Bill Stewart wrote:

At 07:38 PM 1/23/97 -0600, Jim Choate wrote: One of the points of the Ebonics program is to recognize that other people don't always speak the same way you do, and that if you want to communicate with them, you'll be more successful if you realize it, understand when they're talking in their dialect,

I could agree with "some of the points" of the Ebonics program were it not for the fact of the hidden points. Unbeknownst to most folks, supporting a program on any erstwhile points will give support to the program on *all* points. One specific example: When I worked for Firestone corporate from 1970 to 1981, we were bullied into giving to the United Fund. (BTW, I learned how much my boss was making by reading the punches on the IBM cards.) The one bone they tossed us was we could specify which worthy causes our personal contribution would go towards. The trick was, if a certain greater-than-expected number of people specified a Catholic charity, for example, more funds would then be moved into the other charities to balance that out. Presumably those funds would come from those folks who hadn't declared a designee. In my view, once the contributors' specific designations were made, the remaining undesignated contributions should have been split across the designees according to the original percentages declared in the U.F. literature. Anything else would be a farce.