
Discusses linguistic discrimination of African American dialects and a court case that has helped to prevent further discrimination based on language. ---- Transcript When rural southern blacks eventually moved to the cities of the north, they brought their own kind of English with them. They're young men now, but 25 years ago, Dwayne, Asheen, and Kihilee were students at this school. Situated in a prosperous, mostly white suburb of Ann Arbor, there were not many black kids at the Martin Luther King school. When they spoke, as they did at home in African American English, their teachers simploy assumed they couldn't do school work. ABrenen: They sort of felt like we were unteachable in a sense, I would feel. So, it kind of made them go towards other students more and gave them a little bit more help than they would give us. RM: Can you remember some of the things that were said? Teachers would say? ABrenen: Actually to be honest, the teachers really didn't even communicate with us too much. It just was sort of like, in a sense, that we were on our own. RM: Do you remember any of that? You were younger. KB: I was really young, but I mean I remember enough to know that I wasn't being treated the same way as all the other kids in the class, or a lot of the other kids. You know, that's the irony of it all. It's Martin Luther King's School and, you know, they hadn't learned anything from Martin Luther King. Well, hopefully, they learned it, but they didn't learn it back then <b>...</b>
linguistic
discrimination
school
education
African
American
English
dialect
linguistics
sociolinguistics
AAVE
court
law