If people did not know about the attempts being made in American school systems to reach out to a multicultural population before 1996, they certainly found out about it then. When the public school system in Oakland, California, decided to treat the standard speech of black Americans as a separate language or dialect, the issue of multicultural education (which had been discussed and agreed upon and argued over at the local level for at least a decade) became an important part of the national dialogue. Ebonics became a symbol for nearly everyone who thought that something should be changed about the way American schoolchildren are taught, with some people applauding the idea and many others -- and not only conservative whites -- decrying it. An examination of this issue will serve as an introduction to the topic of multicultural education in the United States.
It is important to begin the discussion of Ebonics by noting that the storm that settled itself so quickly over the Oakland school board had very little to do with the actual linguistic issues at hand. Ebonics, stripped of its political rhetoric (to the extent that is possible with such a subject) was really just an acknowledgement of the fact that Black Americans, caricatured for years as being unable to speak proper English, were instead simply speaking a separate dialect of English. This dialect, Ebonics, was influenced in part by West African languages, in part by the speech patterns of the Southern United States, in part by the linguistic changes that always occur to a language when it is spoken by a minority group. This school district wanted to ensure that this dialect would be recognized and validated, just as the Spanish spoken by the children of Mexican immigrants was recognized as a fully expressive language. The school district hoped to make African-American children bilingual in Ebonics and English just as it hoped to make Spanish-speaking children bilingual in E...