The Nineties: A Book

by Chuck Klosterman

Here again, the friction was contextual. When white people engaged with new language through a hip-hop album, it was seen as enlightening and mind-expanding. But the moment that engagement encroached upon regular day-to-day life, the response turned negative. The fleeting 1997 panic over Ebonics was proof. The term was invented in the mid-1970s, a blending of the words ebony and phonics. The premise was that differences between traditional English and the way the English language was used in segments of the Black community were not errors or flaws, but part of an organized vernacular built over time and governed by its own grammatical rules (pronouncing the word “ask” as “ax,” for example, or the purposeful employment of double negatives). The academic version of the term was African American Vernacular English, and nobody outside of academia paid much attention to the theory for twenty years. But then, in December of 1996, seemingly out of nowhere, the Oakland, California, school board publicly recognized Ebonics as the primary language for the majority of its Black students and that this linguistic difference needed to be considered within the education process. The news was not exactly greeted with bemused curiosity. It prompted a national freak-out over the sanctity of language, driven by a detail that wasn’t even accurate: The popular assumption was that Oakland public schools were not simply recognizing Ebonics but replacing traditional English education with Ebonics...