“Politics and the English Language"by George Orwell

Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English

language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious

action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent and our language -- so the

argument runs -- must inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows that any

struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring

candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-

conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we

shape for our own purposes.

Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and

economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual

writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and

producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may

take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more

completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the

English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish,

but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.

The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written

English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if

one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can

think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political

regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the

exclusive concern of professional writers. I will come back to this presently, and I

hope that by that time the meaning of what I have said here will have become

clearer.....

Now that I have made this catalogue of swindles and perversions, let me give

another example of the kind of writing that they lead to. This time it must of its

nature be an imaginary one. I am going to translate a passage of good English into

modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the

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battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of

understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth

to them all.

Here it is in modern English:

Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that

success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be

commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the

unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

This is a parody, but not a very gross one....It will be seen that I have not made a full

translation. The beginning and ending of the sentence follow the original meaning

fairly closely, but in the middle the concrete illustrations -- race, battle, bread --

dissolve into the vague phrases "success or failure in competitive activities." This

had to be so, because no modern writer of the kind I am discussing -- no one capable

of using phrases like "objective considerations of contemporary phenomena" --

would ever tabulate his thoughts in that precise and detailed way. The whole

tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness. Now analyze these two

sentences a little more closely. The first contains forty-nine words but only sixty

syllables, and all its words are those of everyday life. The second contains thirty-

eight words of ninety syllables: eighteen of those words are from Latin roots, and

one from Greek. The first sentence contains six vivid images, and only one phrase

("time and chance") that could be called vague. The second contains not a single

fresh, arresting phrase, and in spite of its ninety syllables it gives only a shortened

version of the meaning contained in the first. Yet without a doubt it is the second

kind of sentence that is gaining ground in modern English. I do not want to

exaggerate. This kind of writing is not yet universal, and outcrops of simplicity will

occur here and there in the worst-written page. Still, if you or I were told to write a

few lines on the uncertainty of human fortunes, we should probably come much

nearer to my imaginary sentence than to the one from Ecclesiastes....

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least

four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3.

What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an

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effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: 1. Could I put it more shortly? 2.

Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly? But you are not obliged to go to all this

trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-

made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you -- even

think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent -- and at need they will perform the

important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself. It is at

this point that the special connection between politics and the debasement of

language becomes clear.

In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where it is not

true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his

private opinions and not a "party line." Orthodoxy, of whatever color, seems to

demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets,

leading articles, manifestoes, White papers and the speeches of undersecretaries do,

of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never

finds in them a fresh, vivid, homemade turn of speech. When one watches some

tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases -- bestial

atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to

shoulder -- one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human

being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at

moments when the light catches the speaker's spectacles and turns them into blank

discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A

speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning

himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his

brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the

speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he

may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the

responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is

at any rate favorable to political conformity.

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the

indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges

and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be

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defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and

which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political

language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy

vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven

out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with

incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their

farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is

called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for

years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic

lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is

needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.

Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian

totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, "I believe in killing off your opponents when

you can get good results by doing so." Probably, therefore, he will say something like

this:

While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which

the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a

certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable

concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian

people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the

sphere of concrete achievement.

The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the

facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great

enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and

one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted

idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as

"keeping out of politics." All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of

lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad,

language must suffer. I should expect to find -- this is a guess which I have not

sufficient knowledge to verify -- that the German, Russian and Italian languages

have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.

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But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage

can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know

better. The debased language that I have been discussing is in some ways very

convenient. Phrases like a not unjustifiable assumption, leaves much to be desired,

would serve no good purpose, a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind ,

are a continuous temptation, a packet of aspirins always at one's elbow. Look back

through this essay, and for certain you will find that I have again and again

committed the very faults I am protesting against...This invasion of one's mind by

ready-made phrases (lay the foundations, achieve a radical transformation) can only

be prevented if one is constantly on guard against them, and every such phrase

anaesthetizes a portion of one's brain....

I think the following rules will cover most cases:

(i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are

used to seeing in print.

(ii) Never us a long word where a short one will do.

(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.

(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can

think of an everyday English equivalent.

(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

These rules sound elementary, and so they are, but they demand a deep change

of attitude in anyone who has grown used to writing in the style now fashionable.

One could keep all of them and still write bad English, but one could not write the

kind of stuff that I quoted in those five specimens at the beginning of this article.

I have not here been considering the literary use of language, but merely

language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing

thought. Stuart Chase and others have come near to claiming that all abstract words

are meaningless, and have used this as a pretext for advocating a kind of political

quietism. Since you don't know what Fascism is, how can you struggle against

Fascism? One need not swallow such absurdities as this, but one ought to recognize

that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that

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one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If

you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You

cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its

stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language -- and with variations

this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to

make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of

solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least

change one's own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly

enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase -- some jackboot, Achilles' heel,

hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal refuse -- into

the dustbin, where it belongs.

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“If Black English Isn’t A Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?”by James Baldwin

The argument concerning the use, or the status, or the reality, of black English is

rooted in American history and has absolutely nothing to do with the question the

argument supposes itself to be posing. The argument has nothing to do with

language itself but with the role of language. Language, incontestably, reveals the

speaker. Language, also, far more dubiously, is meant to define the other--and, in

this case, the other is refusing to be defined by a language that has never been able

to recognize him.

People evolve a language in order to describe and thus control their

circumstances, or in order not to be submerged by a reality that they cannot

articulate. (And, if they cannot articulate it, they are submerged.) A Frenchman

living in Paris speaks a subtly and crucially different language from that of the man

living in Marseilles; neither sounds very much like a man living in Quebec; and they

would all have great difficulty in apprehending what the man from Guadeloupe, or

Martinique, is saying, to say nothing of the man from Senegal--although the

"common" language of all these areas is French. But each has paid, and is paying, a

different price for this "common" language, in which, as it turns out, they are not

saying, and cannot be saying, the same things: They each have very different

realities to articulate, or control.

What joins all languages, and all men, is the necessity to confront life, in order,

not inconceivably, to outwit death: The price for this is the acceptance, and

achievement, of one's temporal identity. So that, for example, though it is not taught

in the schools (and this has the potential of becoming a political issue) the south of

France still clings to its ancient and musical Provençal, which resists being

described as a "dialect." And much of the tension in the Basque countries, and in

Wales, is due to the Basque and Welsh determination not to allow their languages to

be destroyed. This determination also feeds the flames in Ireland for many

indignities the Irish have been forced to undergo at English hands is the English

contempt for their language.

It goes without saying, then, that language is also a political instrument, means,

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and proof of power. It is the most vivid and crucial key to identify: It reveals the

private identity, and connects one with, or divorces one from, the larger, public, or

communal identity. There have been, and are, times, and places, when to speak a

certain language could be dangerous, even fatal. Or, one may speak the same

language, but in such a way that one's antecedents are revealed, or (one hopes)

hidden. This is true in France, and is absolutely true in England: The range (and

reign) of accents on that damp little island make England coherent for the English

and totally incomprehensible for everyone else. To open your mouth in England is

(if I may use black English) to "put your business in the street": You have confessed

your parents, your youth, your school, your salary, your self-esteem, and, alas, your

future.

Now, I do not know what white Americans would sound like if there had never

been any black people in the United States, but they would not sound the way they

sound. Jazz, for example, is a very specific sexual term, as in jazz me, baby, but white

people purified it into the Jazz Age. Sock it to me, which means, roughly, the same

thing, has been adopted by Nathaniel Hawthorne's descendants with no qualms or

hesitations at all, along with let it all hang out and right on! Beat to his socks which

was once the black's most total and despairing image of poverty, was transformed

into a thing called the Beat Generation, which phenomenon was, largely, composed

of uptight, middle-class white people, imitating poverty, trying to get down, to get

with it, doing their thing, doing their despairing best to be funky, which we, the

blacks, never dreamed of doing--we were funky, baby, like funk was going out of

style.

Now, no one can eat his cake, and have it, too, and it is late in the day to attempt

to penalize black people for having created a language that permits the nation its

only glimpse of reality, a language without which the nation would be even more

whipped than it is.

I say that the present skirmish is rooted in American history, and it is. Black

English is the creation of the black diaspora. Blacks came to the United States

chained to each other, but from different tribes: Neither could speak the other's

language. If two black people, at that bitter hour of the world's history, had been

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able to speak to each other, the institution of chattel slavery could never have lasted

as long as it did. Subsequently, the slave was given, under the eye, and the gun, of his

master, Congo Square, and the Bible--or in other words, and under these conditions,

the slave began the formation of the black church, and it is within this

unprecedented tabernacle that black English began to be formed. This was not,

merely, as in the European example, the adoption of a foreign tongue, but an

alchemy that transformed ancient elements into a new language: A language comes

into existence by means of brutal necessity, and the rules of the language are dictated

by what the language must convey.

There was a moment, in time, and in this place, when my brother, or my mother,

or my father, or my sister, had to convey to me, for example, the danger in which I

was standing from the white man standing just behind me, and to convey this with a

speed, and in a language, that the white man could not possibly understand, and

that, indeed, he cannot understand, until today. He cannot afford to understand it.

This understanding would reveal to him too much about himself, and smash that

mirror before which he has been frozen for so long.

Now, if this passion, this skill, this (to quote Toni Morrison) "sheer intelligence,"

this incredible music, the mighty achievement of having brought a people utterly

unknown to, or despised by "history"--to have brought this people to their present,

troubled, troubling, and unassailable and unanswerable place--if this absolutely

unprecedented journey does not indicate that black English is a language, I am

curious to know what definition of language is to be trusted.

A people at the center of the Western world, and in the midst of so hostile a

population, has not endured and transcended by means of what is patronizingly

called a "dialect." We, the blacks, are in trouble, certainly, but we are not doomed,

and we are not inarticulate because we are not compelled to defend a morality that

we know to be a lie.

The brutal truth is that the bulk of white people in American never had any

interest in educating black people, except as this could serve white purposes. It is

not the black child's language that is in question, it is not his language that is

despised: It is his experience. A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him,

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and a child cannot afford to be fooled. A child cannot be taught by anyone whose

demand, essentially, is that the child repudiate his experience, and all that gives him

sustenance, and enter a limbo in which he will no longer be black, and in which he

knows that he can never become white. Black people have lost too many black

children that way.

And, after all, finally, in a country with standards so untrustworthy, a country

that makes heroes of so many criminal mediocrities, a country unable to face why so

many of the nonwhite are in prison, or on the needle, or standing, futureless, in the

streets--it may very well be that both the child, and his elder, have concluded that

they have nothing whatever to learn from the people of a country that has managed

to learn so little.

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From “Authority and American Usage”by David Foster Wallace

Because the argument for SWE [Standard Written English] is both most delicate and (I

believe) most important with respect to students of color, here is a condensed version

of the spiel I’ve given in private conferences6161 with certain black students who were

(a) bright and inquisitive as hell and (b) deficient in what US higher education

considers written English facility:

I don’t know whether anybody’s told you this or not, but when you’re in a college

English class you’re basically studying a foreign dialect. This dialect is called

Standard Written English. From talking with you and reading your first couple

essays, I’ve concluded that your own primary dialect is [one of three variants of SBE

{Standard Black English} common to our region]. Now, let me spell something out in

my official teacher-voice: the SBE you’re fluent in is different from SWE in all kinds

of important ways. Some of these differences are grammatical—for example, double

negatives are OK in Standard Black English but not in SWE, and SBE and SWE

conjugate verbs in totally different ways. Other differences have more to do with

style—for instance, Standard Written English tends to use a lot more subordinate

clauses in the early parts of sentences, and it sets off most of these early

subordinates with commas, and under SWE rules, writing that doesn’t do this tends

to look “choppy.” There are tons of differences like that. How much of this stuff do

you already know? [STANDARD RESPONSE = some variation on “I know from the grades

and comments on my papers that the English profs here don’t think I’m a good

writer.”] Well, I’ve got good news and bad news. There are some otherwise smart

English profs who aren’t very aware that there are real dialects of English other than

SWE, so when they’re marking up your papers they’ll put, like, “Incorrect

conjugation” or “Comma needed” instead of “SWE conjugates this verb differently”

or “SWE calls for a comma here.” That’s the good news—it’s not that you’re a bad

writer, it’s that you haven’t learned the special rules of the dialect they want you to

write in. Maybe that’s not such good news, that they’ve been grading you down for

6161 (I’m not a total idiot.)

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mistakes in a foreign language that you didn’t even know was a foreign language.

That they won’t let you write in SBE. Maybe it seems unfair. If it does, you’re

probably not going to like this other news: I’m not going to let you write in SBE

either. In my class, you have to learn and write in SWE. If you want to study your

own primary dialect and its rules and history and how it’s different from SWE, fine

—there are some great books by scholars of Black English, and I’ll help you find

some and talk about them with you if you want. But that will be outside class. In

class—in my English class—you will have to master and write in Standard Written

English, which we might just as well call “Standard White English,” because it was

developed by white people and is used by white people, especially educated,

powerful white people. [RESPONSES by this point vary too widely to standardize.] I’m

respecting you enough here to give you what I believe is the straight truth. In this

country, SWE is perceived as the dialect of education and intelligence and power

and prestige and anybody of any race, ethnicity, religion, or gender who wants to

succeed in American culture has got to be able to use SWE. This is How It Is. You can

be glad about it or sad about it or deeply pissed off. You can believe it’s racist and

unjust and decide right here and now to spend every waking minute of your adult

life arguing against it, and maybe you should, but I’ll tell you something. If you ever

want those arguments to get listened to and taken seriously, you’re going to have to

communicate them in SWE, because SWE is the dialect our country uses to talk to

itself. African Americans who’ve become successful and important in US culture

know this; that’s why King’s and X’s and Jackson’s speeches are in SWE, and why

Morrison’s and Angelou’s and Baldwin’s and Wideman’s and West’s books are full of

totally ass-kicking SWE, and why black judges and politicians and journalists and

doctors and teachers communicate professionally in SWE. Some of these people

grew up in home and communities where SWE was the native dialect and these

black people had it much easier in school, but the ones who didn’t grow up with

SWE realized at some point that they had to learn it and become able to write in it,

and so they did. And [INSERT NAME HERE], you’re going to learn to use it, too, because I

am going to make you.

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From “The Burning of Paper Instead of Children”by Adrienne Rich

this is the oppressor’s language

yet I need it to speak to you.

“The Language of Power”

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by bell hooks

Like desire, language disrupts, refuses to be contained within boundaries. It

speaks itself against our will, in words and thoughts that intrude, even violate the

most private spaces of mind and body. It was in my first year of college that I read

Adrienne Rich’s poem, “The Burning of Paper Instead of Children.” That poem,

speaking against domination, against racism and class oppression, attempts to

illustrate graphically that stopping the political persecution and torture of living

beings is a more vital issue than censorship, than burning books. One line of this

poem that moved and disturbed something within me: “This is the oppressor’s

language yet I need it to talk to you.” I’ve never forgotten it. Perhaps I could not have

forgotten it even if I tried to erase it from memory. Words impose themselves, lake

root in our memory against our will. The words of this poem begat a life in my

memory that I could not abort or change.

When I find myself thinking about language now, these words are there, as if

they were always waiting to challenge and assist me. I find myself silently speaking

them over and over again with the intensity of a chant. They startle me, shaking me

into an awareness of the link between languages and domination. Initially, I resist

the idea of the “oppressor’s language,” certain that this construct has the potential to

disempower those of us who are just learning to speak, who are just learning to

claim language as a place where we make ourselves subject. “This is the oppressor’s

languages yet I need it to talk to you.” Adrienne Rich’s words. Then, when I first read

these words, and now, they make me think of standard English, of learning to speak

against black vernacular, against the ruptured and broken speech of a dispossessed

and displaced people. Standard English is not the speech of exile. It is the language

of conquest and domination; in the United States, it is the mask which hides the loss

of so many tongues, all those sounds of diverse, native communities we will never

hear, the speech of the Gullah, Yiddish, and so many other unremembered tongues.

Reflecting on Adrienne Rich’s words, I know that it is not the English language

that hurts me, but what the oppressors do with it, how they shape it to become a

territory that limits and defines, how they make it a weapon that can shame,

humiliate, colonize. Gloria Anzaldúa reminds us of this pain in Borderlands/La

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Frontera when she asserts, “So, if you want to really hurt me, talk badly about my

language.” We have so little knowledge of how displaced, enslaved, or free Africans

who came or were brought against their will to the United States felt about the loss

of language, about learning English. Only as a woman did I begin to think about

these black people in relation to language, to think about their trauma as they were

compelled to witness their language rendered meaningless with a colonizing

European culture, where voices deemed foreign could not be spoken, were outlawed

tongues, renegade speech.

When I realize how long it has taken for white Americans to acknowledge

diverse languages of Native Americans, to accept that the speech their ancestral

colonizers declared was merely grunts or gibberish was indeed language, it is

difficult not to hear in standard English always the sound of slaughter and conquest.

I think now of the grief of displaced “homeless” Africans, forced to inhabit a world

where they saw folks like themselves, inhabiting the same skin, the same condition,

but who had no shared language to talk with one another, who needed “the

oppressor’s language.” “This is the oppressor’s language yet I need it to talk to you. “

When I imagine the terror of Africans on board slave ships, on auction blocks,

inhabiting the unfamiliar architecture of plantations, I consider that this terror

extended beyond fear of punishment, that it resided also in the anguish of hearing a

language they could not comprehend. The very sound of English had to terrify. I

think of black people meeting one another in a space away from the diverse cultures

and languages that distinguished them from one another, compelled by

circumstance to find ways to speak with one another in a “new world” where

blackness or the darkness of one’s skin and not language would become the space of

bonding. How to remember, to reinvoke this terror. How to describe what it must

have been like for Africans whose deepest bonds were historically forged in the

place of shared speech to be transported abruptly to a world where the very sound

of one’s mother tongue had no meaning.

I imagine them hearing spoken English as the oppressor’s language, yet I

imagine them also realizing that this language would need to be possessed, taken,

claimed as a space of resistance. I imagine that the moment they realized the

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oppressor’s language, seized and spoken by the tongues of the colonized, could be a

space of bonding was joyous. For in that recognition was the understanding that

intimacy could be restored, that a culture of resistance could be formed that would

make recovery from the trauma of enslavement possible. I imagine, then, Africans

first hearing English as “the oppressor’s language” and then re-hearing it as a

potential site of resistance. Learning English, learning to speak the alien tongue, was

one way enslaved Africans began to reclaim their personal power within a context

of domination. Possessing a shared language, black folks could find again a way to

make community, and a means to create the political solidarity necessary to resist.

Needing the oppressor’s language to speak with one another they nevertheless

also reinvented, remade that language so that it would speak beyond the boundaries

of conquest and domination. In the mouths of black Africans in the so-called “New

World,” English was altered, transformed, and became a different speech. Enslaved

black people took broken bits of English and made of them a counter-language. They

put together their words in such a way that the colonizer had to rethink the meaning

of English language. Though it has become common in contemporary culture to talk

about the messages of resistance that emerged in the music created by slaves,

particularly spirituals, less is said about the grammatical construction of sentences

in these songs. Often, the English used in the song reflected the broken, ruptured

world of the slave. When the slaves sang “nobody knows de trouble I see—” their

use of the word “nobody” adds a richer meaning than if they had used the phrase

“no one,” for it was the slave’s body that was the concrete site of suffering. And even

as emancipated black people sang spirituals, they did not change the language, the

sentence structure, of our ancestors. For in the incorrect usage of words, in the

incorrect placement of words, was a spirit of rebellion that claimed language as a

site of resistance. Using English in a way that ruptured standard usage and meaning,

so that white folks could often not understand black speech, made English into more

than the oppressor’s language.

An unbroken connection exists between the broken English of the displaced,

enslaved African and the diverse black vernacular speech black folks use today. In

both cases, the rupture of standard English enabled and enables rebellion and

16

resistance. By transforming the oppressor’s language, making a culture of

resistance, black people created an intimate speech that could say far more than was

permissible within the boundaries of standard English. The power of this speech is

not simply that it enables resistance to white supremacy, but that it also forges a

space for alternative cultural production and alternative epistemologies—different

ways of thinking and knowing that were crucial to creating a counter-hegemonic

worldview. It is absolutely essential that the revolutionary power of black

vernacular speech not be lost in contemporary culture. That power resides in the

capacity of black vernacular to intervene on the boundaries and limitations of

standard English.

In contemporary black popular culture, rap music has become one of the spaces

where black vernacular speech is used in a manner that invites dominant

mainstream culture to listen—to hear—and, to some extent, be transformed.

However, one of the risks of this attempt at cultural translation is that it will

trivialize black vernacular speech. When young white kids imitate this speech in

ways that suggest it is the speech of those who are stupid or who are only interested

in entertaining or being funny, then the subversive power of this speech is

undermined. In academic circles, both in the sphere of teaching and that of writing,

there has been little effort made to utilize black vernacular—or, for that matter, any

language other than standard English. When I asked an ethnically diverse group of

students in a course I was teaching on black women writers why we only heard

standard English spoken in the classroom, they were momentarily rendered

speechless. Though many of them were individuals for whom standard English was

a second or third language, it had simply never occurred to them that it was possible

to say something in another language, in another way. No wonder, then, that we

continue to think, “This is the oppressor’s language yet I need it to talk to you.”

I have realized that I was in danger of losing my relationship to black vernacular

speech because I too rarely use it in the predominantly white settings that I am most

often in, both professionally and socially. And so I have begun to work at integrating

into a variety of settings the particular Southern black vernacular speech I grew up

hearing and speaking. It has been hardest to integrate black vernacular in writing,

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particularly for academic journals. When I first began to incorporate black

vernacular in critical essays, editors would send the work back to me in standard

English. Using the vernacular means that translation into standard English may be

needed if one wishes to reach a more inclusive audience. In the classroom setting, I

encourage students to use their first language and translate it so they do not feel

that seeking higher education will necessarily estrange them from that language and

culture they know most intimately. Not surprisingly, when students in my Black

Women Writers class began to speak using diverse language and speech, white

students often complained. This seemed to be particularly the case with black

vernacular. It was particularly disturbing to the white students because they could

hear the words that were said but could not comprehend their meaning.

Pedagogically, I encouraged them to think of the moment of not understanding what

someone says as a space to learn. Such a space provides not only the opportunity to

listen without “mastery,” without owning or possessing speech through

interpretation, but also the experience of hearing non-English words. These lessons

seem particularly crucial in a multicultural society that remains white supremacist,

that uses standard English as a weapon to silence and censor.

That the students in the course on black women writers were repressing all

longing to speak in tongues other than standard English without seeing this

repression as political was an indication of the way we act unconsciously, in

complicity with a culture of domination.

Recent discussions of diversity and multiculturalism tend to downplay or ignore

the question of language. Critical feminist writings focused on issues of difference

and voice have made important theoretical interventions, calling for a recognition of

the primacy of voices that are often silenced, censored, or marginalized. This call for

the acknowledgment and celebration of diverse voices, and consequently of diverse

language and speech, necessarily disrupts the primacy of standard English. When

advocates of feminism first spoke about the desire for diverse participation in

women’s movement, there was no discussion of language. It was simply assumed

that standard English would remain the primary vehicle for the transmission of

feminist thought. Now that the audience for feminist writing and speaking has

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become more diverse, it is evident that we must change conventional ways of

thinking about language, creating spaces where diverse voices can speak in words

other than English or in broken, vernacular speech. This means that at a lecture or

even in a written work there will be fragments of speech that may or may not be

accessible to every individual. Shifting how we think about language and how we

use it necessarily alters how we know what we know. At a lecture where I might use

Southern black vernacular, the particular patois of my region, or where I might use

very abstract thought in conjunction with plain speech, responding to a diverse

audience, I suggest that we do not necessarily need to hear and know what is stated

in its entirely, that we do not need to “master” or conquer the narrative as a whole,

that we may know in fragments. I suggest that we may learn from spaces of silence

as well as spaces of speech, that in the patient act of listening to another tongue we

may subvert that culture of capitalist frenzy and consumption that demands all

desire must be satisfied immediately, or we may disrupt that cultural imperialism

that suggests one is worthy of being heard only if one speaks in standard English. …

To recognize that we touch one another in language seems particularly difficult

in a society that would have us believe that there is no dignity in the experience of

passion, that to feel deeply is to be inferior, for within the dualism of Western

metaphysical thought, ideas are always more important than language. To heal the

splitting of mind and body, we marginalized and oppressed people attempt to

recover ourselves and our experiences in language. We seek to make a place for

intimacy. Unable to find such a place in standard English, we create the ruptured,

broken, unruly speech of the vernacular. When I need to say words that do more

than simply mirror or address the dominant reality, I speak black vernacular. There,

in that location, we make English do what we want it to do. We take the oppressor’s

language and turn it against itself. We make our words a counter-hegemonic speech,

liberating ourselves in language.

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