Perhaps colleagues might be interested in the British reaction to the
Ebonics debate:
 
The Sunday Times - 12 January
 
Truth and Lies in the language classroom
 
You may have heard of Ebonics already.  Like most other products of
political correctness, it is an
easy joke and quiet tragedy.  A joke because it is hard not to laugh at the
notion that a California
school board wants to elevate black slang, such as "He does be goin to the
store", to the same
status as Shakespeare.  A tragedy because its logic - that there is no way
to distinguish between
good and bad English - is consigning a generation of young black Americans
to more educational
despair.
The threat is perhaps even greater than that, because the logic of Ebonics,
devised at the highest
levels of American intellectual and academic life, does not only affect
language.
The argument behind teaching young black Americans that there slang grammar
is, after all, part
of the argument that teaches black jurors that O.J. Simpson is innocent.  In
a world where
everything - language, law, reason - is a function of racial power, there
are no neutral principles of
grammatical or ungrammatical, true or false, innocent or guilty. There is
merely black and white
and no way to mediate between them.
 
note: these views are not mine.
Malcolm Kauffman