Rhetorical Reading for James Baldwin

Baldwin’s Theory, “If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me What Is?”

 

            Baldwin’s, “If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me What Is?”(1979) is a personal essay that explains the role of language spoken by different people. Baldwin explains this by giving examples of how black people who came from different tribes, each with their own language, and were unable to communicate with each other. The purpose of Baldwin’s essay is to describe the differences in language in order to understand what black language is. Baldwin’s intended audience is a mixture of different cultures.

           I appreciate how Baldwin brings to light that language, especially black language, has nothing to do with the language itself but the role it plays. The sounds, the words, the articulations are all a reflection of a current reality. That’s how all language is, no matter who it is from. Each person’s language becomes their own due to their circumstances, who they are speaking to, and what situation they are in. I also connected with Baldwin as he explained that black language in a way is used as a form of protection against the white American. I actually never thought of it that way, but as a black American myself, I understand. It’s almost as if to say the dialect of black Americans created by black culture is a different language set apart entirely by the dialect of white Americans created by white culture, although in many ways they are one in the same. I personally think that American language has become divided in this way because of the lack of interest Americans have in not just getting to know one another but in truly understanding their neighbor. Although we say that in one nation we are free, in that same nation we are also oppressing ourselves through lack of unity. A country all about self cannot thrive when there is no foundation of unity to stand upon, thus creating our lack of unified language, which does not have to be the same, just understood.

          We speak based on the realities given to us. Our speech is transmuted into our patterns based on how or why we speak: to protect, to earn, and—obviously—to communicate. To say one word in any part of the world using their language in that specific region could give away “your parents, your youth, your school, your salary, your self-esteem, and, alas, your future.” James Baldwin speaks of how whites in America would not sound the way they do now without appropriating black sound, words, and culture. By trying to “[imitate] poverty, trying to get down, …[trying to do] their thing, and [to do] their despairing best to be funky” whites were appropriating what they were not during The Beat Generation—another generation named from a black phrase. Baldwin speaks of how whites have twisted and turned the language into a misunderstood version of itself such as turning the sexual phrase, “jazz me, baby” into The Jazz Age. Baldwin comments on how the “white man” could not begin to understand Black language due to the reality it was created from—the reality where “the slave was given, under the eye, and the gun, of his master, Congo Square, and the Bible… under these conditions, the slave began the formation of the black church, and it is within this unprecedented tabernacle that black English began to be formed” because the whites would have to come to terms with its codes and face themselves—their history—in the “mirror in which [they] froze [themselves].” Baldwin proceeds to close out with a powerful line, saying, “ in a country with standards so untrustworthy, a country that makes heroes of so many criminal mediocrities, a country unable to face why so many of the nonwhite are in prison, or on the needle, or standing, futureless, in the streets--it may very well be that both the child, and his elder, have concluded that they have nothing whatever to learn from the people of a country that has managed to learn so little.”

Precis by Pernida Freeman

Analysis by Aja Taylor.

Opinion by Jensine Maxis