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Ensuring social relevance 245
the history and status of these varieties are very different, they all share similar experiences of coming into conflict with the politics of standardization.
A case in point is the cultural politics of Ebonics that flared up recently in the United States. Ebonics, a blend of ebony and phon- ics, is the popular name given to African-American Vernacular En- glish (AAVE). In 1996, authorities in Oakland, California, passed a resolution declaring Ebonics to be the primary language of the African-American students in Oakland’s schools and recommended that students be taught in such a way that they maintain their home language Ebonics as well as learn Standard American English.
The move was strongly opposed by the American media and the American public, including some prominent African-American lead- ers. The New York Times wrote that it is a “blunder” to give “black slang” a place of honor in the classroom. It objected that “by label- ing them as linguistic foreigners in their own country, the new policy will actually stigmatize African-American children—while validat- ing habits of speech that bar them from the cultural mainstream and decent jobs” (New York Times, 1996, cited in Dennis Baron, 2000, p. 7). Faced with severe criticism, Oakland quickly retracted its res- olution and replaced it with a milder one stating that the objective of the resolution was to teach teachers about the language their stu- dents brought to school, and to teach Standard American English to students who speak AAVE as home language (see, for instance, Baron, 2000, for more details).
The widespread debate that followed the Oakland decision seems to have reinforced the general consensus that knowledge of the “stan- dard” variety is necessary for social and economic uplift. However, serious concerns were expressed about the need for maintaining the linguistic and cultural identity of the speakers of minority vari- eties, and also for linking the variety spoken at home with the vari- ety taught at school. These concerns reflected an earlier assertion by Lisa Delpit (1990, p. 53) that it is the responsibility of teachers to “recognize that the linguistic form a student brings to school is intimately connected with loved ones, community, and personal identity. To suggest that this form is ‘wrong’ or, even worse, igno- rant, is to suggest that something is wrong with the student and his or her family.”
There is also evidence suggesting that an understanding of the