This example of a conference between Mr. Wallace and one of his Black students can be taken a lot of different ways. Wallace himself admits this. He says that he thought he was coming off as being blunt and candid and, in his view, helpful to the student. He relates later in his article that at least one student didn't take it that way at all. She was highly insulted by having this white teacher browbeat her with this elitist diatribe (as she took it) and brought his butt up on charges at the university he was teaching at. Either way, I kindah think he makes two important points:

• one is that, as my opening 'graph points out, there's a lot of dialects of the English language out there, such that many of us speak in them and some of us have stretched so far as to write in them.
  
  
• Secondly, that SWE is the language of the power elite which they use to judge all the arguments and presentations of everybody else.

I think that's why you got some southern folks, including politicians, who make it point to militate against SWE and why, on the other hand, newscasters make it point to all sound alike in a buzz-word peppered version of SWE. I'll say more about that in minute.

One of the nice things Wallace does in his article is talk about some of the dialects and subdialects of the English language. Besides SWE and SBE, he points out examples of Academic English (AE, which he derides,) Political English(PE, which he says is used to conceal information rather than reveal it and is equally as fuzzy as AE) and Politically Correct English (PCE, which he says does more to reduce the chances of social change than enhance them. Wallace believes that PCE actually helps reinforce the social status quo.) He gives some side-splitting examples of all of these dialects of English. And even goes on to take a look at jargon, which is more a word than dialectical phenomenon.

Radio Raheem

I'm not sure when it happened, because I didn't much like watching the news when I was a little kid, but I suspect that some time around the 1980s, when Connie Chung and Dianne Sawyer started gettin' big and folks had gotten used to Barbara Walters' speech impediment ALL the news people on the TV started to sound alike. Even the folks on the local newscasts started loosing their regional accents, knowing that they'd never get to move up to The Big Time if they sounded like they was from somewhere.

Suddenly, there was only one accent and one diction and lots of SWE for folks reading the news on TV. They could be Black, Asian, Latino, whatever, they all sounded like Connie Chung and Tom Brokaw. You notice that, too? Next thing you knew, watching the local news anywhere you went in America was like visiting any mall in America: EVERYTHING WAS EXACTLY THE SAME. It was like something out of that movie "The Stepford Wives." These people really could have been mass-produced off of some factory assembly line for all the difference you could tell between them.

I find that scarey.

Anybody with any kind of sophistication at all knows that we use our language and its dialects for other functions beside communicating information. One of the political functions of language usage is to set up our various "Us" and "Them" systems. Most folks have more than one and began learning how to move between them during kindergarten or grade school. Way back then we began setting up dialects for use with our parents and teachers, our peer groups, and subsets within that peer group. Language separated the jocks from the nerds from the stoners later on, and so forth.

Anybody who missed out on this ability to apply different dialects of the language in different settings missed an important social and political lesson which left them less adept than the rest of us, Homes.

I say that, you see, because another function of language is to give you an impression of me, the speaker or writer. It is a rhetorical issue. I use a certain rhetorical voice in order to join me or separate me from you. This breaks down to a series of what some eggheads call "appeals." Among the rhetorical appeals are those to ethics ("Do the right thing.",) logic ("Reason tells us that a person is innocent until proven guilty.") and sympathy ("I feel your pain.") Each one serves its purpose in a presentation.

My rhetorical choice to write here at G21 in a dialect of SBE is that kind of political statement. I am trying to subvert what I see as the language usage juggernaut of the power elite.

I see television as the biggest bludgeon being used by the power structure, ya'll. TV is hard at work at creating a Standard American Teenager accent, a Standard Middle-class Adult accent and so on. In the process it is also hard at working on creating a Standard American Accent and English. You pay attention and you'll see that. Dialects and subdialects are being relegated to only use as imitation of (and often jokes about) other people by lead characters in most television programs. It's a not-so-subtle message about what it means to be part of the great American "Us." And that's scarey, too, I think.

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