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FREEDOMWAYS   SECOND QUARTER 1973

of Black English is reinforcement rather than learning. In view of the reinforcement provided in the home setting, is further reinforcement needed in the school? Then, what is he reading in Black English? Will it help him when he reaches the market place? Let us explore this for a moment. If the young black child has a paper route, will Black English help him to relate to those he will do business with? This raises another very important point: Black English is not meant for all blacks—it is meant for lower class blacks. Considering that housing patterns are such that a black school population will include children above the lowest rung of the economic ladder, will those black children who come from homes where Black English is not spoken be expected to conform or will a different set of teaching tools be employed? At what point will the switch to Non-Black english take place, if it is intended to take place? Is Black English a commodity in demand? Will it help on job applications and/or college entrance exams? Or will this become another way of keeping black children out?

If the move toward Black English continues, the market for such texts will enlarge. And, who will write them? Who will standardize them? Depending on the way a phrase is used, it can enjoy a wide range of meanings, from slight contempt or annoyance, to threat of death or hateful rage to intimate endearment: e.g. the phrase "mother fucker." But, the teachers and writers of Black English will work all these little knotty problems out. Assuming that Blacks would be the logical ones to do the teaching and writing, then, this must be Black capitalism or Black Exploitation. Take your choice. And, will the development of the black expertise eventually limit who you can teach or what you can write. The plot just thickened, didn't it?

It is not possible to say how many words the average first-grader understands when he hears them spoken. Some say 3,000, others say around 30,000, but we can say that he has learned to understand most of the language that he hears. If the first-grader can understand from 3,000 to 30,000 words, why then, must he be forced to read less than 1,000.

The intelligence of black children has too long been underestimated. The color of a child's skin is unrelated to his learning ability. The black child is handicapped not so much by a lack of his reading skills but more by certain phonic sounds he is forced to memorize. Black language will not, in my opinion, aid him in learning English.

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---------- Reopened for Editing 2024-02-21 17:37:50