The Back to Ebonics movement which has been around for a few decades is gaining new traction of late.
This from frontpagemag.com.
The black vernacular—which proponents are striving to convince the nation at large—aims to capture the unique and singular way many blacks speak and act as a means of protecting black self-expression.
That’s crazy talk. You’re in America, speak English.
Few in academia, or in mainstream society for that matter, took the Ebonics movement very seriously. Standard English is the lingua franca of business and commerce, and that was not about to change. If blacks aspired to achieve economic parity with their counterparts, they would have to become bilingual.
Lately, however, the Back to Ebonics movement has morphed into a devoutly nasty and pernicious new form. It has transmogrified into a hegemonic call to replace standard English as the norm. Blacks required to speak standard English are believed to experience violence, persecution, dehumanization, and marginalization.
The leader of this movement, a black professor at the University of Michigan by the name of April Baker-Bell, has sponsored a document to abolish what she calls “White Mainstream English.” She believes black students who are forced to write their papers in mainstream English are victims of anti-black racism.
The idea that standard English speaking and writing requirements are emotionally harmful, as Baker-Bell claims, goes beyond shallow identity politics. The root, as Baker-Bell would have it, is the arbitrary imposition of Dead White Men whose goals are to marginalize the speech practices of non-white speakers of English. In other words, the grammar that governs the use of standard English is racist.
To indict white speakers of standard English as linguistic colonizers and imperialists is untenable and empirically false. To begin with, millions of non-white and non-native English speakers voluntarily learn the language with great zeal for the simple reason that it is the global language of trade, commerce, and business.
What’s in it for these race hustlers who are paid large sums of money to lecture to white progressives on how they should alter their pedagogical styles and expurgate standard English requirements from their syllabi?
It is not care and concern for the well-being of blacks.
It is a struggle for power, a struggle to continue creating a vast underclass of uneducated blacks who will speak in a manner that will render them incomprehensible and lower their intelligence quotient in the minds of those with whom they speak.
Black race hustlers such as April Baker-Bell aim to keep their own people downtrodden on their terms. They have become the new slave holders of their own people. They are the most condescending set of prejudicial narcissistic elitists who know that blacks, if taught standard English—and a basic solid education in general—could learn adequately and prosper.
Worrisome to many Conservative whites, Baker-Bell’s black English and anti-standard English agenda are gaining traction. She gives seminars around the country on linguistic racism and eliminating white standard English altogether from society, and some educators drink the Kool-Aid and take notes. In other words, if Baker-Bell’s top-down approach makes inroads among educators and administrators who create policies, teachers who continue to demand grammatically correct standard English will be punished.
The professor seeks to “emancipate” blacks from adherence to standard punctuation and basic mechanics of grammar and enunciation. In effect, she wants to relegate blacks to primitive backwater swamps where they sound like grunting farm animals. But the sins of her agenda go deeper. Since black English is broken English, any attempt to elevate it to a level of superiority by demonizing standard English is an attempt to mainstream mediocrity and demonize excellence.
Baker-Bell knows all Americans will never speak Ebonics. Her goal then must be to demote excellence and promote mediocrity. This is manufactured stupidity. And, since language is primarily a tool of cognition, those dependent on Ebonics will be unable to think, and form concepts and abstractions. Ebonics will prove to be devolutionary—taking a larger and larger percentage of the American population back to a primitive stage of speech and behavior.
This agenda fits squarely with the trans-human and post-human movements which, for all the vagueness surrounding their definitional status, advocates a destruction of the human condition as we know it.
When the moral integrity of language is undermined, with full malice aforethought, then the civic virtues that bind us as a nation-state, such as trust, social cohesion, patriotic commitment to a shared understanding of the public good, pride in country, and benevolence and good will towards our fellow compatriots, get destroyed. Factionalism and tribalism assume ascendancy. Mediocrity is enshrined. Excellence and greatness are ridiculed and demonized.
Let us not kid ourselves. Professor April Baker-Bell and her ilk are not real scholars, and their fields of studies are illegitimate. Calling for the elimination of standard English cannot be a proper field of any academic discipline. What the Governor of Michigan must do—but she won’t because she is a dangerous combination of compromised and incompetent—is sign a law into effect banning the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) policies that make it possible for racist welfare scholars such as Baker-Bell to be employed in higher education.
This is not an infringement on academic freedom, since such work is merely hate speech and propaganda masquerading as scholarship.
Final thoughts: Doubt not, this rebirth of Ebonics is yet another element of the Obama fundamental transformation of America. Oddly enough, the clean-cut, well-spoken black man who squeezed un-vetted into American politics and reached the pinnacle quicker than people learned how to pronounce his name is behind this dumbing down of the masses for the purposes of de-populating the nation and the world and enslaving those of us selected to be left alive.
