AAVE and Discrimination in Academia
Sylvia Rust
September 19 2020
AAVE and Discrimination in Academia
Today academia is not just for white, middle-class students as it has been historically. Although this development in academia is good, there is another issue that many students have to deal with. Standard American English (SAE) is not spoken by all students; some students speak other languages (Spanish, French, etc) while others speak dialects such as African American Vernacular English (AAVE), previously called Ebonics. The issue of American education systems focusing on standard English disenfranchises many students, but for this academic research proposal, the focus will be on the problems associated with and discrimination that black/African American students have to deal with in academia.
Shawn Smith writes in his article, “African American Ebonics: Discourse & Discursive Practice—A Chicago Case Study of Historical Oppression” about the phenomenon of African Americans, even in large Northern cities, like Chicago, using AAVE, a dialect based out of the south because of systemic racism and segregation (Smith, p. 311). The use of AAVE can be indicative of power relations that often link to racism, discrimination and historical oppression (Smith, 311). Because language can be hard to adjust, people that use AAVE have historically been known to be denied resources due to their speech patterns (Smith, p. 313). Smith’s article is about the low-income families in Chicago and the problems they face because of their speech patterns (Smith, p. 316), other scholars write about the same discrimination that students in academia face because of these speech patterns (Perryman-Clark, Hannah, E. Richardson, Turner, Sarah Smith, Sanchez, Brammer, Rickford) while others (Baugh, Rickford and Price, Pollock and Meredith, Rickford) write about the history of Ebonics/AAVE.
I believe this problem is important to communication. Black students are often discriminated against, feel out of place, and are left without help or advisors because people are not educated on AAVE or even about the lives, experiences, or history of these students. All of the articles listed above are all that I could find on the subject. Even so, many are from linguistic and anthropology journals or specifically black studies journals. The gap of knowledge is in communication broadly. My overarching question or idea is surrounding the problems associated with centering SAE and whiteness in academia.
Although I think work could be done surrounding AAVE, discrimination, and academia in semiotics and the socio-psychological traditions, I believe the socio-cultural and critical traditions are the most effective and useful for analyzing the topic. Because of the power dynamics in academia and repression dulled by mass/social media, the critical tradition would most be able to analyze the political and relational power relations in academia and throughout the world (Griffin, p. 44). AAVE does impact society, so the semiotic tradition would likely be useful in analyzing the words and phrases used in the dialect, but my research is not about the semiotic or phonetic properties of AAVE. Using a socio-cultural tradition would likely go hand-in-hand with the critical tradition in analyzing how people that use AAVE in academia are scrutinized but repeated and imitated in popular culture and mass media.
I expect to find a lack of research in this, as I did not find very much information specifically about AAVE in communication studies (ironic, I think). From black studies or anthropological journals, I have found people writing about this situation. Studies that use different dialects should be embraced and understood, but there is a lack of understanding in academia about AAVE and the history of black Americans in general.
