"'Ain't' is not a word," my first grade teacher wrote on the blackboard. Sitting criss-cross-applesauce on our carpet squares, we did our best to make sense of her statement.
"Why not?" a classmate asked timidly.
"Because it's not in the dictionary," she replied.
We nodded. The answer was sufficient. At six years old, our teacher's word may as well have been the divine word of God, and the dictionary, as far as we could tell, was the linguistic bible.
No one asked the prophet, "But Ms. Smith, who made made the dictionary?" If we had, she might have said, "Samuel Johnson, did." But she didn't, and stripped of its humanity, the dictionary became to us a holy, unchanging, unwavering relic--a thing that existed outside of time, question, and opposition. It was a document we'd call upon in games of scrabble, one we'd cite in the hook of 95% of our papers ["The Oxford English dictionary defines 'justice' as..."]. And similar to other, equally human relics, we'd use it to shame people who spoke differently than we did, people living on the fringe of society, people who society, and Samuel Johnson, forgot.
Then some of us became teachers ourselves. I did. And if it hadn't been for a transformative experience in a college classroom in West Michigan, I'd probably have done the same thing.
When I was a sophomore, my linguistics professor, a white, Dutchman from Zeeland, MI, wrote "Ima be" on the whiteboard.
The class waited in anticipation. We all thought we knew where the lecture was headed: "How slang is polluting our beautiful mother tongue." We were wrong.
"I heard this the other day," he began, "And I thought it was just gorgeous. Beautiful."
It was the first and only time I'd ever heard anything like that from an English teacher, a completely novel idea, and one I believe all students--both black and white--need to hear.
I now teach English at a school in North Memphis. 99% of my kids are black, and every day, I wonder how I can both honor my students' language and prepare them for a world where they will encounter people who have more, shall we say, "traditional" beliefs.
And by "traditional" I mean racist.
Because at the end of the day, I believe all languages were created equal. Words like "slang," and "standard English" are vestiges of a system of oppression and segregation. We mask our prejudices with phrases like, "Well in the work place..." and "It's just not professional." But, as the playwright William Shakespeare once said, "Racism by any other name would still smell like racism."
So teachers, the next time you reach for your red pen, consider this:
If you want your classroom to mirror a world in which diversity is an asset, innovation is praised, and creativity is encouraged, communicate to your students that there is no right or wrong, merely better and worse. Emphasize audience and purpose over "never this" and "always that". For everything there is a season, a time to omit an unnecessary linking verb ("She very open minded."), and a time to appeal to whatever authority deemed linking verbs God's gift to mankind.
