Geneva Smitherman lecture, "The Black Idiom," at the University of Iowa, February 13, 1974

Speaker 1: The following was recorded February 13th, 1974, as part of the Black Kaleidoscope Three Cultural Series at the University of Iowa. The Black Idiom is the subject of this address by Geneva Smitherman, a Professor in the Department of Linguistics at Wayne State University. Introducing Professor Smitherman is Wilson Moses, an instructor in the Department of History at the University of Iowa. Wilson Moses: Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to our fourth presentation in this year's second, is it? Someone told me before. Second presentation in this year's Black Kaleidoscope Lecture Series. Our speaker this evening is Professor Geneva Smitherman, Wayne State University's Department of Linguistics. Professor Smitherman is a graduate of Detroit's, perhaps strongest intellectual institution, Cass Technical High School, and a graduate of Wayne State University. She did her doctoral work at the University of Michigan, with specialty in Afro-American Language. Professor Smitherman has published in Black Scholar, College English, and numerous other periodicals. She's particularly known for her attempts to demonstrate that language is a political thing, and that it can be both a means of oppressing people, and of advancing their status. Professor Smitherman, we are delighted to have you here this evening. Geneva Smitherm...: Thank you. If I start not sounding loud enough, would somebody in the back just kind of raise up your hand as I go along, and I'll try to project more. Is this okay now? Is this is pretty good so far? Okay. I guess I might begin my talk on the Black Idiom with an excerpt from Langston Hughes, which I think is particularly appropriate, because one mechanism of Black survival in what was, and perhaps in some ways still is an alien land. One mechanism of Black survival has been our ability to laugh to keep from crying. Geneva Smitherm...: So I want to introduce my talk with a quote from Langston Hughes, who very often had some things to say on Black speech, speaking through the character of his folk hero, Jesse B. Semple. And this little excerpt is from a bit of conversation between Semple and his girlfriend, Semple and his lady, as we say in Detroit. Between Semple and his lady, Joyce, and it begins like this: Semple: "What are you doing with all those timetables and travel books, baby?" Joyce: "Just in case we ever should get married, maybe I'm picking out a place to spend our honeymoon. Niagara Falls, the Grand Canyon, Plymouth Rock." Semple: "I don't want to spend no honeymoon on no rock. These books is pretty, but baby, we ain't ready to travel yet." Joyce: "But we can dream, can't we?" Semple: "Niagara Falls makes a mighty lot of noise falling down. I like to sleep on holidays." "Oh, Jess, then how about the Far West? Were you ever at the Grand Canyon?" Geneva Smitherm...: Semple: "I were. Fact is, I was also at Niagara Falls, after I were at Grand Canyon." "I do not wish to criticize your grammar, Mr. Semple, but as long as you've been around New York, I wonder why you continue to say, 'I were,' and at other times, 'I was.'" "Because sometimes I were, sometimes I was baby. I was at Niagara Falls, and I were at the Grand Canyon, since that were in the far distant past, when I were a country boy on the Santa Fe. I was more recently at Niagara Falls." "I see. But you never were, I were. There is no were. In the past tense, there is only I was. The verb to be as declined, I am, I was, I have been." "Joyce baby, don't be so touchless about it. Do you want me to talk like him Edward R. Murrow?" Geneva Smitherm...: "No, but when we go to formals, I hate to hear you saying, for example, 'I taken,' instead of, 'I took.' Why do colored people say, 'I take it,' so much?" "Because we are taken. Taken until we are undertaken. And Joyce baby, funerals is high." "Funerals are high." "Oh Joyce, what difference do it make?" "Jess, what difference does it make? Does is correct English." "And do ain't?" "Isn't, not ain't." "Woman, don't tell me ain't, ain't in the dictionary." "But it ain't. I mean, it isn't correct." "Joyce, I gives less than a small dam. What if it aren't?" Geneva Smitherm...: "You say what if things aren't? You give less than a damn. Well, I'm tired of a man who gives less than a damn about what if things aren't, I'm tired. Tired, you hear me? I've never known any one man so long without having some kind of action out of him. You have not even formally proposed to me, let alone writing my father for my hand." "I did not know I had to write your old man for your hand." My father Jess, not my old man. And don't let it be too long. After all, I may meet some other man." "You better not meet no other man. You better not. You do and I will marry you right now this June in spite of my first wife, bigamy, your old man, I mean your father. Joyce don't you know I'm not to be trifled with I'm Jessie be simple." Geneva Smitherm...: Joyce: "Yes I know you were. Well, let's just sit down and spend a nice Sunday evening conversing, okay?" Semple: "Yes, Joyce. Baby, you ain't mad with me is you? Because I know, you know what I mean when I say I is, or I are, or was or whatever it'd be. Listen, Joyce honey, when I say I were, believe me. When I say I was, believe me too, because I were and was, I am deep in love with you. If I say you took or taken, just believe I've been taken too, because I were and am and I is taken in by you. If it is, or it ain't well stated and it ain't or it aren't said right, my love still must be rated a love that don't fade overnight. When I say I am, believe me. When I say I is, believe me too, because I were and was, and I is deep in love with you. Damn if I ain't." Joyce: "A small damn." Geneva Smitherm...: Okay, that was one of Langston Hughes's many ways of pointing out some of the attitudes about Black people towards Black speech and Joyce, if some of you are familiar with the Semple stories, Joyce is Black too as is Semple. And in poking fun at these kinds of attitudes. Okay, before about 1959, when the first study was done to change the speech of Blacks, and this was done right in my home city, Detroit Central High School. Fortunately by going to Cass Tech, as Wilson mentioned, I evaded this study at Central High School, but of course ran right into it when I got into speech correction at Wayne State, which I'll talk about in a minute. But before this time, and I sort of talk about Black English in terms of Black education as before '59 and after '59. And before the time, as I said, Black English had been mainly a subject of very highly specialized study by historical linguists and cultural anthropologists who debated hotly over whether the dialect of Blacks had West African or Anglosaxon groups. Geneva Smitherm...: In more recent years however, we have had pronouncements on Black English from the NAACP, the Black Panthers, from educational psychologists, such as [Bright] and Jensen, from housewives, from community folk, from executives of national corporations and so on and so on. I mean everybody and they momma done had something to say on the subject, whether qualified to do so or not. I think their concern over the speech of Blacks, as well as studies of language change, such as the first one that I mentioned. Ruth Goldens at Central High School, where she had Black 11th grade students sit in for the whole 20 weeks of the semester and do nothing but drill over pronunciation. Learning to distinguish F-O-E and F-O-U-R, foe and four, which I finally got able to after speech correction. And what she found after all of this money, and I think she got a doctorate from Wayne State for it, and 20 weeks of the students' time, that's what they did during English class. They went and they did these speech drills. Geneva Smitherm...: And her what her post tests revealed was that the students who have made the most change, who had made any appreciable statistically significant change in their speech, were girls who came from homes where the mother had two years of college. Okay. But I started out to say that I think that this concern and all of the human graveled Black speech has been generated the way I see contemporary Black history by two major factors. First of all, the rapid educational and economic progress of Blacks during the forties and fifties. Secondly, to the civil rights and later the Black Power Movements, which began of course in 1955, the year Black Rosa Parks of Montgomery, Alabama refused to move to the back of the bus. Geneva Smitherm...: Seems to me that both factors made Blacks a potential threat to the entrenched political control and economic domination that whites had become accustomed to. So in other words, I'm saying basically that the recent much ado about Black English talk of it's being a barrier to Black educational development, talk of it's being a barrier to Black employment, is a new form of racism, a discriminatory obstacle designed to obstruct the coming to power of Black Americans. Geneva Smitherm...: I want to talk then about Black English from a Black perspective. And I feel, a rather unique Black perspective at that since I was a victim of one of those linguistic eradication programs that I mentioned at Detroit Central High School. At this point, then I just like to interject two bits of personal commentary that I think are highly relevant here. In 1956, I entered college fresh from the Black ghetto of Detroit with a high enough academic average, having gone to Cass Tech. But speaking a dialect of English that the university couldn't abide, not at least if you were going to be a teacher, which I thought I was until I flunked the speech test and was informed, I'd have to take speech therapy. My problem so I was told, was what they were then calling a Southern regional dialect, but which just a few years hence, would be labeled for what it was, Black dialect. Geneva Smitherm...: Not true enough, I had been born and had my early schooling in the south, Brownsville, Tennessee. And I guess in many respects, my life had been as James Baldwin says, the usual bleak story. My father was a sharecropper who left Brownsville as a part of what the sociologists call the postwar urban migration of Blacks, to come to the promised lands of the North. First, we live in south side Chicago and daddy worked in the stockyards. Then later, Black bottom Detroit and the animal bill plants. Shortly after we moved to Detroit, my father received the call to preach. And thus our family became immersed in that whole storefront church tradition, which interesting enough is no longer in a storefront. It seems to me that it was at just the precise point that the congregation moved out into a big elaborate brand new quarter of a million dollar structure, went big time, as we say, that my father really began having problems. And I guess that's a whole nother piece of the Black experience, which is touched on quite well in Henry Mitchell's book, Black Preaching. Geneva Smitherm...: But at any rate I'm talking about starting out in the storefront, on grass shoot. An important challenge to such preachers, Black culture preachers as Henry Mitchell calls them, an important challenge to the role of such preachers is to keep the congregation ever assured that he speaks their language. That is despite any advanced education he may attain or any of his family, he must reaffirm that he is one of us by using the lingo of the folk. So it was all this kind of background that I had come to college with and speaking in the idiom of my community And was pretty hard nosed and Black and proud even back in those days so that I wasn't about to spend my father's hard earned money taking no speech lessons. Geneva Smitherm...: So I dropped out of the pre-teacher program at the university and went over to Liberal Arts and just decided to take a straight degree in English. And to my dismay, four years later, found myself back over at the speech clinic because I discovered you can't do anything with a degree in English, but teach. Especially I say in those days when they didn't have people like Tony Morrison doing editorial work at Random House. Fortunately, the speech therapist that I had, was pretty hip and she soon realized that all those Blacks who were signed up for speech therapy didn't really need it. Indeed, many of them, like my best friend since high school days had been born in the city of Detroit and had never even lived in the South and like me, they didn't have no dyslexia, auditory discrimination or any other kind of multi-syllabic sound and speech impediment. Sure none of us could distinguish foe and four. And we said "Wendsday," for Wednesday. And we said, things like, "Thang," for thing. And, "The bell is ranging," for the bell is ringing. And sure we use verb structures like, "It be's that way sometime." Geneva Smitherm...: And negation patterns like, "Don't nobody but God know that." But these were not speech defects that she soon realized, rather they were systematic features of a dialect pattern spoken then and now by a large number of Black people. Looking back on what seemed to me then a really horrendous experience, I'm thankful that we had such a sensible therapist. She allowed several of us to double up on the lessons, split the tutoring fees, and more importantly, bless her soul. She taught us the test. She knew could nobody change they dialect in 18 weeks, we were on a semester system then. And I like to think now that maybe she even believed shouldn't nobody have to change. But at any rate, all of us passed because every lesson we went in there and practiced the test items. Geneva Smitherm...: And of course, one of the ironic things we have to laugh about now, this best girlfriend of mine that I mentioned, is that when the real showdown came, we had to take the test. If anybody had asked us anything off the structure of that test, we would have been in the whole world of trouble. But that experience launched me into linguistics and kind of brings me to the second personal observation I wish to share with you. Several years ago, when I first began going about speaking and lecturing to groups on the subject of the Black idiom, I would always get the question, "Well now if you think it's so good and so systematic and so legitimate, how come you didn't give your lecture in it?" I took that under advisement because after all, it seemed perfectly valid. In many ways, I had never lost touch with my native lingo and living in the Black community, I naturally used and heard it often. Geneva Smitherm...: Not only that, it seems that a great majority of Black teachers, professionals and others in the Black middle class, when they're talking among themselves, might use features of the style of Black language, if not features of its dialect. So that the comment about trying to give a formal presentation in the dialect made some sense, because that would seem to be more reflective of the wide range of the socio-linguistic spectrum in the community. Okay. So I started rapping all the way through in the Black thing. And guess what? After I finished, then people would say, "Well, maybe everything you said about Black speech is true. But I hate to say this, but you really don't sound like an authority, a college professor on the subject." It's like damn if you do, damn if you don't. But such an observation coupled also with my experiences serve simply to reaffirm what the socio-linguists and psycho-linguists know, that all kinds of people, Black, white, red, brown, rich, poor, are touchy and self conscious about their speech. Geneva Smitherm...: It is after all, an inextricable part of our daily habitual doings as human beings. And it is irrevocably interwoven with our identity and cultural affinity to attack a person's speech habits amounts to attacking that person himself. Revealed in such comments is also another important area of concern, language attitudes. Increasingly socio-linguists are continuing to find that people's feelings and perceptions about language, exist independently of any objective analysis of the language itself. And as a matter of fact, often their judgments are contrary to the actual facts of a given case. Geneva Smitherm...: For example, in the extensive research on language attitudes that has come out of McGill University in Canada, particularly that of Lambert, he found a number of interesting kinds of things that bear this out. For instance, in one bit of research, bilingual speakers, French Canadians, who were bilingual, and who were taped and whose speech was judged by both French and English speaking Canadians on a what we call linguistics, a semantic differential scale, they were asked to make judgements about the person's intelligence, his trustworthiness, his self-confidence, security, leadership abilities, honesty, and so on, in addition to having to make some judgements about whether the speech was good or bad. Geneva Smitherm...: And he found that the speakers were rated higher when they spoke English, then when the very same speakers were heard on tape speaking French. Unbeknownst of course, this mass gas technique, unbeknownst to the people making the judgments. And he found also that this judgment was made not only by English speaking Canadians, but French speaking Canadians as well. Using Lambert's matched guise technique in research here in the United States, Frederick Williams, beginning first in Austin, Texas, and later replicating his study in a number of other places, researched teachers' attitudes toward the language and learning abilities of schoolchildren. And he found not only, okay, what you'd expect to find, that tapes of as he classified them, he called them Anglo, Chicano, and Black, and he found the tapes of Anglo speaking children were judged to be more standard and more fluent than either recorded speech of Black or Chicano children, was very interesting and bearing out this attitude factor. Geneva Smitherm...: Is in another part of the study, he used videotapes to accompany the audio tapes, and he found that when teachers viewed a picture of a Black or Chicano child speaking standard English, that child was not judged as favorably as when they saw a picture of an angle child speaking standard English. Although the speaker on tape in both instances were Anglo speakers and using the unbeknownst again, that's the matched guise thing, unbeknownst to the teachers. They were Anglo speakers then using all the grammatical registers of standard English. Geneva Smitherm...: But if charity begins at home, I think so much language attitude change. Because in Williams' study also, he found that Black teachers just as white teachers, ranked the Anglo faces speaking Black English, higher than the Black faces. I'm sorry, the Anglo faces speaking white English higher than the Black faces speaking the same white English. I mean, with the same Anglo voices on tape. That is the Black teachers did not differentiate in their judgments significantly from those of the white teachers. Geneva Smitherm...: Of course, what I'd say is that the self consciousness and ambivalence of Black people about Black language as well as about Black culture is not new given the nature of the Black experience. And therefore it's not at all surprising to find dynamics similar to those that Black people have about Black culture, and similar to those that were prevalent among Blacks in the early part of this century, in regards to denial of African heritage. It's not surprising to find similar dynamics exposed and attitudes about Black language. Geneva Smitherm...: As a matter of fact, one will often hear even the staunchest, sometimes even the staunchest Black militant, correcting Black kids who say, "He do," and exhorting them to use correct grammar, just as if the grammar that they were using and which about 80% of the Black community at one point in time, percentage may be less now, but which a high proportion of the Black community also use. Geneva Smitherm...: I would like to just share a quote with you from Fanon that I think speaks quite well to this point. And he's talking about the attitudes of persons of African descent, living in the French Antilles towards Afro French Creole, but I think it has profound implications and applications through the attitudes of Black Americans towards Black English. And Fanon says this... Geneva Smitherm...: I would like to just share a quote with you from Fanon that I think speaks quite well to this point. And he's talking about the attitudes of persons of African descent, living in the French Antilles towards Afro French Creole, but I think it has profound implications and applications through the attitudes of Black Americans towards Black English. And Fanon says this, "To speak means to assume a culture. The Negro of the Antilles will be proportionately whiter in direct ratio to his mastery of the French language. Every colonized people, in other words, every people in whose soul and inferiority complex has been created by the death and burial of its local cultural originality. Every such people finds itself face to face with the language of the civilizing nation. The middle class, and the Antilles never speak creole except to their servants. In school the children are taught to scorn the dialect. Some families completely forbid the use of creole. Geneva Smitherm...: The educated Negro adapts such a position with respect to European languages because he wants to emphasize the rupture that has now occurred. He is incarnating a new type of man that he imposes on his associates and his family. In every country of the world there are climbers, the ones who forget who they are and in contrast to them the ones who remember where they came from. The Antilles Negro, who goes home from France, expresses himself in the dialect, if he wants to make it plain that nothing has changed." Geneva Smitherm...: And I realize that I had gone quite a ways into my lecture without really saying, defining Black English or as poet, Sarah Fabio puts it, "Who speaks Negro?" To begin to define that, I think we have to look at the history of this dialects development. Okay. As I mentioned early, one school of thought argues that Black speech is traceable to British base dialects, which the slaves picked up from their overseers and masters. The slaves passed this speech on to their children. And down through the years, these now archaic old English forms have been retained in the Black community. Due primarily to the history of segregation and discrimination which kept Black people out of the mainstream. And thus prevented us from participating in the processes of linguistic change. In other words, this view sees Black English as simply old fashioned white English. Geneva Smitherm...: The other school of thought on the matter and the one that makes most sense to me, is the one which places Black English in the larger context of the development of pidgins and creoles, which resulted from European expansion into other continents. Now pidgin develops when two languages come into contact and the speakers have to learn to communicate immediately. And I mean, "Don't nobody be having time to go to language labs or anything of that sort. They got to hurry up and get it together and talk fast." So they develop this pidgin, this mixture of two languages we stay used for transactional purposes, as was probably the case between English and Africans in the slave trade and on the plantation. Geneva Smitherm...: That is, the slaves approximated, the white man's tongue by fitting as best they could, his words, and some sounds onto their native African syntactical patterns, producing a form of Africanized English. Now this procedure trying to make a foreign language fit the structural patterns of one's own language is really pretty standard in any language learning situation. As any of you might know if you've ever tried to instruct students in a language other than their own, they'll generalize from the patterns in their language and try to apply these same kinds of grammatical rules to the new language. Geneva Smitherm...: For instance, I would frequently have, when I first started teaching in Detroit High School, Northwestern High School, I frequently had... I taught English and Latin. And I frequently have students in Latin, for instance, who would try to form the possessive with an apostrophe instead. And they would have the right genitive form but with an apostrophe there also. Or another example, when I started teaching English as a foreign language to foreign students at Wayne state, when I first went to the English department there, some years ago, I once had a German student being used to the idea that you always have a noun with its definite article, say for Patrick Henry's motto, "Give me 'the' Liberty or 'the' death." Geneva Smitherm...: So this is... what I'm trying to say is the thing that the African slaves they're generalizing from the structure of their language to that of the white man's language is pretty standard kind of a thing. But obviously despite this pidginization process, the African slaves still, we talking about the initial stage, okay, still had command of their West African language. And I think it's just the very height of absurdity to assume that, for instance, those 20 slaves that landed at Jamestown in 1619 jumped fresh off the good ship, Jesus, speaking English. Geneva Smitherm...: As a matter of fact, there seem to have been at least three different kinds of linguistic groups among the Black population of colonial America. There were, first of all, those who had mastery of white English and to were often referred to in advertisements for runaway slaves who were referred to as "Speakers of exceptional English," or they take something like "Speaks exceptional or perfect English for a Negro." A second group were those Blacks who, and it seems to be incidentally that a lot of the Blacks in that first category who had mastery of the dialect, a lot of them seem to have been those who were born in America. Okay. Then there was a second group who spoke no English at all and were recent arrivals from Africa. Geneva Smitherm...: Now it would seem logical to me to hypothesize that the affects of the language of this new group coming in, might not have stopped even until the mid 19th century. That is despite the fact that the slave trade was outlawed on a number of colonies and then States, and that there was a federal slave trade act in 1808. There's still evidence of slaves continuing to be brought in. And according to John Hope Franklin, as late as 1858, there were 400 slaves that were brought to Georgia. Geneva Smitherm...: So we had the second group then, recent arrivals and had no command of English at all. And then in those slave advertisements, they were referred to as, "Speaks no English," that kind of thing. Then there was a third group who were on the way to learning English. They were, seemed to have been Blacks who had been in the US for a short period of time but long enough to have begun picking up some of the forms of white English. And these groups in slave advertisements are referred to as "Speakers of bad English" or broken English. Geneva Smitherm...: I would suggest though that the pidgin of this early stage probably had to serve as a form of communication among slaves, not only because of these three different linguistic groups but also in order for the slaves in their inter-group conversations with one another but also for them to find some linguistic medium that would serve all of them. Since we now know that the practice of slavers was to mix slaves from different tribal groups. And so it seemed logical since this pidgin which had been developed and used between Blacks and whites, might also serve in inter-group communication. Geneva Smitherm...: From this pidgin then, there developed a creole. Now creole results from the widespread use of a pidgin over time, in such a way that it becomes the first and only language of a given speech community. So it seems that the pidgin English of our slave ancestors becomes a plantation creole. Which later, due to pressures from the dominant culture which seem to have been extremely intense during abolitionists times, and especially in the post-emancipation period, this creole gradually loses its African distinctiveness and begins to be leveled out in the direction of white English. Geneva Smitherm...: It becomes what the white linguist, Leonard Bloomfield, way back in the 30s called decreolized. So that this theory would see today's, the linguistic features, at least, of Black English. And there's a whole kind of a thing that goes on in the Black idiom that has to do with style, verbal style and speech interaction, which I'll talk about shortly. But just to talk about those linguistic kinds of features, such as the kind that forms a good part of mostly language eradication programs like the kind that I went through. Geneva Smitherm...: Okay. This theory would argue that those kinds of features that are left and they're very small in number, are the result of the incompleteness of this process of decreolization. That is a process of leveling out the Africanized English, collapsing and converging both the surface and deep structures in the direction of white English. Geneva Smitherm...: Further, according to this position and it's very well developed and extensively developed in J. L. Dillard's book, Black English, a Random House, 1972 publication. I'm just kind of rushing through it now. But creolists who hold this position further argue that if Southern white speech sounds similar to Black English and in many ways it does, it can very easily be explained as a borrowing from Black to white, just as the other theory explains the fact that the borrowing from white to Black. And even Bloomfield touched on this in his brief commentary on the decriminalization of Black English in the United States. Geneva Smitherm...: Okay, then. According to the decreolization hypothesis then, features like the use of "Be" and "It be's that way some time." Or possessive structures and sentences like "They sold they house" are considered residual linguistics survivals of this pidgin to creole, to decreolization process. The fact that the number of such features is today fewer in number, attests, I think, to the success of mainstream America's conformance pressures on Black language and culture. And when I say few in number, this has been born out in research like the monumental two year Detroit dialect study for which I was a research worker and consultant. In which there were... It was a survey of the speech dialects of the city of Detroit taken as a representative urban community. A survey of the speech of the dialect patterns of the city for all the groups, Black as well as white and all the various ethnic groups among whites. Geneva Smitherm...: And what came out of that monumental two year study was some eight patterns only of linguistic variables that vary, strictly and statistically, in statistically significant ways, differentiated Black from white speech. So the fact of such a relatively limited number of linguistic differences is often brought forth by those who would argue that there's no such thing as Black English because the two dialects of American English, Black English and white English, they're so closely related. Geneva Smitherm...: But I think if we see the decreolization leveling as a gradual historical process taking place in stages, this can help to explain the contemporary interrelatedness between the two dialects. And also helps to explain why in the feature of any given speaker of Black English, you will find both the, "He do" and a "He does" or both an "It be's that way sometime" and "It is that way some time." As well as hypercorrect features, which should be... Yeah. Which should be features trying to, okay, which would be a feature like "They does." Where the speaker knows and I think you find this especially, let's say in the pre-adolescent and on years where Black people are becoming increasingly attuned to the social significance of language. That is features where they realize that an 's' go somewhere. So you put it on "They does." Geneva Smitherm...: So the same speaker might say... I'm suggesting three different kinds of linguistic data from one in the same speaker. A kind of a Africanized sort of Black English which should be like a "He do" or an "I be." A hypercorrect kind of white English like a "They does" or an "I is." As well as some speakers who are trying to collapse, that is the deafricanize English into the white English, as well as the "He does" and "They are" and an "I am." Geneva Smitherm...: And even more striking and people teaching in schools really find this out, even more striking is not only might you have this distribution in one given speaker, you might find this distribution among the speakers of Black English in any given class. Three sort of different kinds of groups. Geneva Smitherm...: Okay. Another dimension of that historical linguistics situation has to do with the African slaves need to communicate coded messages to his fellow slaves. And with the psychological necessity to impose the African cultural imperative upon that code. That is, in order to express himself in a language undecipherable by old masser. The slave had to impose Black semantic meanings upon the white English words that he was forced to use. Generating what I called in the Black lexica as another part of the whole range or model of Black English. Geneva Smitherm...: For example, we get terms like, Miss Ann. Which is nobody's name but which is a derisive term for the white woman. We get also a term in that lexicon like, Ofe, from the pig Latin version of f-o-e, foe or enemy. So ofe, logically makes sense to call, whites where the enemy, ofes. Geneva Smitherm...: That this procedure, that this process might have been so, is imposing special Black semantic meanings upon white English terms. That this might've been so is given some support by the work of those historians who have argued that there were revolutionary rhetoric, that there was revolutionary rhetoric couched in the lyrics of the Negro spirituals. And I say revolutionary, since the escape from slavery was considered an act of rebellion. And so when the slaves were singing things like this train is bound for glory, the glory in these songs was metaphorically freedom. And the train, a reference to the train that ran on the underground railroad, the whole revolutionary network of escape routes and mechanisms, which were designed to assist slaves freeing or fleeing from the South. Geneva Smitherm...: That is through a language shaft through with irony, paradox, ambiguity, through nuances, overtones of indirections, suggestiveness, the slaves created a Black base communication system from the oppressors tongue. This tradition of using a coded dialect of English whose meaning is veiled from whites persisted, even after slavery. And I see it as the underpinning of contemporary Black so-called, Black slang, which very often functions as a register of exclusion around whites. The origin of this process in Black servitude probably explains why today, when a Black slang term enters the mainstream, it loses its linguistic currency in the Black community. That is, a code is no longer code, obviously, if the enemy is familiar with it. Geneva Smitherm...: Incidentally, and here's another whole area that little research has been done on it in terms of a Black base semantics. There's quite obviously an effect of mass communications just as there is on those linguistic features. There's obviously an effect of mass communication on the features of the lexicon. For instance, we do know that much of American popular culture, which has even Ralph Ellison suggested, much of American popular culture is simply Black culture borrowed into the mainstream. And we know that probably a good deal of this borrowing might have taken place as Norman Mailer tried to explain perhaps by white Negroes, musicians and others of the arts, he said, who went into Black communities and borrowed some of this. But it also probably takes place a lot through the media because how else would you explain whites who lived in suburbia all their lives, who imitate Black speech, dance, musical, and other cultural patterns. Geneva Smitherm...: So I'm suggesting that a good deal of general so-called American slang is, as Ellison argued the point about culture, is also Black slang. What you see is not always what you get, however, because many times when the terms leave the Black community, they take on a different kind of meaning in the white community. And the favorite example I like to point to out here is the word 'rap.' Now, in it's indigenous Black meaning 'rap' means romantic talk, from a brother to a sister, usually for purposes of winning her, not only her emotional affection but her sexual affection as well. When the term entered the white mainstream, it got to mean just playing serious talk. Now that term has been recycled back into the Black community and is also used to mean serious talk as well as the other series romantic talk. I mean the two meanings exist, reside in the Black community just as you find with linguistic items, two different usages. Geneva Smitherm...: For the Anglo sects and tongue to serve then as a total communication system to the dispossessed African slave, he had somehow to make the strange foreign tongue his. You see language is more than a vehicle of transaction or a carrier of secret revolutionary messages. It is as well a badge of psychological identification in which the user conceptualizes emotional states and cultural belief sets. So we have a need placed on English language beyond the purely functional demand of the transactional use of the pidgin English. Beyond even the sort of coded terms that comprise the Black lexicon. Geneva Smitherm...: Therefore, to flippantly query, "What's the name?" as many did when Black people began to substitute Black for Negro, is to disregard the function of language as an identity controlling mechanism. Now you recall of course, that the term, which really wasn't the new term. Richard Wright had used it in, I believe the 30s in his... Speaking of his travels around Africa and called his book, Black Power. But the recent re-emergence of the term Black came out of a political movement, The Black Power movement, whose aim was to assert Black self-determination and Black dominance within the Civil Rights movement. Okay. Within that context considered that 'Black' not 'Negro', is the equivalent antonym to white. Black calls to man evil, Black magic, diabolical deeds. Negro suggests no such associations. Hence, a Black man is someone to be feared, someone to be reckoned with and thus respected. Geneva Smitherm...: But it was not only in words and in syntactical structures that the Africanized English took on qualities of Blackness. It was also in the ways that the words combined into larger patterns of rhetoric and communication. I'm talking then about a kind of a speech interaction model of Black English, which would note the rich interplay of Black discourse modes in the Black community. Comprising this Black verbal style is not only secular linguistic games that you hear a lot about, like The Dozens, a playful game of talking about somebody's mother. Or narrative structures like The Toast, Signifying Monkey, for instance. But then not only things like that but they're also sacred and secular variations of that style. Geneva Smitherm...: Like the call response style of the preacher, which I also see operating in secular conversational sets as well. See, for instance like, if this whole audience here, if you all were my daddy's church, you would've had to been given me some responses back, to co-saying what I'm saying, "Yeah," "That's right," "Uh-huh," and that. Or if you were in my uncle's barbershop or one of the members of our church also owns a pool hall and secular kind of a set, you would have had to say some kind of responses. Given skin, it could be non-verbiage, you would've had to have some type of response to the call. This is expected. And there's that whole kind of interplay as if the speaker's kind of testing his message as he goes along. Geneva Smitherm...: You get things like that. You also get something that, the Black poet, Eugene Redmond talks about and calls 'songified' style. Were the voice is used as a... Were the rhythmic sort of quality of the voice is used to convey the message. For instance, there's certain kinds of ways of saying, "Aha," that make it mean certain sorts of things. Somebody tells you something and you want to show that you sort of disbelieve it and also that you want to be kind of sarcastic, you say, "Aha." Geneva Smitherm...: You want to be kind of sarcastic, you say, "Uh-huh. Yeah, Uh-huh." Somebody's running game on you, you say, "Uh-huh", and there's also say another sacred... Preachers play off, of course, on the songified style all the time. Geneva Smitherm...: There's also another feature in this that I call signification, and this is kind of a way of using a rhetorical device of talking about somebody through indirection. For example, the old time Black preachers signified on white Christian slave holders, as well as on hypocritical churchgoers with the expression, "Everybody talkin' bout him ain't going there". In modern times, Malcolm X once began a speech with the following bit of signifying, and I quote from that speech, "Mr. Moderator, brother Lomax, brothers and sisters, friends and enemies. I just can't believe everyone in here is a friend, and I don't want to leave anybody out." Geneva Smitherm...: The Reverend Jesse Jackson, as another example of the songified pattern, conveys a message to the Black man when he says, "Africa would, if Africa could. America could, if America would, but Africa can't and America ain't." And finally, whether we're talking about, I mentioned call response, whether we're talking about a group gathered on Harlem, 225th street, or in the temple of the fiery baptist, a Black speaker relies on his audience's responses to reinforce or co-sign his call. Black English, then, as I'm trying to set up a definition here, is comprised of a constellation of linguistic commonalities that form a sort of core, a lowest common denominator of Black language. In addition to systematic linguistic units exemplified in a statement like, "It be's that way sometime," there's a certain Black way of manipulating white English linguistic elements into larger patterns of speech activity, Geneva Smitherm...: There are, to be sure, many Blacks who do not use expressions like, "It be's," but I would say that the varying social groups in Black town do share speech registers, whose constant reference point is the Black experience. And ironically enough, one register, as far as I've been able to document this in data I've collected, one of those registers is the very conscious employment of a linguistic dialect kind of form as an extra way of conveying meaning. In one of Barack's essays in home, he talks about the preacher who says, "God don't never change, "and that this is not the same thing as, "God doesn't ever change." Now, linguistically, technically it is, but in terms of a sociolinguistic message, it is not because the speaker who says, "God don't never change," is sounding a familiar racial core, and semantically what this usage does is to intensify the thought by sort of psychologically saying, "Yeah, I've been there too." Geneva Smitherm...: The Black idiom then, and that explains why I prefer the term Black idiom, because I'm trying to get at that lowest common denominator, the Black idiom then, I see as a cognitive linguistic style of American English, whose semantics is bound, not only to the immediate linguistic context, but to the context of Black enslavement in white America. Because of the common experience and history of oppression, under which Black speech survived, Black English or Black idiom then, is not simply the language of the ghetto, but the language of Black America. Geneva Smitherm...: Okay. Where do we go from here? First, and this will be some very quick kinds of recommendations, but I think you kind of get the message of where I'm coming from. First of all, I would like to see serious attempts made to preserve the idiom of Black America. It seems to have been, with the vestiges of the decreolisation process, what little we have left. It seems to be perhaps too late to preserve particular kinds of linguistic features, but the style features embedded as they are in psychocultural kinds of processes, it would seem, can be preserved. And I see a move by artists who came out of the Black arts movement of the sixties, as well as some scholarly writings on that literature, people frequently say, "Well, Smitherman blows everybody's mind because she tries to write scholarly pieces in Black English." Geneva Smitherm...: But actually the idea was tried even before one of my first publications by a piece of Gerald McWorter in Black Scholar, on the ideology of Black social science, has flavorings of Black English, a piece of literary criticism on new Black poetry in a Black World article of 1969 by Carolyn Rodgers has that same sort of thing, and both of these predate my first publication experimenting with this, which was a '72 publication. Okay, preserving the idiom of Black America, rather than seeing such a move as a threat, I would say that whites sincerely committed to the American ideal as well as Black sincerely committed to it, might embrace this as a step towards preserving America's rich diversity and making of cultural plurality more than a dream, and as for Black people who might be resistant to this notion, it's sad to say this, but those who might object to Black idiom now would quickly fall in line if white America endorsed it. Geneva Smitherm...: Secondly, because we have a massive educational problem in the Black communities across this country, I think teachers should get on with the business at hand and stop using the Black idiom as an excuse for Black students low reading and achievement levels. All of the research since '59, which shouldn't have been necessary, but anyway, a lot of this that was done shows that Black speech and Black speakers are logical, that the users of Black English don't suffer any cognitive deficiencies, despite the racist claims of people like Jensen and Shockley, and that there may be a linguistic interference problem simply in the fact that the teacher may not be familiar with the Black students' dialect, but that indeed, if this is so, we should retrain teachers. This is not so far fetched. A number of teacher training institutions have gone this route, holding institutes workshops, and on the pre service level requiring students to take courses in socio-linguistics, at least 70% of which courses, as far as I can survey them, is usually comprised of data relevant to Black English. Geneva Smitherm...: Actually though, one can see that Americans make adjustments to understand different white regional dialects. The person from Minneapolis makes adjustments to understand the the white person from Austin, Texas, including make adjustments to understand the really difficult dialect of Britishers, difficult just because the phonemic registers are so much different. So it would seem that teachers could and should make similar efforts to understand their Black students. I'm talking then about working on the mindset of teachers in schools, working on language attitudes, rather than on students. Now, most of the linguistic and other kinds of educational remediation programs that came out of the sixties, in which people like Jensen, judged to be failures, most of these were aimed at Black students and a number of them really did prove to be dismal failures, but I think they fail not because Blacks can't learn or schools don't count. Geneva Smitherm...: Rather,, I think the failure was on the one hand, to the whole deficit ideology, undergirding these approaches, and on the other hand, or maybe the two things go hand in hand, to the power elites perceived insignificance and rejection of Afro American language and culture, which came ironically, in the sixties, at a time when Black people were just about the business of reaffirming, again in this century, the value of our culture. Therefore ,many students of the sixties rejected, just as I did in 1956, language teaching based on a correctness model, which for instance, simply drilled them in the rope mechanical edition of s's and ed's. Geneva Smitherm...: Or, for example, the kind which came out of Illinois and was used with Black preschool kids, where they were drilled in answering questions in a complete sentence, like the teacher would show a picture of a cat in a tree and she'd say, "Where's the cat," and the kid who answered, "In the tree," that's wrong because he had to say, "The cat is in the tree," and yet anybody knows anything about linguistics, especially the work that's come out of from Chomsky and out of MIT, knows that the phrase, "In the tree," is simply a deletion transformation of the statement, "The cat is in the tree," and it's much similar to, I was brought up on traditional Latin grammar, but it's very much similar to when we used to have to diagram sentences or label part sentences, and you'd get things like "Do this, come here," and where's the subject? Geneva Smitherm...: And you couldn't tell teacher there were no subject, because that's the standard English. So they tell you the subject is you understood. Now we say it's just that you delete it, and so that when the statement is actualized on the surface, semantically, you know that that, "You," is there, just as a kid who answers the question, "Where's the cat," and says, "In the tree," is doing the same kind of thing. Okay, I can't blame students then for having resisted this kind of teaching, which I don't consider really teaching at all, because it is educationally patronizing and linguistically stultifying. Seemingly well intentioned after all, weren't all these things programs designed to help Blacks come up from the ghetto, such teaching technologies didn't add and cannot increase the Black students' linguistic fluency, enhance his ability to manipulate cognitive concepts, nor enlarge his analytical powers. Geneva Smitherm...: True. Teaching white English forms like, "He does," might be a lot easier task for teachers than teaching reading and conceptual thought, but it's certainly not the same thing, nor is it what Black students today crucially need, as Black functional illiterates continue to be graduated from our high schools yearly. So I think, and this is a case where whatever your position is on accountability, and if you keep up with the teachers movements and unions and the teacher strikes, this whole thing on accountability is a big thing, a big controversy now among teachers. Geneva Smitherm...: The teachers in Detroit went out on strike, the longest teacher's strike in history, and the whole question of accountability, even more so than money, seems to be central. As a matter of fact, that contract still isn't settled, it's not arbitration, and they might just pull a move like the teachers did in Baltimore who went back to work without a contract, and now in the middle of the school year, out on strike, because they didn't dig the way the contract went down. But I think that somehow or other, the Black community is going to have to get on the educational case, and they may have to apply pressure through accountability mechanisms, to force teachers to get it together. Geneva Smitherm...: Thirdly, as to the employment problems of Blacks, I think that we cannot allow this new form of racism to be used as an obstacle to Black economic development. If the problem is not inherent in the dialect itself, and it certainly is not, most of these speech interaction things that I mentioned are in group cultural processes, which Blacks rarely, if ever, use in formal sets of communication, let's say interview situation, between Blacks and whites, so we're talking, then, about a very small number of features, vestiges of those linguistic features from the decreolisation process. So I'm saying then the problem seems not to be inherent in the dialect itself, but in attitudes toward the dialect. And I think a way to go maybe to work on changing those attitudes and upwardly mobile rhetoric, we always talk about entering the mainstream, but nobody ever talks about changing the course of the stream. Geneva Smitherm...: Finally, consistent with the humanistic ideal, I think that we should stress on all Americans, Black or white, the importance of using language to serve man righteously, rather than as an instrument of oppression and deceit. And if Watergate talks of protective reaction strikes, and that sort of business has not made their point. Watergate at least has made that point more so than ever before, that language should be used, not as an instrument of oppression and deceit, but to serve man righteously. And if this means choosing goodness over grammar, well, I would just simply respond, "It be's that way sometime." I would like to close, then, as I began with a quote, again, from Langston Hughes as Jesse B. Semple, and this time, a little bit more serious kind of vein, but this time Simple is talking about grammar and goodness, and the conversation takes place here between Simple and what seems to be the author himself, Langston Hughes, or a projected representative of Hughes. Geneva Smitherm...: "I read a poem," said Simple. "Again? I exclaim. The last time you showed me a poem of yours, it was too long, also not too good." Geneva Smitherm...: "This ones better," said Simple. "Joyce had a hand in it. Also my friend Boyd, who is colleged, so I want you to hear it." "I know you're determined to read it to me, so go ahead." Geneva Smitherm...: "It's about that minister down in Montgomery who committed a miracle." "What miracle," I asked? "Getting Negroes to stick together," declared Simple. Geneva Smitherm...: "I presume you're speaking of Reverend King?" I said. Geneva Smitherm...: "I am," said Simple. "He is the man, and this is my poem. Listen fluently now. This poem is written like a letter, and it is addressed to the white citizens councils of Alabama and all their members. And this is how it goes. Dear citizens, counselors, in light of what my folks say in Montgomery, in light of what they teaching about love, when I reach out my hand, white folks, will you take it, or will you cut it off and make a nub? Since God put it in my heart to love you, if I love you like I really could, if I say brother, I forgive you. I wonder what to do you any good? Since slavery time long gone, you've been calling me all kinds of names, pushing me down. I've been swimming with my head deep under water. And you wished I would have stayed under until I drowned. Well, I did not. I'm still swimming. Now you mad because I won't ride in the back end of the bus. When I answer anyhow I'm going to love you still and yet, today you want to make a fuss. Now listen, white folks, in line with Reverend King down in Montgomery, also because the Bible says I must, in spite of bombs and buses, I'm going to love you. I said, I'm going to love you white folks [inaudible]." Geneva Smitherm...: "You never wrote a poem that logical all by yourself in life," I said. Geneva Smitherm...: "I know I didn't," admitted Simple, "but I'm getting ready to write another one now. This time, I'm going to write a poem about Jim Crow up north, and it's going to start something like this. In the North, the Jim Crow line ain't clear, but it's here, from New York to Chicago points pass and in between, Jim Crow was mean. Even though integrated with democracy, Jim Crow was not mated. Up north Jim Crow wears an Angel's grin, but still he sin. I swear he do. Don't you?" Geneva Smitherm...: "I agree that the sentiment of your poem is correct," I said, "but I cannot vouch for the grammar." "If I get the sense, right," answered Simple, "The grammar can take care of itself. There are plenty of Jim Crow-er's who speak grammar, but do evil. I've not had enough schooling to put words together right, but I know some folks who went to school 40 years and do not do right. I figure it's better to do right than to write right, is it not?" Geneva Smitherm...: "Well, you have something there," I said, "So keep on making up your poems if you want to. At least they rhyme." Geneva Smitherm...: "They make sense too, don't they?" asked Simple. "I think they do, I answered." Geneva Smitherm...: "They does," said Simple. "They do," I corrected. "They sure does," said Simple. Thank you. Geneva Smitherm...: Do you want me to take some questions? Wilson Moses: I'm sure there must be some questions. Geneva Smitherm...: Okay. Yes. Speaker 3: [inaudible] Geneva Smitherm...: Does that mean, "Do these form of Black English crop up in written speech?" Speaker 3: What I'm saying is, would there be a spoken language and a written language that are different, or does written language have the same idiosyncrasies as spoken language, or would it more resemble white English? Geneva Smitherm...: Especially by the time students get to junior high school, written language, except for a few sets of features, is very close to white English. See though, this course mode that I talked about, basically they're speech interaction kinds of [inaudible] and the closest thing that I've seen to that is for instance, in some papers, student will write something and then they'll put, "Okay, which is the closest thing that I can see as a transposition of a call-response thing of thing in writing," or this might be what I see in some of these young Black poetry, where there'll be a "Yeah." Before they write something, there'll be a "Yeah." But by and large, the features that you get in written papers, are very few in number in terms of linguistic [inaudible], which is fine. Geneva Smitherm...: Yes. Speaker 4: So not to [inaudible 00:01:08:26]. Geneva Smitherm...: Give me some more, I'm not sure I understand. Speaker 4: [inaudible] but you don't make any connections. Geneva Smitherm...: If I understand you right, the closest... Okay, first of all, we got a situation in the example that you mentioned where we're talking about two different languages altogether, and the closest thing to that is the French English and the French Canadian situation. My point is simply that by this point in time, if you're strictly talking about linguistic features, those kinds you can apprehend through impericist [inaudible], you don't have quite the same situation as the French English Canadian situation, or as you mentioned, the Israeli Arabic situation. Geneva Smitherm...: And therefore, I'm just saying that those analogies are sometimes used, but I'm saying that in the American context that I don't think you can push the analogy that far, particularly when we're talking about two dialects, which now are very close, and which are now very highly interrelated, as opposed to two strictly different languages altogether, than two different language situations. And it would seem as, even somebody like Sledd making the point, who has suffered through his lifetime. He's a Southern white linguist who has suffered in his time for Southern white speech, and it would seem that this is just a variation on that same kind of thing of language attitudes operating to oppress and Sledd, as a matter of fact, comes right out of this whole controversy and refers to it as the linguistics of white supremacy, that it's not Black dialect, but it's Black skin. It's not he do, but it's who's saying he do. Speaker 3: [inaudible] Geneva Smitherm...: Only, see that question presupposes that you consider it a different light. And I think that's maybe somewhat related to what I just answered over there. Most of those language programs that I talked about are set up on that kind of model and for that reason we're dismal phase. Because we really at this point in time are talking about two highly related dialects, we're talking about this one, a given in the given idiolect of any speaker, both the, he do and a he does existing. And it seems to me that just because of that kind of ideology that these kinds of programs are, they have [inaudible] as a matter of fact. Speaker 3: [inaudible]. Geneva Smitherm...: Yeah well see, I have problems with that, again as I tried to convey because actually that is a cop out. That's the way of just dealing with something that's kind of easy, whereas maybe teaching reading is hard or teaching conceptual thought, it's not like "he do", but what comes after that? What is he talking about? Is the point getting across? Are there examples there in this way, the support with what the student is trying to convey? Is it organized in such a fashion that it has coherent and cohesiveness? And what I then see is... And this came up very often wherever I've done any kind of in-service work with teachers and composition. What I then see is that whole corrections kind of thing as a cop out for dealing with these other harder sort of writing problems and harder sort of problems with expression period. So I guess what I'm saying is I think that there are too many crucial things the Black students need to have them be hung up on polite usage kinds of forms. Speaker 3: Maybe I don't understand just regarding the educational [inaudible]. Are you saying that there is really only one language that we are dealing with here? That instead of [crosstalk] Geneva Smitherm...: One language which has a number of different varieties and Black [speech] is one of these varieties. So it's a Southern whites, so it's New York speech. So it's the speech of [Boston]. So it's the very bland speech of the Midwest. Sorry about that I mean I'm a Midwestern so it's pretty fine to talk about it. So I'm saying that one language with a number of different varieties. All of which seem to have accessibility except the Black language. Speaker 3: In other words if I knock myself out trying to understand what a guy from Brooklyn is saying I should make the same effort to try and understand a Black person. Geneva Smitherm...: Right. Yes. Speaker 5: I heard a teacher say more about how a teacher can successfully [inaudible] a Black idiomatic system that tends to enforce a standard [inaudible]. Geneva Smitherm...: Oh, well I'm not so sure if teachers can do that, or should really be about the business of doing that. I see that as a kind of a program, a programmatic sort of thing that will go down in the Black community. And I mentioned some of the writers that are beginning to do that, that began to do that in the sixties. Speaker 5: Or maybe I misunderstood your first [inaudible] you were saying that [inaudible]. Geneva Smitherm...: That's probably because I'm not sure precisely all the different steps that we might want to go through in the Black community to do that. But I think the literature is certainly one way of doing that. I think retaining it in... For want of a better term Black role models might be another way of doing that. So, that there isn't that kind of distance between varying social groups in the Black community. Your question start asking about school and all I'm saying is that I would not say that that's the business the teacher ought to be bothered with. Because, it's simply all these other kinds of conceptual cognitive kinds of things that ought to be going on in school. And I would not like to see, for instance, a program drilling in Black English in everybody in the classroom. Just as I'm opposed to the [inaudible]], if you try to drill in the white English in schools. Speaker 5: Number one if a student comes to you as a teacher or presents a paper or a report as a form of Black [inaudible]. Geneva Smitherm...: I'm not... See, I think teachers are really hung up on this, man. I tell you, it's just, it ain't and I ain't gone even... I should just not even deal with it no more, because it'll just be repeating all the same things that I said. But teachers are just simply hung up on this. They love them red pencils and ain't nothing you can do about it. And I'm trying to do things that my own way and some other people work in this area, but I'm just saying there's a whole kind of a mania with thou, linguist thou, lawyer calls a national mania for correctness. That teachers are just hung up with them. The schools perpetuate this sort of notion that there is something inherently bad about the person says "he does" than one says "he do". Or the person... and you can name a whole other list of usage features. Geneva Smitherm...: But if there's any comfort in the fact of language change, that might be a place for teachers to go to know how standards of uses have changed over time. I'm talking about white English usage. For instance, one linguist has predicted that since people can't really get it together when to say who and whom, nor either when to say who and which. Like who for person and which the things, that probably is basically going to be saying that, because you can use that in all cases and you can use that for humans and things. Geneva Smitherm...: And he predicts that eventually who, whom, which, that whole business is going to go out of the language and that the relative clause marker is going to be this. Because you can use it, because that's easy and you have to remember no grammar rules to do that. So I think, I'm just saying, if there's any comfort in some of the teachers, you could say comforting, is to look very seriously at the whole tradition of school room grammars and how would got to be correct. Got to be that way. And you can see the patterns of change. I mean, it's just sort of a cliche to talk about the double negatives of Shakespeare. I mean, you can see the patterns of change in the history of your life. Speaker 5: Are you suggesting that these realizations taking place in [inaudible], that there is not enough [inaudible]. Geneva Smitherm...: Okay, Mm-hmm (affirmative). Speaker 5: Then what you suggest [inaudible]. Geneva Smitherm...: No I'm suggesting that I think the linguist, just because they like to work in those purest kinds of ways, and not taking any political positions. That the linguist are misunderstood and they misunderstood because they don't come out from behind surface and deep structure and run things on, in the real world. Geneva Smitherm...: If you read [Labov] very carefully. Speaker 5: [inaudible] Geneva Smitherm...: If you read Labov very carefully he points out that the reading interference problem is a problem on the part of the teacher, not understanding what the kid's reading. And I'm kind of mentioned that in my summary of things to do. The kid says "he does"....Okay, the kid says m-o-r-e and pronounces it like m-o-w. Teacher now being hitched to that, thinks he doesn't know the word. Or the kids says, this one of The Bronx famous sentences "I passed by him yesterday" without the D and the teacher thinks the kid doesn't know that it's a past tense situation. So he's talking then about a kind of an appearance that I see emanating really from persons of [crosstalk] Speaker 5: You talking about grammatical disappearance and I am talking about [inaudible] appearance, the one that makes it difficult for people to know how to read. Geneva Smitherm...: Depends on how you classify the data. Some people in that area classify the ED [inaudible] disappearance as grammatical, not as phonological. Speaker 5: [inaudible]. Geneva Smitherm...: Well, this is not a conspicuous though. Speaker 6: On the question of whether you have to spell more [inaudible] or a Black kid. I wonder if [inaudible]. Speaker 5: I am not talking about [inaudible]. Speaker 6: [inaudible]. Speaker 5: I am not talking about [inaudible], I am talking about the fact that Black dialect [inaudible]. Geneva Smitherm...: Well, I don't want to get into a thing. This is on tape and I don't want to get the whole thing anti Bill Stuart, but his date on that is very questionable. And you can read some other folk who make that point, to read Ken Goodman on the whole. He's probably the name in teaching and reading. And read Ken Goodman's research on reading and dialect and it's just completely opposite. Look at any of the articles that [CAL] put out and teaching Black children to read including Stuart's own on piece. And note that the one variable that they all point to that's the interference problem in reading is teacher attitude and lack of information on the part of the teacher. Speaker 6: I'm not really sure you understood the question but I believe that [inaudible] is the way I understood it. Language is part of a whole colonial [inaudible] of cultural domination. I mean [inaudible] language is part of it. When the colonized people want to rise up, they do at some point face this barrier of language. Now he's pointing out that the Black people here face the genius of the English language. And the genius of the English language, he says led themselves to certain ways of speaking, certain ways of expression, which will actually be ridiculous in other languages. Geneva Smitherm...: Which will be ridiculous? Speaker 6: It would be absurd if [inaudible] with any other language. And he made an example of preserving the freedom. He made the statement that you are going to preserve your freedom by destroying the freedom of others. I'm making a statement in English. He says, if you tried to make a statement like that in another language, [inaudible 00:01:25:20]. The statement would itself be [inaudible], but you can make such a statement in English. And his point was that Black people feel like they would in fact be making absurd statements because they would be using the English language. Now what can be done or what has to be done or what is being done to break this kind of chain of [inaudible]? And he thought [inaudible]. Geneva Smitherm...: Yeah, but see, as a linguist, I don't accept the notion that a language is inherently absurd. They're absurd notions that accrue to the language because of the culture of the people and in your language, and I just don't know, but I'm sure the statements that are also observed... I mean, every language that you know, in quotes, okay, because I really don't, accept that notion. But every language has its peculiarities or it's idiosyncrasies of structure that makes certain kinds of things possibly to an outside of seen observing and that accrues to... that has to do with the social setup really more so than something that's indigenous to the language itself. Geneva Smitherm...: And now, as you might help me, and I'm not trying to work out of my dirty English bag, so much simply mentioned. But there's an interesting little master's thesis on vernacular terms for sexual intercourse and for women and men. And the writer begins by making the point of sort of a philosophy of language kind of approach, I guess, but he begins philosophy and socio- He begins by making the point that in the current women's lived movement, the statement of, or the notion that we don't want to be thought of as sex objects has to be seriously exempt. Because that means that if a sex object that somebody is to have sex with, then that means that a man can not say that... I mean, who else is a man supposed to have sex with if not a woman, okay. He further goes on to point out that maybe if we look at some of the terms for sex objects and sexual intercourse itself, we can see some enlightenment to you. Geneva Smitherm...: And the terms, for instance, vernacular terms for sexual intercourse all has to do with terms that suggests that it's an injurious kind of act it's harmful. And therefore to that extent, if that's what women and women's live movement mean by saying I don't want to be a sex object, okay the statement makes sense. But that's something that accrues to the statement because of certain kinds of social attitudes about sex and not just inherently, linguistically inherent in the statement itself. So, I mean, that's one of the problems for instance, that I try to point out and talking about how the shift from Negro to Black was a deliberate kind of shift to change the attitude, mindset associated with certain kinds of words to something that is past. Let's make this one, the last one, okay? Speaker 3: How do you see the preservation of Black dialect [inaudible] it changes all the time? Geneva Smitherm...: Yeah, do you want to repeat? Speaker 3: I asked how she sees the preservation of Black dialect in the framework of the fact that language changes? [Crosstalk]. Geneva Smitherm...: Yeah. Do I think that that effort would be successful or is it going to just be a losing battle? And you know, I, I still think the effort ought to be made and it can be made by trying to as best as possible represent that oral tradition in writing now, to some extent there's certain things you just can't represent or we haven't figured out how to represent them yet in the literate tradition. But do I see, do I see this is a project that will be successful? I don't know. It may not be. Geneva Smitherm...: I mean, maybe that in the millennium, everybody will be speaking... Two dialects are going to converge at such a point that everybody will be speaking something that's close to a common national standard. Speaker 3: [inaudible]. Speaker 5: [crosstalk] the notion non-verbal [inaudible]. Geneva Smitherm...: Well it's a myth, a misconception, obviously nd the, what Labov found in [inaudible] the that he did on the tape, the conditions under which the data on speech that our kids they were given were conditions that were intimidating. It's at school or it's... The kid is in a laboratory, kind of sat with this big important looking researcher type dude comes in and we naturally... I'm not going to say too much. Geneva Smitherm...: And probably the best sample tapes that I've heard on this are the tapes where Labov taped some kids who have been put on tape. And they just spend the interview with the teachers and what you hear is [inaudible] sort of no verbal kind of speech. He took those same kids and put them in a room all by themselves with a tape recorder and he put a rabbit. And he told the kids that this is a cutie kind of rabbit. And one of the things you can do is you can keep talking to him because if you don't he's going to get sick, and just went on out the room. And the kids just was rapping for days, saying triple comparatives, complex sentences, everything, the very same kids the tutor and on that other just shortly who had been so called non-verbal. Wilson Moses: Before you leave, can I call your attention to the next lectures and our series on February 26th, Mr. Fred Water will be lecturing on the political thought to boys and the other one, Darwin. Why Dylan Brooks on march 4th.