DATELINE–The News at Six and Eleven

Like most decent Americans, South to the Future refused to participate in the Ebonics hoopla for fear that it would further distort the issue at hand and add insult to injury to those nameless African-American children already caught in the crossfire. But recent television coverage has implicated us all in the incipient hi-tech race war of 1997.

7 out of 10 Americans have already been exposed to news anchors’ impersonating Buckwheat, Amos and Andy, and Steppin’ Fetchit between weather reports.

The tabloid television show, “American Journal” reports that only 6% of Americans believe “Ebonics is a legitimate language” while 94% of Americans do not. The A.J. Ebonics poll was followed by a dramatization of the day’s proceedings at the O.J. Simpson Civil trial.

The “Standard English” referred to by the news media, in direct opposition to “Black English” or Ebonics, was, in fact, created by the broadcast industry to serve as a national standard for diction, grammar and vocabulary. Television news was once regional in both language (dialect, slang, accent) and focus. “Standard English” is a product created by a company to be marketed and sold to a new national audience.

Regardless of your position on Ebonics, this once local, discrete, pedagogical initiative has now become the occasion for a nationwide venting of racist jokes (some nervous, some not.) The specter of the lynched coon has once again been let out of the bag in the seemingly banal form of one or more of the following myths:

1) Ebonics means that White children will be
forced to talk like Blacks.

2) Ebonics will be taught as a second language
in public schools across America at the
taxpayers’ expense.

3) Ebonics will be forced upon all African-
American children, whether or not any variant
of Black English is spoken at home.

These blatantly erroneous myths are not the issue. Let’s face it, the compulsive, repetitive coverage the media has showered upon Ebonics expresses little more than the media’s fears about the severed, not equal, nations it has created within the United States.

Why have the media taken this opportunity to lampoon the Black community with the taunting voices of Buckwheat, Queenie, and Sanford & Son? Why are these glib anchors suddenly so indignant and defensive about their “Standard English?” Why is such shameless racism ("we be back wit’ da weather…"), perpetrated by the national and regional celebrities who deliver your nightly news, popular (let alone permissible) in this day and age?

Is this not how we reveal our festering anxiety that African-Americans have never been allowed to flourish, on their own terms, within the America of immigrants, settlers, and pioneers?