John Russell Rickford & Russell John Rickford, Spoken soul: The story of Black English. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2000, xii + 267 pp. Hb. $24.95.

2001 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 479-487
Author(s):  
Salikoko S. Mufwene
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
American English ◽  
Linguistic Research ◽  
Socioeconomic History ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Scholarly Discourse ◽  
Lay Public

Spoken Soul is a very stimulating book to read, informative and solidly grounded in scholarship from several disciplines, including quantitative sociolinguistics, sociology, socioeconomic history, and African American literature. It exemplifies the contribution that linguistic research on African American English (AAE) can make to African American studies. It is also a model for how scholarly findings can be shared with the lay public in a language that is vivid and accessible. Those who are familiar with AAE will appreciate the fact that this vividness is borrowed from the subject matter itself. Thus, the authors demonstrate implicitly that AAE is not an impoverished vernacular, and even scholarly discourse can benefit from it.

Texts, white lies and a videotape: white teachers teaching African American literature

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (3/4) ◽  
pp. 239-253
Author(s):  
Lisa Marie Westbrooks
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
American English ◽  
White Teachers ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Standard American English ◽  
English Classrooms ◽  
Teacher Researcher ◽  
White Gaze

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to share my personal memories and emotions of my experience as an African American, a Woman of Color, teacher-peer, teacher-researcher, student and a colonized standard American English speaker, situated in English classrooms as white teachers teach African American literature from a white gaze. I concur with previous researchers on this topic, but from a fresh perspective that traditional educational spaces support racial-socio and linguistic hierarchies by avoiding authentic racial, social and cultural ways of knowing, thus allowing reproduction and perpetuating academic and social inequities targeted toward multilingual learners. Furthermore, I suggest that teachers must acquaint themselves with communities of color to become affective and effective to specifically facilitate multilingual classrooms. Design/methodology/approach This is an autoethnographic inquiry. It examines instances of culturally inexperienced white teachers teaching African American literature to middle school and high school multilingual learners. In adjacent, I share my personal memories and emotions of my experience as an African American, a woman of color, teacher-peer, teacher-researcher, student and a colonized standard American English speaker, situated in English classrooms as white teachers teach African American literature from a white gaze. Findings Undoubtedly, the white gaze influences marginalized persons. It does not merely attack who we be. It counter forms (e.g. influences) the views and ideas of the world around us. Gonzales (2015), shares in her autoethnography how educational practices are unjustly resistant to diversity. The racial-socio hierarchy uses every means necessary to deprive ethnicity (language, practices and beliefs). I did not verbally resist discrimination. Subsequently, some people of color may be guilty of having a slave gaze. I am very cautious and reluctant to use the term slave gaze. Nevertheless, I describe this as the opposite of having a white gaze. Slave gaze is someone who is colonized, dominated, submissive and feels unequal to whites and describes persons of color who have been conditioned to believe that whites are privileged and there is not much that we can do about it. I think this one way that Gonzales’ (2015); definition of double colonization can be extended, the racial-socio hierarchy in education forces marginalized persons to “redefine their identities within the dictates of yet another racial ideology” (p. 50). Undoubtedly, in re-identifying self-inflicts a counter-response to developing a substandard identity. Yet, I am certainly not the only person of color that is wary of challenging whiteness. Dismantling the master’s house will take more time. As white supremacist’s perceptions are embedded deep in the heart of education. Banishing false linguistic, cultural and racial ideologies equate to a mere few bricks of the master’s house. However, with non-traditional methods (e.g. getting to know the community in which the students live), renewed hearts and minds educators (together as a human race) can deconstruct and rebuild an education system fit for all learners. Originality/value This piece is an autoethnography of my experiences as a teacher teaching in multilingual classrooms. These are my original experiences and opinions.

James Weldon Johnson

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Nowlin
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
James Weldon Johnson ◽  
New York University ◽  
Daily Newspaper ◽  
Fisk University

James Weldon Johnson (b. 1871–d. 1938) was born and raised in Jacksonville, Florida. After graduating with a BA from Atlanta University, he became principal of his former grammar school, established the first daily newspaper for Jacksonville’s African American population, and gained admission to the Florida bar. With his brother, the musician J. Rosamond Johnson, he also wrote the song “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” for a commencement ceremony (in 1900), and it eventually became known as the “Negro National Anthem.” He joined his brother in New York in 1902 to launch a successful songwriting team with Bob Cole. Johnson gave up show business in 1906 to become US Consulate, first in Venezuela, then Nicaragua, where he completed his novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, which was published anonymously in 1912. In 1914 he moved to Harlem with his wife Grace Nail Johnson (whom he married in 1910). He began writing editorials on a range of subjects for the New York Age, a nationally circulating African American newspaper, and in 1915 he joined the recently established National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He became secretary of the organization in 1920 and remained so until 1930. Fifty Years and Other Poems, his first collection, was published in 1917. In 1922 he edited The Book of American Negro Poetry, the first anthology of its kind, and established himself as a pioneering theorist of African American poetics and a guiding light of the Harlem Renaissance. Johnson modeled his poetic ideas in the 1927 volume God’s Trombones, which appeared in the same year he reissued The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man under his name. In 1929, a Julius Rosenwald Fellowship enabled him to devote a year to writing, which resulted in Black Manhattan, a history of African Americans in New York. From 1930 onward, Johnson taught creative writing and African American literature at Fisk University as well as New York University. His 1933 autobiography Along This Way was widely acclaimed, and he collected both new and old poems in the 1935 volume St. Peter Relates an Incident. When he died in a car accident in 1938, Johnson was one of the most honored and respected African Americans in the United States, recognized at once as a man of letters, an advocate of black America’s cultural achievements, and a tireless political opponent of America’s Jim Crow system.

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