OK--but since when are most Americans, including black ones, at all shy about dissing Black English

He didn't seem surprised that Obama can sound not black when he talks--he was just pointing out that Obama is part of the subset of blacks who can. He knows there is such a subset. Lesson learned.

Not all black people use Black English.

here are all kinds of things that are off here, if we are inclined to go pointy-headed. Humans can be bidialectal as well as bilingual and, therefore, can speak both standard and Black English--as Obama does, and as Reid acknowledged.

"Black people use bad grammar so much because they were brought here as slaves and denied education. The bad grammar holds on today because too many blacks still have bad schooling, and they pass it down the generations. They would be best off if society allowed them the education and opportunities to get rid of their bad grammar. It's not their fault."

We also feel this way about Southern "hick" grammar--race is not the only factor here

Black English sounds cool, and even hot, and maybe "sharp"--but note that sharp is what you call someone whom you wouldn't necessarily expect to be smart … and whom you don't actually think is all that smart.

benighted

Second: Yes, there is such a thing as Black English. Sometimes one hears a claim that Black English is the same as white Southern English. We must always beware of stereotyping and be open to the counterintuitive, but here is an instance where we can trust our senses: There is a "Black sound." It's not just youth slang; it's sentence patterns--Why you ain't call me? (not a white Southernism, notice)--and a "sound," such that you'd know Morgan Freeman was black even if he were reading the phone book.

So I am ashamed for the black poet who says, "I want to be a poet, not a Negro poet," asthough his own racial world were not as interesting as any other world.

Yet the Philadelphia clubwoman is ashamed to say thather race created it and she does not like me to write about it. The old subconscious "whiteis best" runs through her mind. Years of study under white teachers, a lifetime of whitebooks, pictures, and papers, and white manners, morals, and Puritan standards made herdislike the spirituals. And now she turns up her nose at jazz and all its manifestations--likewise almost everything else distinctly racial. She doesn't care for the Winold Reissportraits of Negroes because they are "too Negro."

intelligentsia

a sideshow freak (A colored man writing poetry! Howodd!)

They furnish a wealth of colorful,distinctive material for any artist because they still hold their own individuality in theface of American standardization.

And I was sorry the young man said that, for no great poet has ever been afraidof being himself. And I doubted then that, with his desire to run away spiritually from hisrace, this boy would ever be a great poet

nd so the word white comes to be unconsciously a symbol of all the virtues. Itholds for the children beauty, morality, and money. The whisper of "I want to be white"runs silently through their minds. This young poet's home is, I believe, a fairly typicalhome of the colored middle class. One sees immediately how difficult it would be for anartist born in such a home to interest himself in interpreting the beauty of his own people.He is never taught to see that beauty.