It is bad English-the kind of English that should be dispensed with by the time you’re eleven years old. In her view, speaking what linguists call African American Vernacular English (AAVE) is not speaking “fluent” English. I don’t know why we’ve gotten to a place where as a culture-as a race-if you sound as though you have more than a fifth-grade education, it’s a bad thing.” This was the argument of a young black woman whose video on the subject went viral in 2014. “There is no such thing as ‘talking white’ … It’s actually called ‘speaking fluently,’ speaking your language correctly. That assumption has become so ingrained, it’s even taken up by some black people themselves. It’s not surprising, then, that the dialect many black people speak is stigmatized, too-to such a great extent that it’s often denied the status of dialect, becoming merely “bad” English. As of the second decade of the twenty-first century, black people are almost five times as likely to be jailed as white people, despite making up only 13 percent of the population. Since the civil rights era, many legal barriers to equality have been removed, but society has yet to catch up. In the time of slavery, that stigma was enshrined in law-and even after emancipation, legal measures have been used to ensure that black people could not easily vote, could not access decent education and transportation, and so on. Few large groups of English speakers have borne as great a burden of stigma as black people.
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