kunstler | Of course, the Freddie Gray riots in Baltimore last week prompted the
usual cries for “an honest conversation about race,” and countless
appeals to fix the “broken” public school system. So, in the spirit of
those pleas, I will advance a very plain and straightforward idea: above
all, teach young black kids how to speak English correctly.
Nothing is more important than
acculturating ghetto kids out of their pidgin patois and into real
English with all of its tenses, verb forms, and cases. It’s more
important initially than learning arithmetic, history, and science. I
would argue that it is hardly possible to learn these other things
without first being grounded in real grammatical English.
When these kids grow up, their
manner of speech will identify them and their prospects for success at
least as much as the color of their skin —
and probably more, in my opinion. Their ability to speak English
correctly will be the salient feature in how others assess the content
of their character
I’m sure by now that the racial
justice hand-wringers are squirming over this proposal. All dialects are
equally okay in this rainbow society, they might argue. No they’re not.
Have you noticed that TV news, business, show biz, education, and
politics increasingly employ people whose parents came from India and
other parts of Asia. Do they speak in a patois lacking in complex verb
forms? Apparently not. Are they succeeding in American life, such as it
is? Apparently so.
Notice that the speech issue —
how people talk — is never part of the “honest conversation about race”
that we are supposed to have. Has anybody noticed that in his public
speeches Martin Luther King spoke regular English correctly, if with a
Southern inflection? Has anybody noticed how important that was in his
role as “a communicator?” Why is this crucial question of language
absent from the public conversation about “the intractable problems of
race in America?” Is it because both blacks and whites are too fearful,
too cowardly, to face this particular problem of how English is spoken?
Perhaps this raises the specter
of IQ. I’d like to know how any IQ test can be meaningful when the
person taking it can’t speak the language that the test is given in. I’m
sure that any ghetto kid drilled in English for two years would show
substantial improvement in such a generalized test. But, of course,
first the American people of all skin tones would have to admit that
this is important.
We don’t want to. We’d rather wring our hands over “structural racism” and other canards.
