Summary Of If Black English Isn T A Language

James Baldwin goes into a rigorous intellectual dissolution of what language really means in his article, “If Black English Isn't a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?” Throughout this article, Baldwin applies a brilliant and accredited critique on society by presenting language as the bulk of peoples’ “temporal identity”. He argues that language, in itself, is an identification of the speaker in his respective environment, which is why Black English should be considered an actual tongue; he acknowledges that African Americans have managed to create a native voice after the “black diaspora” in order to articulate themselves in this society rather than have the reality of being an American utterly diminish their culture. Baldwin’s main arguments stand on the front that African Americans were never meant to be educated and that Black English serves as a cultural, political, and intellectual movement, all bound together in order to repudiate White America’s best efforts to weaken a people. …show more content…
In his article, Baldwin states that, “People evolve a language in order to describe and thus control their circumstances, or in order not to be submerged by a reality that they cannot articulate.” (pg.1) Within this, he subliminally provides the platform for why Black English was created in the first place. Firstly, African Americans of different tribes and different tongues were, in fact, brung to America together. Thus, they had to create a language to come together, eventually, as one people. Secondly, describing America was initially the reason for the creation of Black English, however, this then leads for a people to want to manage and control their circumstances, which is where White America would be