wotjek wrote: That is an excellent argument. It is impossible to discuss language while abstracting form social, economic conditions that produced it. Language is merely a reflection of material reality that produced it, albeit it has an "institutional history' that outlives the material reality that gave birth to a certain form of expression. Impoverished reality of an underclass produces impoverished consciousness and impoverished means of communications. That is a very powerful anti-poverty arguement: we should abolish it, because it prevents people from achieving their full human potential. The p-c crowd, however, adhers to an idealistic viewpoint where symbols are more important than material reality. Thus symbolic expressions produced by underclass arre just as "valuable" as symbolic expressions of everyone else. Material poverty is "compensated" by symbolic richness. It is not difficult to see the reactionary nature of such idealistic pc attitudes in the preservation of social inequalities: it is, in fact, tantamount to saying: they can thrive on symbols, so we do not need to redistribute material wealth. Or worse yet, "we should not redistribute material wealth, because that may kill their 'culture'". ------------ Wotjek, you must be out of your mind. This is a good argument if you accept a couple of bad premises. First, "Ebonics" isn't a dialect or a substandard form of English. It is a pedagogical tool used to *talk about* some consistent features of non-standard dialects in a certain place at a certain time, etc. No one speaks Ebonics, just like no one speaks phonics. Second, language is not just a reflection of material reality. Language is a production--and like all forms of production it has places, durations, times, etc. In other words, it is not merely a superstructural byproduct of some material reality. It's bound up in its production and reproduction. Most of the so-called pc-ers that you talk about understand this. There are all kinds of pragmatic reasons for learning "standard English" whatever that happens to mean in a certain place or time. No one ever denied that--except most of the media during the whole Ebonics fracas. Most of all, using Ebonics doesn't mean jettisoning a minority culture or the sober recognition that some languages will get you farther than others, often for very stupid reasons. But your representation of the whole thing trivializes everything that could be productive about the discussion. Christian
