Some Quotes to Share and Communicate...

My favorite quotes to share with as many people as I can, for many reasons.

Monday, December 17, 2012

"Even language can be squeezed into the glass slipper of race by a sufficiently ruthless pruning of the foot. According to believers in something known as 'black English,' the deep structures of African languages - in other words, the speakers' African-ness - accounts for the speech habits of Afro-Americans. But African linguistic structures cannot explain why, despite the much greater survival of Africanisms in Jamaican creole, the children of Jamaican migrants to Britain do not speak 'black English'; instead, they speak English as white Britons of their class and region do. (Nor can such structures explain why there is no such thing as black French, black Portuguese, or black Spanish.) The speech patterns of Afro-Americans testify not to the greater strength of African linguistic survivals among Afro-Americans as compared to Afro-Caribbean migrants in Britain but to the greater prevalence and rigidity of segregated schooling, housing, and sociability, especially among the working class, in the United States, as compare to Britain. Racism, in other words, not race." - from Racecraft by Karen Fields & Barbara Fields

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