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On the Issue of Africanisms in American Culture daniel c. littlefield O n december 18, 1996, the Oakland (California) Unified School District’s Board of Education adopted a resolution declaring that its black students were bilingual, speaking both standard and black English. Ebonics, a term derived from “ebony” and “phonics” is the name given to what some consider to be a distinct language, not a dialect of English. “African Americans have a different language system,” the school system’s superintendent argued, “and we want to recognize that and build on that.”1 The roots of this variant language were to be found in “the cultural and historic bases of West and Niger-Congo African Language Systems,” the resolution proclaimed, and furthermore were “genetically based.”2 The unfortunate and ill-considered last phrase was later, and unconvincingly, explained away as referring to “linguistic genesis, not racial DNA.”3 Indeed, the whole resolution eventually was seriously modified.4 Whatever the linguistic or pedagogical merits of the case, many blacks rejected the school board’s decision as a disservice to black students, stigmatizing them as being unable to master the standard variety of a language they claimed as their own. If the resolution could be deemed “progress” in its recognition that blacks exhibited some vestiges of a valued African heritage, it was a progress that, some claimed, evaded the real educational issues involved and, ironically, was yet part of an old American tradition of regarding blacks as foreign and unassimilable. It was also part of a venerated American practice, extending from the time of the founding of the nation, to locate the sources of American institutions and culture in the Old World, a world usually denied to blacks. 199 1. New York Times, December 21, 1996, 5. 2. USA Today reprinted a portion of the text of the resolution, January 6, 1997, 12A. 3. Newsweek, January 13, 1997, 79. 4. New York Times, January 14, 1997, A8. daniel c. littlefield 200 5. New York Times, October 25, 1987, 5. 6. New York Times, November 8, 1987, 28. 7. New York Times, March 1, 1987, 24. 8. “Letter from Samuel Dyssli, Charleston, South Carolina, to His Mother, Brothers, and Friends in Switzerland,” December 3, 1737, South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 23 (July 1922): 90; also quoted in Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), 132. 9. Gerald W. Mullin, “Religion and Slave Resistance,” paper delivered at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association, New Orleans, December 1972. A decade earlier, another series of newspaper articles also highlighted linguistic connections between Africans and African Americans, with less bombast and greater precision. “Africans See Their Culture Live in U.S. South” reported cultural linkages, including food and language, between lowland South Carolina and Georgia and Sierra Leone,5 and a group of local African Americans voyaged there to investigate this portion of their past.6 They had long been noted for cultural distinctiveness. So much greater credence had Gullah attained as a language in its own right that the Bible was being translated into it, a far cry from anything ever suggested for Ebonics.7 But the South Carolina region from which these people came was unique among England’s North American colonies because, among other reasons, it was the only one on the continent where the black population at one time outnumbered the white. Indeed, when the Swiss settler Samuel Dyssli visited the region in 1737, he commented that it looked “more like a negro country than a country settled by white people.”8 It may have sounded that way too. One historian suggests that it was effectively bilingual, with the blacks speaking a patois that the whites could not understand.9 The disproportion of blacks to whites was not as great as on some of the West Indies islands, but it was sufficient to make white society in lowland South Carolina distinctive and to permit development of a divergent African American subculture that, on the sea islands along the coasts of South Carolina and Georgia, survived into the twentieth century . Blacks in lowland South Carolina, often called Gullah, were distinguished from other North American blacks, as well as from whites. For one thing, they had a much greater awareness of their Old Country backgrounds. For most black Americans their origins were generally obscured, not only by the tragic circumstances of their passage but likewise...

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