“Black language?” Seriously?

I am an older, straight, white male. I grew up in impoverished neighborhoods in Los Angeles: first Hispanic, then black. I was married for years to a black woman. Unfortunately, our marriage didn’t last. (She died….)

You and I and Millennials and Gen Z’ers differ. Ebonics, AAVE, and other names for the urban slang that purports to be a variation of English are to mainstream English what “Cajun French” is to French. “Code” talk among prisoners and adolescents has presumably always been with us, but it does not serve the purpose of enhancing mainstream communication, which is to bring about understanding and a sharing of ideas, values, and facts.

Coded language has always had an adversarial posture, presumably from those in a minority towards those in the majority. I get it. Slaves who spoke variations of the Niger languages when they were kidnapped and taken to America had to develop appropriate Creolic dialects to communicate amongst themselves. We no longer live in that world and no longer have the same needs as we did 200–300 years ago.

The hostility of your piece does a disservice to the ideas of communication. You don’t achieve true communication if you are living in the Tower of Babel, and that is the implication of the use of these coded dialects today. Rappers, socio-economic commentators, or just plain “street folk” need to speak a common language and deal with whatever their issues are from a common foundation of a linguistic structure we ALL can share. This B.S. about “black language” is profoundly disturbing to those of us who value understanding above all, because it does nothing to add to that understanding, since it creates an exclusionary zone between the speaker and the audience.