VIDEO: Professor Thomas Sowell talks about black culture

"Lemme ax yo somethin'... Who said that? Answer: Thomas Sowell - American economist, social theorist, and senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Of course Dr Sowell doesn't talk like that. He's giving an example of "Black English" (sometimes known as "ebonics"), which he says is one of the facets of current black culture (or "subculture") which is keeping African-Americans from achieving economic and social parity with "other-cultured" Americans. 

Here's a short interview with Dr Sowell, posted on his YouTube channel, just ahead of Martin Luther King Day. 

   

What's the good doctor's solution to the problems black people bring on themselves by adapting to the subculture? Rap "music" is the ultimate expression of current black American subculture. But America needs fewer rappers and politicians, and more engineers, doctors and scientists. So? "Equip yourself with skills that people are willing to pay for." 

If you want to learn more about this topic, Dr Sowell suggests you read his books: Black Rednecks and White Liberals (Encounter Books, 2005) and Intellectuals and Race (Basic Books, 2013). For more thoughts from Dr Sowell, see "Thomas Sowell destroys the arguments for multiculturalism", WWW 4/7/20.

In other news: Far right extremist calls for equal treatment of people of all races!

No fulsome apologies from Walt!

This morning I heard an educated woman -- the director of a charity which aids the poor and down-trodden of the Third World -- talking on public radio about war crimes allegedly committed in Somalia. (The alleged criminals were Americans of course, not the Islamic terrorist group al-Shabaab. Hey, it was public radio!)

The speaker called for a "fulsome investigation" of the "deliberate starvation" of Somalis by the wicked Americans, through restrictions on food aid which otherwise would have prevented the "famine".

A "fulsome investigation"... Really? I'm guessing the speaker really wants a full, complete, thorough investigation, but, in spite of her higher learning, misunderstands the meaning of the adjective "fulsome". Walt's Annadale's dictionary says "fulsome" means "cloying, surfeiting, offensive from excess of praise, gross (flattery, compliments), nauseous, disgusting".

The misuse of "fulsome" has become something of an epidemic amongst the lamestream media and chattering classes. I am sick, sore and tired of hearing news "reporters" promising "more fulsome coverage at 11", and politicians promising to give an issue their "fulsome attention".

This abuse of vocabulary stems, no doubt, from a wish to sound better-educated than the speakers really are. To "big themselves up", as speakers of Ebonics say, the professional talkers reach for the sesquipedelian word, when a plain, simple word would do. To those who are tempted so to do, Walt recommends two books: 30 Day to a More Powerful Vocabulary, by Wilfred Funk (yes, that Funk, as in "Funk & Wagnalls") and Norman Lewis, and the seminal work by Dr. Rudolf Fleisch, The Art of Plain Talk.

If you are a professional talker, and intend to go on misusing "fulsome" because it sounds good, I say, go right ahead and demonstrate your ignorance of proper English. And spare me your fulsome apologies.

Bad English - Who cares?

In reviewing Michael Savage's Stop the Coming Civil War, Walt complained that the book is poorly written. I called it "not so much a piece of writing as a collage of transcriptions of Mr. Savage's radio rants." That doesn't mean it's hard to read. Quite the opposite. It's written and edited (?) to a level which is comfortable for a reader of the New York Post or National Enquirer. You know. The ones whose lips move as they read.

If I were to calculate Stop the Coming Civil War 's Fog Index, I'd bet that the book would prove to have been edited to a reading ease level of Grade 7. That, sadly, is about right for your average American or Canadian. (It's hard to tell about the Brits. The gap between the educated and uneducated in the UK is much wider than that of English-speaking North America.)

Thoughtful people like Dr. Rudolf Flesch have been bemoaning the decline of educational standards in general, and reading in particular, for decades. Dr. Flesch's seminal work Why Johnny Can't Read appeared in 1955. He argued for a return to the phonetic (as opposed to ideographic) method of learning to read. But instead of teaching people to read better, our "educators" are now teaching people to write worse!

This thesis is put forward -- with qualified approval -- by Dr. John H. McWhorter, of UC Berkeley (where else?) in Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care (Gotham Books, 2003) -- winner of the Walt Whiteman Prize for Longest Book Title of that year.

Dr. John (as I'm sure he'd like to be known) is a musician cum linguist, or linguist cum musician, take your pick. He makes a good case that, in the hippy-dippy 60s, American English changed from being a written language to an oral language, written down the way it's spoken.

An extreme example -- Walt's, not Dr. John's -- would be the comparison of Theodore White's The Making of the President, 1960 with Hunter Thompson's Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail `72. Just the style used to denote the year in the two titles makes the point. Since 1965 -- Dr. McWhorter is very precise about the year -- authors have started to write the way Americans talk... for better or worse.

Dr. McWhorter pinpoints 1965, the year following the passing of the Civil Rights Act. That landmark legislation made it suddenly not just OK, but cool to be black. "African-Americans" (a term which would only come years later) no longer had to "act white" or "talk white" to be successful, particularly in the field of popular music. Nat King Cole was out; Aretha Franklin was in. "Black English" or "ebonics" (as progressives like Dr. John would have it) became not just acceptable but emulated by the white majority.

The result? People stopped trying to write stylish, grammatical English and started writing as they talk. This is particularly so with popular music. Try writing down the lyrics of hit songs of the last two decades, and comparing them with the words turned out by even the poorer Tin Pan Alley hacks of yesteryear.

Dr. McWhorter flirts with the notion (if not the word) of the degradation of American English. Walt would say "blackification", but of course that's not politically correct. The fact remains that even educated people, like the Prez, have adopted a less grammatical, more folksy style of speech -- "We's all jes folks heah in Nawlins!" -- and that style is reflected in much American writing, including that of Michael Savage, Ph.D.

Dr. McWhorter does not condemn the degradation of American English. He merely identifies the trend and predicts that it will continue. He's all, like, wassup wit dat? He's OK with it, y'know? Walt is not. Walt doesn't speak (or write) WalMart.

Footnote: Like Michael Savage (Ph.D.), John McWhorter (Ph.D.) could do with the services of an editor and fact-checker. "Dr. Suess" should be "Dr. Seuss", but then, "Suess" sounds more like the way the name is pronounced. Dr. McWhorter doesn't write very well either, but he would probably say that just proves his point.

Further reading: "Book Review: John McWhorter’s Doing Our Own Thing", Wordorigins, June 2004.

Was Rachel Jeantel speaking "Black English" or "Ebonics" or what?

The first thing we must do is identify Rachel Jeantel for those who weren't following the Trayvon Martin controversy closely. Rachel is a BBW from the `hood, and was on the phone with Trayvon Martin at the time of the confrontation with George Zimmerman at the end of which Trayvon was dead. She was thus the prosecution's star witness at Mr. Zimmerman's trial.

If you search "Rachel Jeantel" on YouTube, you can find Ms. Jeantel's testimony in its entirety. But will you be able to understand what she's saying? Counsel for the defence made much of the fact that he was having difficulty doing so. His many requests for repetition or clarification of what she said were seen by some as an attempt to denigrate [No puns, please. Ed.] her intelligence/education/integrity.

In other words, the defence was accused of racism, of trying to discredit Ms. Jeantel and her testimony based on who she was and how she spoke. Among those hollering "racism" was John McWhorter, a professor of linguistics and editor of the ultra-liberal New Republic. Interviewed on "All In" by the very PC Chris Hayes, Prof. McWhorter asserted that Ms Jeantel was merely speaking "Black English", and very articulately too. If her answers weren't clear to the judge and the jury, it was because they were "crackers", the whole lot of them.

But is there such a thing as "Black English"? If so, is it a generally acceptable part of "the linguistic bounty that is America" (to quote Hayes)? Prof. McWhorter declined to debate the issue on Fox News, but Jehmu Green and Brian Benjamin, both persons of colour, had at it. Here's what they had to say.



Mr. Benjamin said there's no such thing as "Black English". Ms. Green adopted Jesse Jackson's characterization of the "language" as a "garbage dialect". Whatever "Black English" may be, she said, "it's not a language that's going to get you to graduate from high school, to go to college, to find a job, or to keep a job."

As you watch the video, you can't help but be impressed by both debaters' command of proper English. (I was tempted to write "the Queen's English", but hey, it's America.) They don't speak "Black English", at least not on TV.

Nor is "Black English" the mangled language misused by Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll in the old (and very politically incorrect) radio and TV sitcom, Amos 'n' Andy. Messrs. Gosden and Correll were white actors who wrote and spoke in the artificial "dialect" of the minstrel show tradition -- a caricature of the way American blacks really spoke, even back in the day.

Back in the 60s, "linguistics experts" like Prof. McWhorter coined another label for the "language" they now call "Black English". They called it "Ebonics", and defined it as African-American Vernacular English, "a distinctive lect of English spoken by many African-Americans". There's a book about it -- Ebonics, the True Language of Black Folks -- but that doesn't make it a language.

What is "Ebonics" then? The Urban Dictionary calls it "a poor excuse for a failure to grasp the basics of english [sic]. When in doubt, throw an "izzle" sound in the middle of any word of just string random thoughts together and insinuate that they actually mean something. When backed into a corner, you can always claim that it has something to do with a sort of symbolism or is a defining trait that makes your race great, versus own up to the fact that it is essentially laziness at it's [sic]finest.

Ms. Jeantel wasn't speaking "Ebonics", nor was she speaking "Black English". What Ms. Jeantel speaks is the idiom of the `hood, the language spoken by poor blacks -- and white and Latinos -- who grow up in certain parts of American cities. It is not the language used by the likes of Ms. Green and Mr. Benjamin, or Prof. McWhorter. It is that of folks who are poor and uneducated and happy to remain the latter if not the former. It doesn't mean they're bad folks or dumb folks, only that they are what they are -- members of a distinct and growing American underclass.

Who were Amos 'n' Andy?

Amos 'n' Andy was one of the first radio comedy series, written and voiced by Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll, two whities who had ebonics down pat! The show ran as a nightly radio serial from 1928 until 1943, as a weekly situation comedy from 1943 until 1955, and as a nightly disc-jockey program from 1954 until 1960.

A television adaptation ran on CBS-TV from 1951 until 1953, and continued in syndicated reruns from 1954 until 1966. Ed. has found a clip from the TV version.



You can find the rest of this episode on YouTube. Search "Amos 'n' Andy" and look for "Call LEhigh 4-9900".

The show was a victim of the "civil rights" movement of the 60s, but radio and TV episodes are still floating around. Since the demise of Amos 'n' Andy, African-Americans have, of course, been portrayed on TV with sensitivity and extreme political correctness, as in such shows as The Jeffersons and Good Times.

What's "ebonics"? What's an "end-man"?

Following up my first post of the morning, to save you checking with Wikipedia, here's what you need to know.

Ebonics (from the words "ebony" -- like the magazine -- and "phonics" -- like "old learning") is a term that was originally intended to refer to the language of all people descended from African slaves. Since 1996, Ebonics has primarily been used to refer to African American Vernacular English (AAVE), a dialect distinctively different from Standard American English.

AAVE is the politically correct term for what used to be called NNE, "Nonstandard Negro English". "Ebonics" was coined in 1973 by social psychologist Robert Williams, formerly a Negro but now an African-American. His intention was to give a name to the language of African-Americans that acknowledged the linguistic consequence of the slave trade and avoided the negative connotations of other terms.

With all respect to John McWhorter -- see previous post -- ebonics or AAVE or NNE or whatever you call it is non-standard English. God help the USA if public officials must talk "jive talk" to make themselves understood to the citizenry.

Speaking of jive talk... an end-man was a character in a black-and-white minstrel show, popular in the USA, Canada, and even in the UK in the 19th and 20th centuries. Blackface minstrelsy was the first distinctly American theatrical form. In the 1830s and 1840s, it was at the core of the rise of an American music industry, and for several decades it provided the lens through which white America saw black America. The Wikipedia article says: "On the one hand, it had strong racist aspects; on the other, it afforded white Americans a singular and broad awareness of significant aspects of black-American culture."


The end-men, in the picture, are the two performers sitting at the ends of the group. Traditionally they were Mr. Tambo (who played the tambourine) and Mr. Bones (you figure it out). They, and all the characters except Mr. Interlocutor (who was white) talked like Amos 'n' Andy.

I guess what they were speaking was "ebonics". If President Al aspires to reach that level, he needs more practice. If he'd been around 50 years ago, he could have joined a minstrel show. Sadly, minstrelsy, like Amos 'n' Andy, was killed in the 1960s, another victim of political correctness.

Does the Prez really talk like a [you know what]?

You probably didn't see Al O'Bama's speech to the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation on Saturday. Walt couldn't make it. But you likely saw a clip on TV or read the transcript.

Associated Press quoted the Prez of the Former Most Powerful Nation on Earth as telling African-Americans to "Take off your bedroom slippers. Put on your marching shoes. Shake it off. Stop complainin'. Stop grumblin'. Stop cryin'. [My emphasis. Walt] We are going to press on. We have work to do."

Woah! Did the Man really drop his G's like that? Maybe not. Other outlets cleaned up the transcript, making the relevant sentences read "Stop complaining. Stop grumbling. Stop crying." That's the way a college graduate would say it, right? Not to mention a senator or a president.

So why did AP use what a linguistics expert called an "interpretive translation"? On Chris Hayes' MSNBC show, African-American author Karen Hunter called AP's version "racist". [Gee. That didn't even take 24 hours. Ed.] Walt assumes she meant that the politically correct thing to do would be to clean up Al's speech -- specifically including the dropped g's -- so he wouldn't sound like an end-man.

But noted linguistics expert John McWhorter argued the g-less version "is actually the correct one," noting that the president's victory in the 2008 election was due, in part, to how effortlessly "he can switch into that dialect." [Emphasis still mine. Walt]

McWhorter argued that "Black English" -- an oxymoron if ever there was one -- is becoming the lingua franca of American youth, and that "America, including non-black America, loves that way of speaking."

Rumour has it that all candidates for the Democractic nomination will henceforward be required to demonstrate their proficiency in the USA's other language -- ebonics. Walt thinks the last contender who spoke really well was William F. Buckley, Jr.