I
personally adhere to the standard rules of grammar when I write, and
also when I speak - with the exception of when I am going wild with my
old new york crew - but it is not a requirement for me that you are a
perfect speller, or always use the accepted case, mood, tense, spelling,
or preposition. It will never even remotely influence my opinion of
your intelligence, competence, or personal standing.
This is one of those subtle and widespread forms of elitism and
classism masquerading as literacy and worldly intellectualism, and I
would be remiss not to address this to the mindless clamoring rabble on
social media who preach this Anglo-centric drivel in their comments.
What it is in actual fact is a pseudo-intellectual, parochial dogma of
'linguistic prescriptivism,' and its most ardent proponents are woefully
ignorant of basic facts of evolutionary and social linguistics about
how languages and dialects develop and the various factors in nature and
society that explain why certain speech idioms and habits are acquired
in some cultures and social groups but are excluded from others. This
ignorance is on its own entirely understandable - not everyone is an
expert linguist - but it should forfeit one's right to render judgment
of others on the issue.
Something as seemingly 'bad' in grammar
as the use of the infinitive where a present tense verb normally goes
("we be goin'") is actually a morphological feature of Caribbean and
African American Vernacular English referred to as 'habitual be.'
Languages range from having no tense at all (tenseless) to having up to
four tenses, and the use of the infinitive here conveys the "aspect" of
the verb, comprising in this case a continuous flow of time.
This feature of 'underclass' dialects of English is rooted in the mode
of perception deriving from the unique historicity of the more
egalitarian, cooperative social patterns of African peoples in their
collective past. Their practices shaped a perception of time that isn't
divided into the exchangeable, uniform units of commodities. Time is
something to be shared, not something one spends and purchases, nor is
it a finite resource to be individually owned and traded. As it so
happens this is also a far more 'correct' statement of reality than the
social construct of its Western European counterpart. Time according to
this ideology is something to embody and accumulate as material,
objective wealth for the purchase and abuse of the time of others, or as
universal private property wholly indifferent to the living activity of
human beings or to the natural world it uses in pursuit of its selfish
interests, expressed in the attitude that 'what i do with my time is my
business, fuck everyone else' present in ignorant, self-indulgent,
egotistical brutes.
As further proof of the equality of slang
and lower class dialects with the dominant grammar, the use of double
negatives ("ain't got no") to express a negation is an idiom termed
'negative concord,' and it appears even in the Middle English of the
European Middle Ages. It functions to emphasize negation, which only
necessarily implies a positive when doubled in binary conditional
statements, due to the 'law of the excluded middle' that is presupposed
in traditional logical syllogisms, but which otherwise conveys a
negative meaning that can be understood contextually. Even standard
English speakers do something similar in 'anaphora', a device of
repeating the same word twice as in 'never, never again.' Seldom is the
implied negation brought into question here because of this.
If you object to these grammatical practices on the grounds of some
perceived enlightened rationalism, or refuse to associate with people
who adopt them, you be ignorant and unscientific, and are only acting to
detract substantially from the cultures you can interact with. I
really hope that privileging the Anglo-American dialect of whitey is
worth the thick effluvia of bullshit billowing out of your uptight, 50
Shades of Gray-reading cracker face-hole which your self-satisfied,
unquestioning conformity to arbitrary rules of speech conceals.
Though it may seem like a problem remote from the institutional racism
and bigotry of AmeriKKKan white supremacism, it has tremendous
consequences in the ideological structure that protects white privilege
and perpetuates the marginalization of black and hispanic minorities.
Even 'liberals' like Barack Obama can deliver condescending advice to
black youth on how they might not reinforce their own racial
stereotypes, or can avoid legal and social abuses on their own, mixing
all of this with the multicultural language of the financial elite's
official veneration of the legacy of civil rights leaders, adapted to a
historical revisionism denying the latter's radical significance and
aligning their deeds instead with the status quo. The message to
minorities is thus an appeal to be more respectable, to not follow the
gangster culture of rap music, dress more conservatively and speak
'normal' English, so they may one day realize the 'dream' of Martin
Luther King. This type of liberal tolerance therefore amounts to
creating opportunities for minorities to change themselves - to learn to
imitate the white society that they must prove they deserve the keys to
- as it remains wholly indifferent in its permissiveness of their
culture and their 'right' to be different, but lets the inherent social
risk of this choice fall on their shoulders entirely if any harm comes
to them. Such promises are clearly empty. Even if the young generation
of blacks were provided career training for future gainful employment,
these jobs clearly do not exist, and private enterprise is helpless to
provide them. Working harder in school might improve their potential
earning power, except that there is already barely enough income going
to labor as real wages, which have been stagnant for decades and are on a
slow decline. Perhaps they could avoid the prison system or the plague
of violent crime if they had more 'self-respect,' but the violence is
all too often instigated by the police and it is common for the arrests
to be conducted illegally or without provocation. Recidivism increases
the likelihood of prisoners becoming repeat offenders. U.S. corporate
capitalism cannot even deliver the rewards promised to minorities who
make an effort even if it wanted to.
All of this dogma
overshadows the empirical facts that whites remain willfully blind to,
understanding that racial inequality could not survive without the
majority consent of their silence. These are facts like the rate of
unemployment for blacks being double what it is for white workers, the
fact that the average black worker today earns 67 cents compared to
every dollar earned by the average white worker in the same occupation,
the fact of NAFTA's systematic liquidation of black workers from
American unions, staggering incarceration rates and criminalization of
black youth in the courts and prisons, discriminatory housing practices
for black tenants and the disproportionate predatory lending to black
home buyers, higher infant mortality rates and reduced access to medical
care and education, and the fact that U.S. military aggression and
foreign occupation targets and massacres Muslims and brown peoples
overseas in the protection of its global market regime, its dollar's
global power, the spread of its liberal democratic values, its trade
bloc, its privileged status in the U.N., its World Bank and
International Monetary Fund, its consumerism, and all other unmatched
powers it has at its disposal for disciplining deviant regimes and
groups with economic sanctions, blockades, tariffs, and through the
international legal institutions it alone is free to ignore, not unlike
the way standard English grammar alone is free to betray its own
premises in favor of a unique figure of speech when doing so is
convenient to its purposes. These things taken together are what the
hypocritical apostles of the free market either deny, or else they
simply pretend that individual responsibility and individual initiative
assumed by minorities will wipe out all traces of its effect on
inequality, without any need to resort to the 'uncivilized' methods of
militant resistance, general strikes, boycotts, and organized mass
agitation - these being to the stodgy formalisms of the juridical
procedures the State submits all oppositional forces to, what black
spoken language is to the prevailing standards of English. They must
fit the rules of a stabilizing order or else anarchy will take over and
everyone will do as they please, a privilege to disregard the damage one
does to society in the name of self interest, denied to all but the
most powerful predominantly white male business leaders and the
opportunistic lackeys of the financial-military-industrial complex they
command, who also happen to be somewhat more racially and sexually
diverse in the positions to which they are appointed as servants of
white supremacist values, in the hopes of the apologists and
propagandists that the myth of real equality can receive a protective
varnish. The apparent neutrality and universality of established rules
of grammar casts a similar, superficial equality over the surface of the
true, hidden hierarchy of culture behind it. The same artificial
neutrality was obvious in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin. Not
satisfied that a single homicide case could prove racially motivated
premeditation, malicious intent or just premature defensive violence
(some are quick to point out that the killer was light-skinned hispanic,
forgetting the ambiguity of racial categories in general but especially
hispanic in particular, or that he was also a wannabe pig cop, and most
cops are white), the general response of whites was to withhold
judgment about the role of race in the incident, leaving out of the
picture entirely the reflexive rage it would have triggered in them had
the shooter been a black adult male and the victim a white teenager, for
the validation of which no proof of racism would scarcely have been
necessary. The black reaction to the murder as racist was for whites an
infinitive verb where the present tense should have been: blacks saw
in the murder the constant, continuous presence of white racism, while
whites confined the incident to the here-and-now. The grammar of white
supremacy was challenged, and blacks were disregarded as incoherent at
best, and conspiring to stir up discontent at worst.
Meanwhile,
the racist policies of violent oppression, austerity and poverty in the
wake of neoliberal economic deregulations perpetuate the very
disadvantages and living condition of minorities which whites begin to
regard as proof of their rebelliousness and the rationality of the
penalties inflicted on them. Even something as innocuous as the stigma
against the 'vulgarity' of their unrecognized and culturally devalued
speech becomes an absolute indictment of these races when whites can be
regularly heard attacking them for their intransigent refusal to
discipline themselves against their endless cycle of oppression,
exploding the grammatical transgression into an openly angry rant
against their own white social order, and revealing the bizarre
perception that it has coddled these people for too long at the expense
of white security ("Why do they talk like that? And then they wonder
why... [and] then we are the ones who end up paying for it...") The
ruling class no doubt endorses and drums up this disgruntled white
working class propaganda, to deflect this class's hostility away from
its rule and against another section of the workers instead.
All of these economic and political powers leveraged against the victims
of racism bear the same relation to them as the privileged grammatical
conventions associated with the white upper class. Both indulge in all
manner of omission, distortion, prevarication and blatant invention of
facts to separate the condition and attitude of minorities today from
their historical past, and to deny validity to their claims and feelings
regardless of how reasonable they may be.
If speaking
correctly is still that important to you, then begin with your thinking.
It should be correct before it is spoken, the only proper form of
speech being that of the truth, the real measure of the value of the
words we choose to use. It requires us to comprehend the content of
things behind their immediate appearances to, and a refusal to admit
these appearances straightaway to the realm of the truth. It requires
us to see other peoples as social beings determined in their
consciousness through a definite and specific process of social
production, and fixed thereby within a determinate range of potential
material and intellectual faculties, habits, traits, and sensual
activities. What appears to us as alien or foreign is something the
more thoughtful among us alone will attempt to grasp in its unique
intercourse with the world. There is no universal grammar, musical
genre, clothing fashion, or model of beauty that does not belong to the
universal human, that category which embraces the whole of the diverse
and particular aspects and moments of truth it has passed through, and
which alone represents the only true notion of what it is to be human.
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