Cole Bailey

Noelle Nagales

Writing 2100

November 7th, 2022

Rhetorical Analysis Essay Final Draft

Black English is much more important than the American educational system gives it credit. For many Americans, Black English is the only English they know until they learn otherwise in school, it is the language they use around their community, with their friends, and most importantly throughout their family. Black English has importance throughout America but is often underappreciated and overlooked due to the way English is taught and the lack of famous novels containing it. English is taught throughout America, however, Black English isn’t taught enough and should be taught more because without this we are concealing its meaning and importance to the rest of society.

Poet, playwright, essayist, and professor of English, June Jordan in her political essay, “ Nobody mean more to me than you and the future life of Willie Jordan”, published in 1985, addresses the topic of Black English and argues that it has communicative power not only through writing but verbally as well. She supports this claim by describing Black English as important to Afro-Americans that depend on it, then explains it is an irreplaceable and perishing system of community intelligence, and finally provides a real-life example of Black English through students’ reaction to Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple”. Jordan’s purpose is to promote the idea that Black English is dependent on, but no longer used and easily forgotten to motivate readers to educate themselves on it. She adopts a sense of importance and relation to her audience, the readers of “On Call” and others interested in Black English.

Many African Americans begin using Black English from a young age and for a while is all that they know, until the American education system destroys any future development of their former language. Jordan begins by bringing up the fact that many Afro-Americans have used Black English their entire lives up until the point where American schooling alienates them from their former language and forces a new “correct” way of English upon them. We see this when Jordan says, “Black English is not exactly a linguistic buffalo; as children, most of the thirty-five million Afro-Americans living here depend on this language for our discovery of the world. But then we approach our maturity inside a larger social body that will support our efforts to become anything other than the clones of those who are neither our mothers nor our fathers”. In this quote we see Jordan say that Afro-Americans depended on Black English their entire lives until they go to school and are turned into as June Jordan says “clones” unlike our mothers and fathers, meaning we are taught to forget the English our parents taught us our entire lives. This quote supports the fact that Black English isn’t taught and that American schooling teaches us to forget it more than the purpose it has for our society.  

Black culture and Black English have been suppressed throughout America for years by White Americans and through our education system in order to make White English our standard or “correct” English in America. Jordan goes on to say how White standards and English have been the ruling and undeniable ways in America for far too long and how Black English has been pushed under the rug because White English made it seem incorrect due to the fact it did not follow the same rules as White English which in America is the standard English. Jordan states this saying, “Nonetheless, White standards of English persist, supreme and unquestioned, in the United States. Despite our multi-lingual population, and despite the deepening Black and White cleavage within that conglomerate, White standards control our official and popular judgments of verbal proficiency and correct, or incorrect, language skills, including speech. In contrast to Nicaragua, where all citizens are legally entitled to formal school instruction in their regional or tribal languages, compulsory education in America compels accommodation to exclusively White forms of “English”. White English, in America, is “Standard English”. In this quote we see Jordan argue the point that White English is held as the standard for English and that the education system in America deems Black English as incorrect because it doesn’t follow their “standards”. This connects to my original point that Black English is severely under-taught and needs to be taught more and we see in this instance that the reason it is barely taught and not seen for its importance but instead for its failure to meet the “standards” of White English which is seen as the one and only “correct” form of English in America. 

Since Black English isn’t being taught at the rate it should be taught, African Americans who speak this language at home, speak it throughout their culture, and consider it their language don’t even recognize it when they see it on paper because they are so used to the White English or “formal” English in books. June Jordan finishes by arguing that Black English is such an underappreciated language that even her African American students who use this language all the time would think something is wrong with it when they see it on paper because that’s what the American education system teaches us. Jordan tests this and these are the students’ reactions,  “At this, several students dumped on the book. Just about unanimously, their criticisms targeted the language. I listened to what they wanted to say and silently marvelled at the similarities between their casual speech patterns and Alice Walker’s written version of Black English. But I decided against pointing to these identical traits of syntax, I wanted not to make them self-conscious about their own spoken language – not while they clearly felt it was “wrong””. In this quote, we see her students have a negative reaction to the book using Black English because they have never seen it on paper before Jordan goes on to say that these students even use this language at home and they don’t know that the English they are bashing for being “incorrect” is the same English they use when they’re on the playground. This connects to my point because even though these students speak Black English every day they don’t recognize it when they read it. After all, the American education system doesn’t give them the chance to ever have the chance to read it because it deems it informal due to the fact that it isn’t enough like White English which they value so much and see as standard and correct. 

In conclusion, Black English is severely undertaught as well as underappreciated in America through the educational system centered around White English. June Jordan proves this true through her writing about teaching her students Black English and how her African American students who use it every day read about it in Alice Walker’s book and due to the corruption of White English in the education system saw their own language as incorrect and informal. While Black English does serve a major purpose in America, the educational system hides this significance through the way White English is taught as the “standard” way to read and write in America.