It just so happens that my book editor is also a servinemup.com reader. She was so kind as to send me a nice little redline to my last post:
My parents taught my sister and I (ME!!!!!) about the pains and struggles black folks went through just to go to school.
It seems my Southside dialect often digresses from the laws of grammar and I end up sounding like some uneducated thug on the street at times, that's why I know I need a an editor. English was always my most difficult subject. Recognizing nouns, conjugating verbs, diagramming sentences were always arduous tasks for me. The main thing that saved me from being below average and trapped in a ghetto vocabulary was the fact that I always liked to read. The problem with a lot of lower income kids (over 50% of the students at Worthing qualify for the reduced lunch program) is that their language skills are rooted in the diction they hear at home. Kids who have parents that are completely ignorant, have a lot steeper slope to climb, because they rarely get a chance to hear, let alone learn proper grammar in their homes..
Momma, I need some help with my homework.
Chile, you betta gone in there and figure that sh’t out fo yo’self! I already been to school and I got my GED, you need to get yours, I got MINE!
Some parents aren’t ignorant, they’re just uneducated and they don’t have the academic foundation to help their children..
Daddy, I need some help diagramming these sentences.
Diagramming sentences?? Is that some kinda drawing class??
No, it’s what we have to do in English. I don’t know understand what we’re supposed to do with past participles.
(staring at the book the child is holding up…and staring…maybe blinking a couple of times)
Hello? Dad?
Uhhhhh…you betta wait til your momma gets home so she can help you with that.
Some parents feel ashamed or embarrassed when they don’t know how to help their child with their homework. Instead of feeling ashamed, I think parents should seize the opportunity to learn along with their child. Whether by contacting a friend or family member who CAN help, or even getting a tutor, the resources are likely there when you look for them. Those who just give up and don’t try are the ones that end up being left behind.
Bill Cosby spoke at a gala in Washington D.C. that was commemorating the 50th anniversary of Brown vs. Board of Education this past Monday. There were a couple of remarks he made contrasting the civil rights pioneers of the 60’s with some of today’s black folks that ruffled a few feathers:
"These people marched and were hit in the face with rocks to get an education, and now we've got these knuckleheads walking around," he declared. "The lower economic people are not holding up their end in this deal. These people are not parenting. They are buying things for kids - $500 sneakers for what? And won't spend $200 for 'Hooked on Phonics."
Some have since taken offense at Cosby’s remark, but everybody on the Southside knows that he’s right on point. So many parents are rushing to buy their children the latest sneakers or designer jeans and so few are making the sacrifices necessary to ensure their child a quality education. There’s a steady warping of the black family’s value system that is diminishing the quest for scholarship while instead exalting the desires to ‘look fresh’.
This is best exemplified by the students who arrive to class dressed in expensive clothes that most of their teachers can’t even afford to buy. Starched down and creased up fresh out of the cleaners, fresh haircut, nails and toes freshly polished, or with the latest $200 pair of sneakers on their feet and yet they don’t have any paper or pencil to write with. Just walking around the school LOOKING fresh, or LOOKING cool, but not striving to learn anything. These are the kids who fall through the cracks and get left behind. Arranging their schedules to get the easiest teachers. Most of them don’t even care about getting A’s, they just want to score high enough to pass so that they can graduate. Instead of enrolling in classes that will challenge them, they enroll in the classes they can play cards or dominoes in.
The real sad part about it, is that most of these students are not dumb. They have the memory capacity to recite volumes of rap lyrics and they know how to measure the difference between 19” and 20” rims from blocks away. The problem is misdirected values. Since their parents don’t demand academic ambition from them, or their running podnas aren’t really into school, they follow suit and wallow with the ‘slackers’. The last ones to arrive to class, sitting in the back of the classroom, only paying attention when the teacher demands it. Otherwise they’re in their own world, passing notes, writing rhymes, sleeping, whatever it takes to kill time. Never even once thinking to apply themselves to really see how much they can learn.
There was another quote from Bill Cosby at this gala that I actually found quite amusing:
"I can't even talk the way these people talk: 'Why you ain't,' 'Where you is' ... You can't be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth!"
Just imagining Bill Cosby saying, ‘Why you ain’t, ‘Where you is’ makes me laugh,because I know this is the same dialect that would cause someone to say , ‘Gimme a nuddin’. But what it really made me think about was Mushmouth. Those who watched the Fat Albert cartoons (created by Bill Cosby) know that Mushmouth was the character that nobody could understand. Of course Mushmouth’s main problem was a speech impediment, but it wasn’t like Fat Albert, Weird Harold or Dumb Donald and the gang were grammatical genius’ either!
There are very few people that have complete command of the English language. Everyone has their moments of mispronouncing words, misusing phrases or making grammatical mistakes. But once a person commits themselves to scholarship, striving to achieve, that’s when progression in communication skills are made. There are people who have been living in this country for only a few years that can speak better English than a lot of black folks. It’s not because these black folks can’t learn proper grammar, it’s because they don’t even TRY. On top of that, there’s large segments of the black community that actually ostracizes proper speaking blacks. Quite often these students are jeered at just because they ‘talk white’. Those who succumb to this peer pressure and fall into the ‘cool’ group are actually pressured into being mo’ ignant.
I grew up with the distinction of sounding like a ‘white boy’ to a lot of my hood friends. But around my classmates at my predominately white elementary school, I talked ‘funny’. To them I sounded just like Arnold ‘Whatchu tawkin bout Willis!??’ from Different Strokes. I learned how to alternate my dialect between the two worlds, and it’s a skill that I still use quite often today. Some may see this as ‘selling out’ or ‘playing Uncle Tom to them white folks’, I just see it as a key survival skill. There’s a lot of opportunities that would have been closed off for me if I wasn’t able to effectively communicate with the group. This applies on the professional level as well as in the hood. I’m sure every black person has to deal with this dual system of communication on some level or another. Some people are so entrenched in being ‘black’ that they go around talking like a d’mn fool thinking it makes them cool. Others are so ‘gone’ trying to impress white folks that they act like they’ve never heard a split verb before in their lives. At some point we all have to find a balance that is above all else, true to ourselves. Or as we say on the Southside, ‘Get in where ya fit in fool!’
