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Journal article
Contradictory Origins and Racializing Legacy of the 1968 Bilingual Education Act: Urban Schooling, Anti-Blackness, and Oakland’s 1996 Black English Language Education Policy
University of Maryland Law Journal of Race, Religion, Gender and Class, Vol.19(1), pp.44-80
2019
Abstract
On December 18, 1996, Oakland, California’s school board unanimously passed a resolution recognizing “Ebonics” as an official language and resolving that the federal Bilingual Education Act’s mandates thus applied to “imparting instruction to African American students in their primary language.” While rightly referencing decades of linguistic research supporting the resolution’s central claims as to the legitimacy of Ebonics or Black/African American English, in the following weeks the coverage and backlash went viral. Within days it seemed nearly everyone from U.S. Secretary of Education Richard Riley to activist Reverend Jesse Jackson were voicing concern. In January 1997, Oakland’s embattled school board substantively revised the resolution, but by then a U.S. Senate Hearing on Ebonics had already been convened and five states had created anti-Ebonics legislation: Florida, California, Georgia, South Carolina, and Oklahoma. Following the backlash, Oakland’s school board dropped the word “Ebonics” from its implementation proposals, thereby ending the controversy as “the media mistakenly assumed it had reversed its plans.” [1st paragraph]
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- Title
- Contradictory Origins and Racializing Legacy of the 1968 Bilingual Education Act: Urban Schooling, Anti-Blackness, and Oakland’s 1996 Black English Language Education Policy
- Creators
- Kenzo Sung - Rowan UniversityAyana Allen-Handy - Drexel University, School of Education
- Publication Details
- University of Maryland Law Journal of Race, Religion, Gender and Class, Vol.19(1), pp.44-80
- Number of pages
- 38
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- School of Education
- Identifiers
- 991021969992504721