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November 1999 November 1999 (changes made from press-edited copy) "Island by island we must go across" Challenges from Language and Culture among African Americans Shirley Brice Heath Stanford University In 1987, the poet William Meredith wrote a curious set of five verses under the title "Do not embrace your mind's new Negro friend." He urges "atonement first" for those who claim new friendship and are convinced in their minds that they have the "right story" about the history of "Jews or Negroes or some dark thing." Though deceptively simple on the surface, the poem savagely pierces abundant late twentieth-century liberal claims to having no prejudice or to having "on good authority" understandings about what is right and good for others. Meredith condemns patronizing claims of brotherhood and urges intense self-examination of motives as well as relentless recovery of stories not told and connections never acknowledged. He calls such a program of self scrutiny and search for new lessons a "friendless struggle" that will be long, laborious, and painful, but "island by island we must go across." This chapter represents a small beginning of such crossings. The traveler-as-author here acknowledges a position that carries the label of "outsider." However, even for those who carry the identity of "insider" in studies or approaches they see as an ethnic, or racial label, thinking along the lines of Meredith's caution is worthwhile. Examination of motives and degrees of thoroughness in determining stories and not merely the "right story" helps ensure for any ethnic- centered work that it does not fall into patterns of ethnocentrism that have so long marked Eurocentric research and policy. ****** The broad ranges of music, literature, and religious and political oratory produced by descendants of those who came from Africa have been noted for their influence and creativity throughout American history. Yet the language uses and structures that constitute these cultural forms have been studied and described in selective and insular ways. This chapter urges every educator, and especially those working with African American children, to learn more about the broadly diverse history and evolution of language forms throughout the history of Africans in the United States. Moreover, it asks readers to examine motives and consider unintended consequences of claims voiced under pressures of contemporary policy demands and without solid grounding in research. A further plea here is that late twentieth-century calls for Afrocentric education and acknowledgement of Ebonics lead to deep exploration and abundant illustration of the immense 1 range of variation--regional, historical and social--within the oral and written language uses of African Americans. This chapter suggests what broadly engaged scholarship on the linguistic, and particularly the literary, accomplishments of African Americans might bring to education, in particular. Exposed here are some of the ways in which studies and promotions of African American life and language have reinforced stereotypes and perpetuated negatives and falsehoods. Some of what has been done--even in the name of Afrocentrism--has been far from centered or balanced in substance and has instead perpetuated notions of African American expressive forms as marginal, dysfunctional, and exotic. My own position in this chapter is that of long familiarity with Black classrooms from the days of segregated schools in the South to current efforts to create Afrocentric schools or African American curricula. From beginnings in Virginia and North Carolina as a rural child with intermittent time in Black schools to South Carolina's Penn Center and Mississippi's new Freedom schools in the Civil Rights Era, I have maintained involvement. I have played various roles--from visiting teacher to professional development resource to occasional advisor--in a variety of schools for African American students. In the early 1970s as a teacher educator in South Carolina, I guided development of a kit on children's language that was placed in all elementary schools of the state. Grammatical and discourse descriptions, games, and tests covered fundamental knowledge about language as well as specifics on varieties of African American Vernacular English spoken in the State as well as Southern Appalachian and coastal dialects used primarily by Whites. Goals of these materials included enabling teachers and students to understand how all speakers play with a range of registers, styles, and dialects to meet their social and instrumental needs. Involving students as early as possible in open exploration of these needs and language resources will enhance reading, writing, and an inquiry mode. Children in the early primary grades can carry out rudimentary sociolinguistic analyses and reflect on their own range of uses. In so doing, they develop a grounded feeling for how and when shifts to other portions of their linguistic repertoire may be more appropriate as well as more instrumentally effective (for an example of early primary teachers' work of this type, see Part 11 of Heath, 1983). Within the fields of teaching and learning, language forms identified with African Americans have too often been so reduced as to create a sense of limits rather than expanses, of narrow marginality and not broad claim to centers. This charge applies particularly to literary expression, as well as to overdrawn claims about necessary links between particular ways of speaking, and matters of identity, adaptation, and choice on the part of African American students. Language varieties along a spectrum termed (dialects of) Black English or African American Vernacular English carry direct communicational strength and symbolic power. However, any claim that formal learning can and should take place either only or primarily through these varieties shortchanges students' capacities. Such views overlook not only common- sense observations about the ubiquity of numerous varieties of English with which every young American hears daily, but also basic scientific understandings of the cognitive and linguistic competencies of any neurologically sound speaker. The fundamental issue comes down to respect and knowledge; a primary underpinning of formal education within the United States rests in faith that with knowledge comes respect and understanding. But this process has been 2 painfully slow with regard to African American expressive forms in language and culture. In spite of extensive research, especially since the 1960s, essential linguistic, social, and historical facts have entered neither public understanding nor relevant fields, such as teacher preparation or legal education. Saturation of the media and all levels of education with accurate information needs to continue unremittingly. Public reaction to the Ebonics Resolution of the Oakland, California school board revealed just how difficult it is to insert fundamental research findings into debates shaped by abiding racism and refusal to learn that which might dislodge long-held belief systems.1 Perhaps most difficult to replace are essentialist positions that assume contiguity of race, language, and culture among African Americans.2 This position holds dearly to notions of predeterminism or universalism in the direction and nature of lifeways and values of African Americans. Difference and divergence mark the history of Africa as well as Africans in the Americas, but public perception still encircles "blackness" within the fence of homogeneity.3 Yet any rational examination must acknowledge the range of choice, direction, and purpose that marks individuals, institutions, and belief systems that bear any label denoting African origin. The same diversity characterizes language structures and uses currently even among groups that may describe themselves as "Afrocentric." From Nation of Islam schools to rural historically vocational campuses dedicated to the schooling of Black students, different degrees of exclusivity, attention to religious creed, and projections of future national or Pan-African identities enlist different languages (e.g., Arabic, Swahili, Xhosa, English) and their forms and uses. There is no agreed-upon center to Afrocentrism or to the language forms that give its accounts. The absence of a center speaks to the dynamism of convergences, multiple directions, and selective representation that surrounds the dilemma of what can appropriately be called "African American language and culture." Some of this dynamism depends on historically based connections, others on identity-building visits by individuals to parts of today's Africa, and still others on at-home socially constructed rituals of identity and community. Such shifting, patterns of convergence and divergence defy the larger society's penchant for creating and maintaining simplistic, fixed, and artificial categories of distance. Highly selective pushes and pulls that originate within communities of African Americans pose special challenge for those trying to sort out just how language and its related habits and beliefs might fit into formal education. They must untangle the numerous fluctuations in categories of distance that resist accurate portrayals and hard evidence about African American speakers and writers across history. They have to uncover predispositions of spokespersons for African American education that unwittingly endorse Anglo-Saxon or heavily assimilationist presuppositions. Moreover, they have to reveal the ways that current favored
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