Geneva Smitherman: The Social Ontology of African-American Language, the Power of Nommo, and the Dynamics of Resistance and Identity Through Language

It is ABSURD to assume, as has been the tendency, among a great many Western anthropologists and sociologists, that all traces of Africa were erased from the Negro's mind because he learned English. The very nature of the English the Negro spoke and still speaks drops the lie on that idea.

—LeRoi Jones

Every dialect, every language, is a way of thinking. To speak means to assume a culture.

—Frantz Fanon

The spoken word is a gesture, and its meaning, a world.

—Maurice Merleau-Ponty

In order to illustrate the interpenetration between life and philosophy, I recently wrote a short and selective philosophical autobiography exploring my philosophical development (Yancy 2002).¹ In the chapter, I consciously decided to use the language of my nurture (African American Language), the linguistic expressions of my life-world, that language which helped to capture the mood and texture of what it was like for me to live within the heart of North Philadelphia, one of America's Black ghettoes. After all, what other linguistic medium could I use to articulate the rhythm, the fluidity, the angst, the aesthetics of coolness, and the beauty involved in traversing those dangerous, challenging, and inviting ghetto streets? These streets were sites where style mattered, where respect was key, where blood was shed, where families were poor, weary, and often hopeless, where who you knew could save your life, and where you had to be bad, had to project that tough image in order to survive. Writing about the background of this existential space of anguish and hope, a background within which my philosophical self evolved, was no easy task. However, writing in the language of my nurture not only helped me to remember much of what was "forgotten," but helped me to make "inroads against the established power-lines of speech" (Potter 1995, 58)

After having read my chapter, a white philosopher whom I admire came up to me at an American Philosophical Association (APA) conference and told me how he really enjoyed the piece and how he had not known so many intimate details about my life. He added: "I really enjoyed it, but why did you use that language [meaning African American Language]? You write very well [meaning in "Standard" American English]. You don't have to use that language to make your point." I listened in silence, realizing that he completely missed the point. Indeed, for him, African American Language was not a viable language, not a legitimate semiotic medium through which my life-world could best be represented. Rather, in his view, the language that I chose to use was slang, an ersatz form of communication that clearly should not have been used. By using African American English I had somehow fallen from the true heights of academic professionalism and broken the norms of respectable philosophy-speak. Indeed, perhaps he thought that I was being "too Black" in my speech, not white enough, not "proper" enough. As Frantz Fanon observed, "Nothing is more astonishing than to hear a black man express himself properly, for then in truth he is putting on the white world" (Fanon 1967, 36). Fanon's observations suggest deeper relationships that may exist between the function of language and a specifically racialized and racist philosophical anthropology. Again, Fanon observed:

The Negro of the Antilles will be proportionately whiter—that is, he will come closer to being a real human being—in direct ratio to his mastery of the French language. I am not unaware that this is one of man's attitudes face to face with Being. A Man who has a language consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by that language. What we are getting at becomes plain: Mastery of language affords remarkable power.

(18, my emphasis)

Fanon's observations also contain profound implications for the specifically racial and cultural dimensions of philosophy-speak. Indeed, perhaps in the U.S. it is philosophy-speak that is "too white," creating a kind of dislocation for many Black folk who find it necessary...