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How Black English and Modern Hebrew Are Alike
What I’m supposed to do? I got to wait till she get on her feet. She my bes’ friend. I heard someone say exactly this recently. She was black. I thought of it as a beautiful sample of the dialect that linguists often call African-American Vernacular English. Most people, though, think of it as bad…
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Doth We Protest Too Much?
It’s all about this business of “contesting.” And it’s about all of us. One thing we all know is that if Cornel West actually met Barack Obama alone in a room — and we can be sure this will happen one day, and likely more than once — he would embrace him and call him…
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Are We "Contesting" Too Much?
John McWhorter is a contributing editor at The Root. He is an associate professor at Columbia University and the author of several books, including Winning the Race: Beyond the Crisis in Black America and Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English.
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Hooray for Twitter's Black Tilt
Twitter’s black tilt is wonderful. The big story is not that it’s sketchy to even notice it. Nor is the big story that the general level of “blacktags” is not that of a graduate seminar. The big news is that America is talking black. There is so much good about this that it’s hard to…
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Convincing Whites to End the War on Drugs
Michelle Alexander wrote a beautiful piece in the New York Times last weekend. She argued that America has imprisoned far too many people, far too many of them black, and the nation must come to a new moral accounting. We must eliminate excessive sentences for low-level offenses, we must fight the vested interest that millions…
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Bring Back Fats Waller's Lost Musical!
Did you know that jazz pioneer Fats Waller wrote the score to a Broadway musical? I don’t mean Hot Chocolates in 1929, a black show that started at a Harlem nightclub and made the move downtown, and was a string of songs and sketches. I mean that Waller wrote a Broadway musical with a white…
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Stop Public Celebrations of Osama's Death
I will never forget a conversation I had with two Muslim Americans in the wake of 9/11 — one black and one a second-generation immigrant. A quiet but insistent theme was that bin Laden’s action was not completely unreasonable. A quiet theme, mind you — both often contributed that what bin Laden had done was…
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Lessons in Ebonics: What's Up?
One of the hardest things for a black linguist is getting across, once and for all, something that the public never quite seems to get: Black English is not bad English. Over the years, people have tried. But it doesn’t help to say Black English is African with English words, as we heard back when…
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What Africa's Click Tongues Tell of Our Origins
A quirky article by Quentin Atkinson in Science magazine reinforces once again the news that would have surprised so many smart people not so very long ago: that humanity began in Africa. This time, it’s language that gives it away — specifically, those languages with the clicks in them. They’re called Khoi-San (or Khoisan) languages,…
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It Really Is Better Now for Blacks
There are those who think that I am naive about racism or that I downplay it. The kinds of people who think so are often themselves accused, from other quarters, of being “stuck in the past,” unable to admit that things truly change. Interestingly, I often feel that it’s actually I who am stuck in…
Black News and Black Views with a Whole Lotta Attitude
