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December 02, 2005
James Baldwin Article
This article is very powerful and makes a variety of claims concerning dialects differences and then relating it to race. One of the most powerful statements in this article was "a country unable to face why so many of the non-white 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." I came up with two different interpretations of this statement. The first was that colored people are at a disadvantage, because they have no one to teach them. The second was that colored people do not want to learn from people who have learned nothing about different races. There are also many other interpretations of this quote. I think that for the most part this quote is not true, because many people of color have opportunities, however there is still disparity over the education of minorities.
Baldwin makes the point that even though people speak the same language (the example that he used was French), it is still difficult for people to understand each other, because of different dialects. This can cause frustration among people, or dialect superiority, where people consider their dialect to be superior to other dialects. This superiority complex is a flaw that people have, and use to sometimes look down upon other people's manner of speaking. This issue is also connected to race.
Baldwin also explains that Black English was influential in the english used by white americans. He claims that white americans adopted some words that were later used in music, like that of jazz. I think that this is true to to a certain extent and some genres of music are a good example to show this. This is true for R&B where words are shortened "going clubbing" becomes "goin' clubbin'". Usually R&B singers of all races use these contructs. This is also true for white rappers.
Another quote from Balwdin's article says "the brutal truth is that the bulk of the white people in America never had any interest in educating black people, except as this could serve white purposes". I think that this quote was far from the truth, because it makes it appear as though white people had no desire to educate black people. This some white people, and not white people as a whole. I think that Baldwin should have also addressed some positive issues in his article, about the achievements of colored people as a result of their education and language.
Questions
1) What does Baldwin mean by the quote "the other is refusing to be defined by a language that has never been able to recognize him."?
2) What are the realities that people have to articulate and control?
3) Why is language a "political instrument"?
4) How is black language a "glimpse of reality"?
--Yasmin
Posted by lcisperez at December 2, 2005 11:19 PM