James Baldwin Black English

James Baldwin Black English

Reading: James Baldwin’s “If Black English Isn’t a Language”

Reading: James Baldwin’s “If Black English Isn’t a Language”
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Exploring a translingual approach to language difference in composition
In this opinion piece, James Baldwin makes a cogent, well-reasoned, and passionate argument that Black English, or African American Vernacular English, is a language . Not a dialect, but a language. He begins by chronicling various reasons for languages to arise—the need to describe and control your circumstances, to confront life and outwit death, and, finally, as a proof of power. After establishing these exigences for the creation and use of a language, he transitions to the circumstances of Black Americans. Baldwin quickly turns the tables on white Americans who might argue that Black English is a dialect:
“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. . . . 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.”
He goes on to connect the present conditions of Black Americans with the history of slavery, saying that “it is not [Black American’s] language that is despised: It is his experience.” Baldwin unequivocally argues that Black English is indeed a language, and counterarguments are rooted in systemic racism. He concludes by arguing that Black Americans must be educated by their own, rather than their oppressors.
This is a polemical essay and many students will react strongly to this piece. Others will argue that this is dated and does not reflect contemporary issues. Admittedly Baldwin was writing in 1979; however, you can easily connect the issues discussed here with current racist rhetoric, violence against Black men in particular, and the Black Lives Matter movement.
In terms of creating a translingual classroom, this will help students to renegotiate their understanding of what “counts as a language” or a valuable system of meaning-making. I usually use this piece after discussing June Jordan’s “Nobody Means More to Me than You and the Future Life of Willie Jordan,” which also argues that Black English is a language. While both Jordan and Baldwin position Black English as a distinct language, which works against translingual notions of language as fluid, influx, and negotiated, these two texts do challenge assumptions about the dominance of standardized English. Baldwin also thoughtfully points out that the English of white Americans draws on, or appropriates, from Black English, meaning that all languages are influx and, in a sense, translingual. I’ve also used this as an example of a well-constructed argument and de-emphasized the actual content of the piece to emphasize Baldwin’s rhetorical moves. If a class is particularly resistant to the idea that Black English is a language and the conversation devolves into a never-ending debate, treating this text as a legitimate argument that does not need debate helps reframe the conversation.
Baldwin, James. “If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me What Is?” The New York Times on the Web , July 29, 1979.
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t. Paul de Vence, France--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, thought 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 ProvenÁal, 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, 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 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, 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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James Baldwin was an American novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and social critic. Born in Harlem, he loved reading and showed a special talent for writing at an early age. He first published at 21 years old (outside the poems, short stories, and plays he’d published in his high school newspaper), a review of the writer Maxim Gorky that appeared in The Nation . Three years later, as a result of being disillusioned by American prejudice against blacks and gays, he left the United States and settled in Paris, France — “Once I found myself on the other side of the ocean, I see where I came from very clearly…I am the grandson of a slave, and I am a writer. I must deal with both,” Baldwin once told The New York Times .
He published his first novel, Go Tell It On The Mountain , in 1953. His first collection of essays, Notes of a Native Son, was released two years later. Baldwin’s second novel, Giovanni’s Room , caused great controversy when it was first published in 1956 due to its explicit homoerotic content, (Baldwin was open about his homosexuality and relationships with both men and women). His work explored racial and social issues, and was especially well-known for his essays on the black experience in America.
James Baldwin returned to the United States in the summer of 1957 while the Civil Rights Act of that year was being debated in Congress. He interviewed people in North Carolina and Alabama, writing many articles and essays during that time. By way of these and a speaking tour, he became known as an important voice for the movement — which probably explains why his FBI file contains 1,884 pages of documents, collected from 1960 until the early 1970s, an era of illegal surveillance of American writers. Even so, Baldwin himself rejected the label “civil rights activist,” rather seeing his role as bearing “witness to the truth.”
In 1963, James Baldwin was featured on the cover of Time Magazine. The accompanying article said of him, “There is not another writer—white or black—who expresses with such poignancy and abrasiveness the dark realities of the racial ferment in North and South.” In the years before his death, he taught at University of Massachusetts at Amherst and Hampshire College.
Interesting fact: Maya Angelou called Baldwin her “friend and brother,” and credited him for “setting the stage” for her 1969 autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, and Baldwin was also a close friend of Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison.
I Am Not Your Negro , a documentary about James Baldwin opens in theaters today, February 3.
Today’s CSU Black History Month Event:
Black History Month: Frederick Douglass
Compendiums of Misbehavior: A Q&A with Ethan Canin

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Department of English
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Ft. Collins, CO 80523-1773

DeWitt Clinton High School, The New School
“I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.” “When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop living.”
James Baldwin was an essayist, playwright, novelist and voice of the American civil rights movement known for works including 'Notes of a Native Son,' 'The Fire Next Time' and 'Go Tell It on the Mountain.'
© 2022 Biography and the Biography logo are registered trademarks of A&E Television Networks, LLC.
Writer and playwright James Baldwin published the 1953 novel Go Tell It on the Mountain , receiving acclaim for his insights on race, spirituality and humanity. Other novels included Giovanni's Room , Another Country and Just Above My Head, as well as essays like Notes of a Native Son and The Fire Next Time .
Writer and playwright James Baldwin was born on August 2, 1924, in Harlem, New York. One of the 20th century's greatest writers, Baldwin broke new literary ground with the exploration of racial and social issues in his many works. He was especially known for his essays on the Black experience in America.
Baldwin was born to a young single mother, Emma Jones, at Harlem Hospital. She reportedly never told him the name of his biological father. Jones married a Baptist minister named David Baldwin when James was about three years old.
Despite their strained relationship, Baldwin fol
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