The Ebonic Plague

[Martin Minow]

Two minor points:

First, Ebonics (Black English) is grammatical, but its grammar differs
from that of standard American English.

Second, from what I heard on the news, Oakland wants to call it a
separate language because they discovered that they got better results
teaching standard English to Black students if they used secondary
language techniques, as opposed to treating Black English constructions
as "wrong" or "inferior."

Martin Minow
minow at apple.com