Even language can be squeezed into the glass slipper of race by a sufficiently ruthless pruning of the foot. According to believers in something known as “black English,” the deep structures of African languages—in other words, the speakers’ African-ness—accounts for the speech habits of Afro-Americans. But African linguistic structures cannot explain why, despite the much greater survival of Africanisms in Jamaican creole, the children of Jamaican migrants to Britain do not speak “black English”; instead, they speak English as white Britons of their class and region do. (Nor can such
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