Reply to Does this make me classist or (shudder!) racist?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I have heard rich, white folks use conversate, orientate, irregardless, could care less, etc etc.

AX is just a dialect. May not be awesome, but no worse than "warsh" (Baltimore), Birfday" (my upper PA in laws say this), or whatever. Really. You KNOW your kid is not going to come home saying "ax," so the only reason it bothers you is because...actually, I don't know why.[/quote]

False equivalence.  Ax is not a dialect or an accent.  It is a mispronunciation of word, which reveals either a lack of education or some kind of learning disability.  The white people who use the words you listed above are revealing a lack of education.  Not sure how that aided your argument.  All you're really saying is that there are also uneducated whites (or whites who are uneducated on the use of those words).

I grew up in the 1980s in a public school system that was 100% white.  There were kids in my school who said ax instead of ask (if white kids in my lily-white town use it, how could it be a black dialect?).  Those kids, more often than not, landed in the remedial program, and were certainly not the high performers when high school came around.

The true racists on this board are the apologists chalking up the use of ax as a black dialect, as if no one should expect blacks to be educated enough to know the difference.  Sorry folks, but holding the black teacher to a lower standard is racist.              [/quote]

I disagree. Have you ever heard of African American Vernacular English? We studied it quite thoroughly in a linguistics class that I took in college. I don't think it's false equivalency at all. I do think it's important for children to understand that language is an inherent part of our identity, and that we use language as a tool, and often times it is necessary to use more "standard" or "formal" language. The key is teaching children when and where the more formal version is appropriate.[/quote]

Well, if this is AA English, then that may partially explain the disparities in job interview callbacks as noted in recent studies.  Not everything can be blamed on discrimination.[/quote]

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