You Ain't Got No Mail
where is the "standard" in standard english?
2007-07-24
By William Jelani Cobb

Flipping channels I recently came across one of those these-are-the-black-people-we-like segments on Fox News. The story centered on an African-American teacher who designed an intensive language skills program for inner-city black teens. The goal was to train the students to speak grammatically correct English – and thereby open up a continent of social and economic opportunities to them. At the end of the segment the teacher said something to the effect of "Their futures are at stake; I gotta do this work."

I might have dismissed that piece had I not heard a well-known black conservative say to an audience in Atlanta just a few days earlier that the number one problem confronting black America is the inability to speak standard English. This program is probably well intentioned, and probably will be helpful in some small way, but I still found myself deeply troubled at the end of the piece.

One of my favorite quotes in life came from a neighborhood sage who told me that "there will be equality in America when a black person can be completely mediocre and still be an astounding success." If "standard English" was really the criteria for success in America at-large, maybe that program and the comments made by the conservative commentator would not seem so painfully naïve. The mayor of an Atlanta suburb is a white republican who recently remarked to a group of visitors that "all the kids in our school system are 'educationable.' And we need look no further than the current occupant of the White House to know that language skills are not a prerequisite for power or success in America -- provided you are white. The essence of racism is being able to blow off rules that are strictly applied to other individuals.

Anyone who has spent five minutes in a classroom at the high school or even the college level knows that improper English is the rule, not the exception in this country. Moreover, "standard" English really does not exist -- what we think of as "standard" is actually a set of accepted linguistic corruptions. Technically, the teacher in the segment was as wrong for using "gotta" as his students are for saying "ax" instead of "ask." (He would be grammatically wrong even if he had pronounced it correctly and said "got to" or "I have got to.") But the word "gotta" is more acceptable than "ax" simply because of the somewhat arbitrary, somewhat race-based rules about what constitutes "good" English.

A better example of the arbitrary way in which these language rules are enforced is that the AOL email service has built part of its brand identity around the phrase "You've got mail" – so much so that it became the title for a sappy romantic comedy about a relationship sparked on the Internet. No one is concerned that using "have" and "got" in conjunction with each other is as wrong as plaid and pinstripes. But if AOL had a tag that said "you ain't got mail" we would have seen a CNN special on how "black English" is corrupting corporate America.

Ultimately, though, this is about more than language. The most interesting aspect of these kinds of behavior modification programs -- which admittedly may be helpful on the micro level -- is the endorsement of the logic that somehow it is ok to hold black people to a standard to which no one else is held. It's an approach which holds that, as opposed to confronting racism, one should be "better" than the whites so that there can be no basis to discriminate against you.

One of the most aged axioms in black America is that you have to be "twice as good to get half as far." That may be true, but we shouldn't take it to be "progress" when someone who is four times as good manages to break even. For instance, some of us look at George W. Bush's appointment of Condi Rice as Secretary of State as a step forward for black people. But Rice has a Ph.D. in international affairs, speaks Russian, plays classical piano and was the youngest provost of Stanford University.

Take a look at most of Bush's other (white) appointees and you find that a huge number of them went to c-list colleges and small religiously affiliated institutions with dubious educational standing. Michael Brown's background running horse shows was deemed sufficient experience for a Bush appointment as the head of FEMA. Should it be impressive that someone with Rice's pedigree was appointed to the job she has in that administration? Not really.

Truthfully, we will have racial progress in America when we have a black man who gets to be CEO of General Motors despite the fact that he drops the "s" in complex words, fails to conjugate the verb "to be" and holds a degree from a college located above a beauty salon. White people have long been free to be mediocre. "Equality" would mean that black folks got a chance to be successful slackers, too. At the end of the day mediocrity is its own punishment – but that don't mean we gotta endorse a double-standard neither.

(William Jelani Cobb, Ph.D. is an associate professor of history at Spelman College. His third book, ‘To The Break Of Dawn: A Freestyle on the Hip Hop Aesthetic’ was published earlier this year by New York University Press. )

He can be reached at http://www.jelanicobb.com