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OK, good point. I wasn't trying to say that they weren't smart, but that most people would interpret their writing as "not smart" and they'd have to adjust it at least to do well on the SAT, which is what they were trying to do.
Ebonics is consistent and has its own rules and everything, and I'm well aware of the difficulty that this creates for them. They're trying to learn two languages (or dialects) at once, and this make everything a little harder for them, like I said. But life is also harder for Asian kids who learn English as a second language or any other person for whom English is a problem. I have a friend who is Bulgarian and he gets bad grades on his papers because his English sucks. Unfortunately, nobody is going to make allowances. And really, they shouldn't. We can't have several different versions of English that are acceptable in the business or academic world or anywhere that precision is important.
So it's not necessarily racism. Should we have different SATs for different English dialects? Should we have the BlackSATs or have different grading systems? It may really blow for them, but it's just another way that life is harder for Black Americans. The way to fix it would be to fix the public schools, especially the inner-city ones. But good luck on that one. There is a built-in "fuck you" in the system that not only has to do with the schools but with the poverty problem and so on. Drastic changes need to be made to fix these problems - there is no way you could make Ebonics acceptable and even if you did it wouldn't really fix any of the deep-set problems.
You might say, "But they're Americans and their way of speaking English is as American as any other way. That's different from being an immigrant or whatever. We shouldn't treat them the same way we treat people who moved here on their own and were aware of the language problem they'd encounter." That's true and that's another reason why the situation sucks so much.
And you know, I write differently than I speak too. I have a Southern accent and I say shit all the time that I would never write. I say "y'all" and "ain't" and "fixin' to" and a lot of other terrible things - everybody has to learn to write differently than they speak. My friend Adam is one of the smartest people I know and one of the best writers I know, but he sounds like Boomhauer from King of the Hill when he talks. But like I said, the way to fix the problem is at a deep level and it would involve trying to achieve equality of opportunity....
Do I sound like a racist? If I do, tell me. (Racism is really the new ultimate put-down, but I won't mind) Was it wrong to tell those kids that they would score badly if they wrote what they turned in to me on the real SAT? Because they would and there's nothing I can do about that. I wasn't a dick about it either. I just tried my best to help them get higher scores - they weren't paying for the class; the county had funded the classes through my private company, Kaplan. The classes usually cost $1000 or so. I felt like I was doing something really good and I tried harder to help them than I did the rich snotty kids I taught sometimes (those that had paid). Oh well...
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