On Reid's "No Negro Dialect"

I pondered on 2 or 3 occasions writing a post that basically said, "It's what we all think: 'Talking black' isn't the best speech pattern to employ if you want to get by in mainstream society. Harry Reid just shouldn't have said it out loud." (Or something to that general effect.) But, I couldn't come across with a jazzy enough way to put it.

Fortunately, someone else did it for me.

Second, yes there is a such thing as Black English. Sometimes one hears a claim that Black English is the same as white Southern English. We must always beware of stereotyping and be open to the counterintuitive, but here is an instance where we can trust our senses: there is a "black sound." It's not just youth slang: it's sentence patterns – Why you ain't call me? (not a white Southernism, notice) – and a "sound," such that you'd know Morgan Freeman was black even if he were reading the phone book. The combination is what we all feel – with uncanny accuracy even without seeing faces, as linguists have found – as "sounding black." Of course not all blacks speak Black English or have The Sound, and those that do (which is most) do to varying extents. But they do. That's what Reid meant, we all know it, and it's okay to know it.

It's a love/hate relationship we have with black speech. On the one hand we associate it with emotional honesty, vernacular warmth, and sex – Marvin Gaye would not have had a hit with "Why Don't We Venture to Consummate Our Relationship?" or even "Let's Have Sex" instead of "Let's Get It On." Yet it's not a dialect – a sound – that we associate with explaining Greek verbs or cosines or engaging in complex reasoning. Black English sounds cool, and even hot, and maybe "sharp" – but note that sharp is what you call someone who you wouldn't necessarily expect to be smart ... and who you don't actually think is all that smart.