YuSeeBerkeley;842256689 said:
http://ftw.usatoday.com/2014/01/aj-mccarrons-mom-apologizes-for-tweet-deriding-jameis-winston/
Apparently, it's racist to point out poor grammar. I think the reaction to Mccarron's mom is more racist than the initial, benign Tweet. You're supposed to excuse poor grammar because of someone's race?
Yes and no. Here are the facts: Language is always changing. This is true of educated English (i.e. its development from Shakespeare to a Cal classroom), and it's true of every other variety of every language that's ever existed. Different speech varieties exist precisely because language is always changing. When speakers of the same language spread out either socially or geographically, the language changes in different ways in those dispersed groups. Key point: Language isn't getting "worse." English (rather, it's ancestor) has been changing since humans learned to speak, and it has never degraded or become incomprehensible despite the fact that organized education has only recently come into existence. It just produced different varieties, all equally good as tools for communication within a specific group.
Standard English has no objective priority over any other variety of English. It started as the version of English that happened to be spoken in London when people decided that there should be a standard, but there have been dialects of English for as long as English has been written down. Some features associated with African American Vernacular English, for example, are just very old regionalisms FROM ENGLAND. So, the variants "ask" and "aks" have existed as long as English has. Many linguistic features came to America not through "mistakes" made by black people, but from English speakers from different parts of England. African Americans learned the language from someone, after all.
Here's where racism comes in: No one speaks standard English. Every spoken variety is "wrong" in a lot of ways. When someone says "That's the man who I see," 95% of the population doesn't bat an eye, because this is a "mistake" made by a specific group of people, so it's OK. We write that off as "Yeah, but EVERYONE says that," when we really mean "Yeah, but MY social group says that." We aren't so forgiving when other groups do things that are different but no worse. Furthermore, we are willing to accept some varieties (i.e. Irish English) as being quaint, and "just the way they speak," but we aren't willing to grant that license to people from the inner city. There's no objective reason for making this distinction. Linguistic prejudice just maps onto and illuminates social prejudice. That's not to say that people who dislike the features of AAVE are racist. Rather, society has been racist for a long, long time, and the rules of what is and is not acceptable linguistically were shaped by that process. Linguistic purists might not be racist, but their linguistic attitudes are shaped by a racist past. These attitudes are still clearly used to justify prejudice against specific groups of people, even if we can mitigate it by saying "I'd hate it just as much if white people talked that way!"
ykes 
