drugsandanarchy:

black-culture: Thoughts on African American vernacular(@zellieimani) So hillbillies don’t speak bad English.

“African American Vernacular English” is a leftover of the self-destructive and backward cultures of English Crackers and Southern Rednecks. The only reason people defend it is because they think it’s part of black culture. But there’s nothing ‘black’ about it and there is no reason to weigh black people down with that baggage by telling them to embrace it as something important to their identities.

It’s not something to be proud of or something to be embraced. It is as destructive to the progress and upward mobility of many poor rural and inner city blacks today as it was to the English crackers and southern rednecks of the past (and present), if not more so. I know it makes us all feel good and 'tolerant’ to praise things we think make us special, but there’s nothing noble about encouraging people into self-destructive patterns of behavior.

I can’t even talk the way these people talk: “Why you ain’t where you is go ra?” I don’t know who these people are. And I blamed the kid until I heard the mother talk. Then I heard the father talk. This is all in the house. You used to talk a certain way on the corner and you got into the house and switched to English. Everybody knows it’s important to speak English except these knuckleheads. You can’t land a plane with, “Why you ain’t…” You can’t be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth. There is no Bible that has that kind of language. Where did these people get the idea that they’re moving ahead on this. Well, they know they’re not; they’re just hanging out in the same place, five or six generations sitting in the projects when you’re just supposed to stay there long enough to get a job and move out. -Bill Cosby

None of these things go back to Africa. For example, using the word ‘ax’ for ‘ask’ and stuff like that. All of that goes back to the south, and goes back to the parts of Britain from which White Southerners came. Calling hog entrails Chitlins, that was in a certain section of Britain, the section from which whites moved to the south. And they were known as ‘Rednecks’ and ‘Crackers’ in Britain in centuries past, before they ever set foot in the south. So the whole this is as phoney as a three-dollar bill… -Thomas Sowell

Cultures exist so that people can know how to get food and put a roof over their head, how to cure the sick, how to cope with death, how to get along with the living. Cultures are not bumper stickers. They are living, changing ways of doing all the things that have to be done in life. Every culture discards over time the things which no longer do the job, or which don’t do the job as well as things borrowed from other cultures… Those who use the term “Cultural Diversity” to promote a multiplicity of segregated ethnic enclaves are doing an enormous harm to the people in those enclaves. However they live socially, the people in those enclaves are going to have to compete economically with others for a livelihood. Even if they were not disadvantaged before, they would be very disadvantaged if their competitors from the general population are free to tap the knowledge, the skills, the analytical techniques, which Western Civilization has drawn from all the other civilizations of the world, while those in the enclaves are restricted to what exists in the subculture immediately around them.