'Ebonics' 2.0? Leftist CA Group Wants to Include 'Black English' in Multilingual Education Program

AP Photo/Steve Helber

While the nation's teachers are busy teaching students about things like transgenderism and how awful America is, what they are not teaching are the basics: reading, writing, and arithmetic. Teaching every kid not only to read but to speak proper English is vital to their future. It will determine any higher education they might pursue, and also their future job and career prospects. Now, leftists in California have come up with another way they think they are helping black students, but they are really hurting them.

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The push is on in California to include black vernacular in multilingualism programs for students in the Golden State. Black Californians for Early Care and Education (BlackECE) is an umbrella group that is part of a coalition of groups including Californians Together, Catalyst California, and Early Edge that is advocating for "language justice" for black students, particularly in early childhood education. 

The impetus for this, a co-founder of BlackECE, says she was teased for "talking white" as a child and doesn't want her son and other black children to be shamed for how they speak. The group's website states :

The workgroup brings together BlackECE, Californians Together, Catalyst California, and Early Edge to challenge harmful language hierarchies and affirm Black English as a legitimate, rule-governed language rooted in Black history, culture, and community.

A commonly defined form of black English is African American Vernacular English (AAVE). It is described as: 

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systematic dialect spoken by many African Americans, characterized by specific phonological, syntactical, and lexical features, including word-final consonant cluster simplification, invariant 'be' for habitual meaning, and multiple negation.

Because California is a state where more than half of children aged five and under live in a household where another language besides English is spoken, in 2020, the state implemented a program called "Promoting Equitable Early Learning and Care For Dual Language Learners." BlackECE wants black English added to the program. 


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America is full of different accents and dialects. It is one of the things that makes American culture so amazing. But regardless of how anyone speaks among family and friends, in the world of getting into college or getting a job, whether or how you speak proper English is going to be a determining factor in whether or how you get there. How are you preparing black students for the future if you are not teaching them a simple skill? It's nothing more than the left's "soft bigotry of low expectations." 

If we are going to follow this "logic," shouldn't anyone who was born or lived for a period of time in the southern part of the U.S also be included in such a program? If you have even just passed through the South, you know there is, to use BlackECE's term, a "vernacular" specific to that region of the country that not everyone might understand. Southerners also consider this part of their culture and heritage. Where does it end?

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It's just another example of how the left destroys everything it touches, especially when it comes to educating, or not educating, our children.

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