @RafiDAngelo · Aug 03

The only reason any of us cringe at "ebonics" is bc we grew up with news media telling us it was bad after the Oakland controversy. A short history thread. 1/ https://t.co/hby7lCmN2b

Rafi D'Angelo @RafiDAngelo · Aug 03

Robert Williams, a Black psychologist, came up with the name "Ebonics" in the 70s by combining Ebony and linguistics. Before that, our vernacular was widely known as "nonstandard Negro English" which puts us at a deviation from English, as opposed to Ebonics, our own dialect.

Rafi D'Angelo @RafiDAngelo · Aug 03

Educators has been studying how we spoke for decades and in the 80s and 90s teachers finally realized we were putting too many Black kids in special ed classes simply because of how we spoke at home and we should be doing what Norway was doing.

Rafi D'Angelo @RafiDAngelo · Aug 03

Norway has a lot of dialects. If a kid came in speaking a (making this name up) Crystal dialect, the teacher would say "that's how you speak at home using these rules, and this is how those rules translate into standard Norweigian." They would use Crystal as a springboard.

Rafi D'Angelo @RafiDAngelo · Aug 03

In the US, we didn't do that. If you spoke Ebonics, your teacher would basically go "that's wrong, don't say that" and punish you OR you would score lower on IQ tests because no one had taught you how English relates to Ebonics.

Rafi D'Angelo @RafiDAngelo · Aug 03

Oakland says "hmm...why don't we give our teachers the tools to understand Ebonics so when kids come in speaking it, they can relate the rules of Ebonics to the rules of standard English so the kids will speak both and score better on tests."

Rafi D'Angelo @RafiDAngelo · Aug 03

WHITE AMERICA THREW A FIT and tens of thousands of news stories in the mid 90s said that Oakland was trying to teach kids Ebonics. Liberal and Conservative publications both trashed Oakland's idea and Ebonics became a bad word.

Rafi D'Angelo @RafiDAngelo · Aug 03

No one was paying attention to what Oakland actually proposed -- which is taking kids who ALREADY KNOW EBONICS (so why would we have to teach them?) and relating English rules to those rules so they could switch more effectively and do better in school.

Rafi D'Angelo @RafiDAngelo · Aug 03

A head start group famously ran this image of a MLK-like figure in the New York Times to protest Ebonics. Notably, this is INCORRECT Ebonics anyway, as this subject/verb agreement is not one found in the way we speak -- another instance of white people outside of their lane. https://t.co/XoalPfanq5

Rafi D'Angelo @RafiDAngelo · Aug 03

That's why "Ebonics" sounds like a bad word to a lot of people. White America had another knee-jerk reaction to a perceived threat to white supremacy, this time in the form of our language being "taught" in schools, and did everything they could to stamp it out.

Rafi D'Angelo @RafiDAngelo · Aug 03

Congress got involved and went so far as to threaten Oakland with pulling federal funds if they even proposed anything close to "teaching" Ebonics.

And now we say AAVE because white people got scared of Ebonics in 1996 and we're still dealing with it. /end

Rafi D'Angelo @RafiDAngelo · Aug 03

I just re-read this thread and realized I put "ebony" and "linguistics" but I meant to type "phonics." I was doing too much at the time (eating grits and watching Umbrella Academy).