Now that the controversy surrounding the Oakland School Board's ill-conceived utterances of the word, "ebonics"*, has all but disappeared until the next race-issue (e.g., the Rodney King beating, the O.J. Simpson trial verdict, etc.) comes to the fore, it seems appropriate to reflect on the substantive issues that have arisen, again and again. The hope of this essay is to go to the precipice and deal with this dangerous issue, not as an American, not as a person with skin of a certain hue, but as a person who cares about the fissure that remains in American and other societies based on perception and the realities engendered by that perception.

[*Explaining terms: (1) ebonics-I browsed through my dictionary in search of help in this discussion, but failed to find anything other than "ebonise, "ebonite", "ebonize", and "ebony". Okay, my dictionary is twelve years old, but where did this word come from anyway? Ebonics is used here as a term for the speech patterns shared by many African Americans that is distinguishable from so-called Standard American English; (2) African-American is the term of choice for this essay in dealing with the group of people who consider themselves a part of that group which traces its history back to the American slavery era as slaves who originated in Africa and the difficulties associated with being a part of that group in the years since based on that shared historical identity. For the sake of clarity, this term refers to the group of people in America who have been called "black"; (3) European-American is the term of choice in this essay for those people generally referred to as "white" in American society, but at times may also refer to any none-African American because the problems associated with African Americans in this essay are not shared by other groups whether they be of Asian or Latin-American descent, and in most cases, coincidentally, by African born persons in America.]

The core issues in race relations between African-Americans and American society as a whole are (1) What is African-American Culture?; (2) Who is to blame for the social-economic problems of African Americans?; and (3) Can African Americans assimilate into American society? I will try to address these issues directly and through some recent issues which have been debated recently in America. These issues have become so charged and so inflammatory as to make it extremely difficult for Americans to debate these issues openly and with hope for change. The purpose of this essay is not to definitively resolve this gargantuan debate, but to open it up for discussion by all parties. These issues have never been debated openly and with trust between European- and African-Americans. For those of you who prefer citations and authoritative references, I apologize in advance because you will not find them here. This is an essay of logic rather that must stand on its own and therefore it serves no real purpose to add the accouterments of academia.

"I seen one woman, Nancy, during the war what could read and write. When her master, Oliver Perry, found this out, he made her pull off naked, whipped her and then slapped hot irons to her all over. Believe me that nigger didn't want to read and write no more."
(The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, vol. 10, part 5, page 2337)

Ebonics has been promoted by some people as something of value to African-American culture. Some who have taken this standpoint, use African-American pride as a foundation for their argument that ebonics is nothing less than a language essentially created by the people who speak it. The irony of this has seemingly missed all Americans just as the wider issue of African-American culture has never fully been debated. Ebonics is nothing more than poorly spoken English which has been standardized by a community identified principally by its skin color. The promotion of ebonics as anything other than this is dangerous because it has no significant positive value.

When I was attending grammar school, I was taught what was correct and what was incorrect when speaking and writing English. Some lessons stuck with me more than others, but we were made to feel ignorant if we did not fully understand and utilize certain lessons. Examples of this might be "she learned me to speak right," or "I ain't gonna do no such thing." There was no attempt made at instructing us that these words and forms of grammar were okay in certain situations. Rather, we were taught that only uneducated people who didn't know better spoke in such a way. If anything, ebonics is a vernacular English as opposed to either a dialect such as British English, American English, and Australian English are for English; or a distinct language as Swahili is to English.

What we should consider, as Americans, is that ebonics was born from the tragedy known as slavery. As such it serves no inherent value other than to reinforce the sense of community amongst African-Americans based solely on the historical identity is not that of willing immigrants, but as chattel brought to this country in chains. African-Americans of the ante-bellum South were not generally instructed in proper English, what some people today refer to as "Standard American English." The thrust of the Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court decision was that "separate is inherently unequal." The basis for this belief was undoubtedly a clear realization that the instructions of the descendants of slaves was still inferior to that of the dominant class of European Americans. The fact that this vernacular exists at all is merely a reflection of a belief amongst African-Americans as a group that merely giving up this vernacular for the vernacular of a more standard-, Europeanized- if you will, American English will not offer them the benefits accorded to European-Americans.

"In the flood of light against white tile, the face and shoulders of a stranger-fierce, bald, very dark Negro-glared at me from the glass. He in no way resembled me."
-Black Like Me, John Howard Griffin

Western society has gone from using the terms "negro", to "colored", to "black" with the particularly offensive term "nigger" (variant of the French "nègre") thrown in alongside the patronizing term "boy", but there continues to be a problem with words that have been historically charged with denigrating meaning. Occasionally an article by an African-American will appear in a magazine or newspaper explicating on the negative connotations of the word "black" in Western society. The idea as it is laid out by various authors of the same mind, is that the two most common historical denominations for African-Americans have been negro (Spanish and Portuguese for "black") and "black". The line of argument is that the term "black" is typically juxtaposed against "white" and that these terms have binary connotations of dirty and clean, bad and good, evil and nice, etc. If the argument intends to suggest that the term "black" has grown to include all of these negative connotations after the term began to be used as an African denominative, I doubt that any rational thinkers would support the idea. If, on the other-hand, the argument is framed to suggest that the denomination was applied, either by fault or design, to connote that Africans personified these negative ideas, then I think that it will find more wide spread adherents. Invariably "black" is used by American authors to refer to a certain race of suspected criminals and in the context of other articles where a negative is intended whereas stories of a more positive bent use both the terms "African-Americans" and "blacks" interchangeably (though these terms are typically only used alongside each other in the same story about the terms themselves). Taking this second line of argument as the only realistic way to frame our understanding of the usage of the denomination "black", American society as a whole might do well to drop the usage of this term when referring to African-Americans.

The changing of names has occurred in the past without meaningful results to the group of people it refers to, and we don't have much reason to believe that it will do much to improve their situation in the future but it is a significant symbolic act of respect that could only improve the climate of discussion.

"Negro women having children by the masters was common. My relatives on my mother's side, who were Kellys are mixed blood. They are partly white. We, the darkies and many of the whites hate that a situation like this exists. It is enough to say that seeing is believing. There are many and are now mixed blooded people among the race."
(The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, vol. 14, part 1, page 267)

"One of the slave girls on a plantation near us went to her misses and told her about her master forcing her to let him have something to do with her and her misses told her, 'Well go on, you belong to him.'"
(The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, vol. 14, part 1)

Michael Jackson's desire to change the color of his skin is not as remarkable as it seems. Products for lightening the skin of African-Americans could be found in newspaper advertisements at the turn of the century. Recent surveys of African-Americans have shown an overwhelming popularity of lighter skinned members of the opposite sex. Just what this means is uncertain. It may be due to naiveté about the historical legacy of slavery-rape, but it also may be a latent desire to change one's identity from the often oppressive identity connected with being "black" in a society dominated by "whites".

Searching through my outdated dictionary again, I found that a sociological definition of culture is: "the sum total of ways of living transmitted from one generation to another." This definition is problematic because it somehow ignores the pliability, the mutability of culture. Rulers and nations have attempted to rewrite their histories in the effort to promote themselves above their predecessors and cultures are constantly evolving based on the creativity of the individual, the popularity of an idea amongst the masses, and the whim of the political elite. African-American culture has been changing since the 1960's movements that included a movement of Afrocentrism. Afrocentrism grew out of the need for African-Americans to reinvent themselves because over the preceding three centuries, "negros" and "coloreds" were defined by European-Americans. Their culture was slave culture and post-slave culture. Nobody taught them how to assimilate into mainstream American society and they weren't sure if assimilating into the evil oppressor was such a good idea anyway. This ambiguous relationship to their past and the contemporaneous society created a need to redefine their culture based on something tangible, something positive. Mother Africa was the ideal answer. This was a different Africa than that which existed in the here and now, not post-colonial Africa where tribe was pitted against tribe in brutal civil warfare that have broken out in the countries mapped out by European colonial powers without regard to the nations that got in the way of enterprise. Because their brothers sold them into slavery and their "white" oppressors defined their reality for centuries they had no realistic way to authentically trace their heritage to specific tribes or nations in Africa so they created the fantasy of a pan-, mother-Africa, rather than attempting to identify with Central West Africa where the predominance of the slave trade originated. As an African-American you could adopt whatever symbols of Africa you wished while denying whatever you wished at the same time. The extreme of this fantasy, for some, has been to adopt the history of Egypt as their own.

Nowhere in this process of reformulating African-American culture has there been a reality check. It seems as if this re-formulation of African-American culture is somehow akin to the fantasy of becoming a superstar performer in sports or the music industry. "There is reality in mere hope because this is our history, hope not reality." It is difficult for the African-American community to debate this issue because they believe, and perhaps rightly so, that they need to be unified at all times against those that threaten their very being-the European-Americans who constantly seem to be in search of a weakness so that they can tell the "blacks" what is good for them and push them down further in the process. The Civil Rights Movement and the concessions gained by it have been weakened in the last decade by the still disproportionately dominate European-American class. As a result, discourse on the issue of what is African-American culture and how it can be best designed for the benefit and promotion of these people is not occurring.

The number of persons in local jails across the United States rose from 223,551 in 1983 to 490,442 in 1994. Although African-Americans comprised a mere 12% of the national population according to the 1990 Census, they account for the largest percentage of jail inmates for the last three years in which records have been tallied, surpassing whites who made up 80% of the population in 1990.
(Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1995)

The difficulty of getting out of the quagmire Americans are stuck in when it comes to dealing with its racism, is that blame needs to be directed at someone in order to resolve the systemic problems that exist. If you can't accurately identify the source of the problems you can't take the next step toward their resolution. Counterpoised to this belief is one that states we must go beyond pointing accusing fingers if we are ever able to progress. Pointing the blame is the sphere of the judicial system. The failure of the judicial system to remedy the ruin on the African-American population led to the passage of the Civil Rights Act and affirmative action programs.

Riots in Los Angeles after the verdict was ready in the Rodney King case, riots in Florida following the police shooting of a African-American youth, and surveys showing that African-Americans sided with O.J. Simpson despite the overwhelming evidence against this man indirectly revealed the limits of change that have occurred in the last thirty years.

Historical legacy has created a distrust of European-Americans by African-Americans, which in turn has created a legacy of pessimism and hopelessness. I have worked with African-Americans in offices where they have both been discriminated and they have blamed their own failings on others' prejudices. African-Americans who aspire to better their life chances by working for a predominately "white" corporation, and playing the rules of the game are considered uppity and turncoats (or "oreos"-like the cookie, "black" on the outside and "white" on the inside). Liquor manufacturers dominate billboard advertising in depressed, African-American neighborhoods. Owners of liquor stores in these same neighborhoods are, typically, not themselves African-Americans. So it seems that African-Americans are being preyed upon and kept down. Who can say they are not to blame when the cycle feeds itself? As an employer, I am more prone to be less forgiving of an African-American's mistake on an application or such an employee's failing on the job because I see a pattern in others like him. He or she is more likely to blame any of their failings on discrimination from me because they have seen it so many times in the past. They become less responsible for themselves and I become less responsible myself. Perception becomes the reality and this in turn, escalates the perception into reality.

Who is to blame?
Both them and I.
Step 1.

"I HAVE A DREAM"
(MLK, Jr.)
He had a dream.
He earned our respect, can we make his dream a reality?

In a society where individualism is prized more than any other society, we desire-, no, have a need to constantly compare ourselves with others. We are always looking for someone else whom we can say we are better than. Cultures do this blindly by self-promotion, but it becomes more insidious when it leads to a dominant culture suppressing a subculture as has occurred throughout American history. How is it that immigrants can come to this nation and become Americans in their lifetime, yet African-Americans whose forefathers have been in this country for numerous generations still lack a true feeling of belonging. Not only is a sense of belonging lacking, but it is often avoided. Assimilation means that you arrest some part of the culture you come with in order to be accepted by the dominant culture you wish to be adopted into. How can a people do this when the whole has for so long caused injury to themselves? If we are all to blame, the onus is on European-Americans to break the legacy, to break the cycle, but once the hope has been renewed, they can not do it alone.