Labels pertaining to American slave descendants have undergone considerable change over the decades since our forebears were freed. W. E. B. Du Bois observed that racial classifications can be misleading, particularly if those classifications are detested. In 1928 DuBois spoke of these matters in response to Roland Barth, and Barth's advocacy of the change from "Negro" to "colored."

Do not at the outset of your career make the all too common error of mistaking names for things. Names are only conventional signs for identifying things. Things are the reality that counts. If a thing is despised, either because of ignorance or because it is despicable, you will not alter matters by changing its name. If men despise Negroes, they will not despise them less if Negroes are called "colored" or "AfroAmerican." ( Du Bois 1928:96-97)

Du Bois's sage advice holds true for the Ebonics controversy as well. If the vernacular speech of urban or rural slave descendants is devalued, modified nomenclature will not increase its worth in the eyes of those who hold black speech--or African Americans--in low regard. Many who criticized Ebonics did not do so merely because they objected to the term; they scoffed at Ebonics as an attempt to legitimize "bad English" in the name of politically correct linguistic enlightenment. Detractors often claimed to be offended, resentful, or worse.

On the other hand, Ebonics advocates were elated by efforts to elevate its stature, because they had never equated black speech with "improper English," and they embraced "Ebonics" as a term that could offer linguistic legitimacy and enhance cultural pride among American slave descendants.

From a linguistic point of view, Ebonics--as originally constituted--refers to a complex mixture of European and African languages born of the African slave trade. How, then, did this original definition become transformed? How did it come to focus more narrowly on the speech of U.S. slave descendants--and are slave descendants in Brazil, the Dominican Republic, or Haiti to be included or excluded from Ebonics? Stated in other terms, does Ebonics refer to one language or to more than one language?

Within the United States a portion of this answer is ideological, because the federal government has never formally acknowledged that slave descendants represent a "language minority population" (see Baugh 1998). Therein lies part of the motivation to declare that "Ebonics is not a dialect of English," and that "limited English proficient (LEP) African American pupils are equally entitled to be provided bilingual education and English as a second language programs to address their LEP needs" ( Smith 1998:58).

Although considerable time has elapsed since Oakland educators passed their controversial Ebonics resolution, many of the linguistic and educational problems they articulated have yet to be resolved. These educational impediments are still with us, as American students from all walks of life have been shown to be less well prepared than the vast majority of students from other advanced industrialized countries.

It would be myopic and wrongheaded to pursue educational reforms for African American students in a social vacuum, and I will attempt to consider broader educational implications as we contemplate ways to increase linguistic tolerance among all Americans. But in this instance, those larger educational goals derive from the Ebonics debate that focuses exclusively on the linguistic behavior of African Americans. . .