Race, Grammar, Bullying, and Belonging

Some years ago I began the David Foster Wallace essay "Authority and American Usage." As a writer, I'm interested in grammar, particularly the battle between prescriptive and descriptive advocates, and Wallace seemed a good authority on the issue.

I read the essay before bed and never finished it. I picked it up again a few weeks ago and finally finished. I'm glad I did because it took many turns I did not see coming.

Wallace begins with a mention of how he was a grammar Nazi (he prefers SNOOT, or Syntax Nudniks of Our Time ) as a child and how it held him back with his peers.

"... this reviewer regrets the bio-sketch's failure to mention the rather significant social costs of being an adolescent whose overriding passion is English usage..."

He then moves into how there are are myriad dialects other than Standard Written English, and we all (Black, White, Asian, Latinx, etc.) speak more than one of them.

"Fact: there are all sorts of cultural/geographical dialects of American Usage — Black English, Latino English, Rural Southern, Urban Southern, Standard-Upper Midwest, Maine Yankee, East-Texas Bayou, Boston Blue-collar, on and on... many of these non SWE (standard written english) type dialects have their own highly developed and internally consistent  grammars, and that some of these dialects' usage norms actually make more linguistic/aesthetic sense than do their Standard counterparts... nearly incomprehensible to anyone who isn't inside their very tight and specific Discourse Community (which of course is part of their function)."

Wallace then goes into the tribal nature of learning a local dialect: it has an ingroup/outgroup function.

"When I'm talking to RMers (Rural Midwestern) I tend to use constructions like "Where's it at?" for "Where is it?"and sometimes "He don't" for "He doesn't." Part of this is a naked desire to fit in and not get rejected ... but another part is that ... these RMisms are in certain ways superior to their standard equivalents."

"Whether we're conscious of it or not, most of us are fluent in more than one major English dialect and in several subdialects and are at least passable in countless others.... the dialect you use depends mostly on what sort of Group your listener is part of and on whether you wish to present yourself as a fellow member of that Group."

"A dialect of English is learned and used either because it's your native vernacular or because it's the dialect of a Group by which you wish (with some degree of plausibility) to be accepted. And although it is a major and vitally important one, SWE is only one dialect... There are situations ... in which faultlessly correct SWE is not the appropriate dialect."

Now it gets really interesting. Wallace does something that Chris Rock talks about in his latest Netflix special that kinda sounds like justifying bullying. But it also supports the importance of free play and socialization for children. They need to learn from one another as much as they learn from adults.

"Childhood is full of such situations. This is one reason SNOOTlets tend to have such a hard time of it in school... The elementary-school SNOOTlet ... is duly despised by his peers and praised by his teachers. These teachers usually don't see the incredible amounts of punishment the SNOOTlet is receiving from his classmates, or if they do see it they blame the classmates and shake their heads at the sadly and viscous and arbitrarily cruelty of which children are capable.

"Little kids in school are learning about Group-inclusion and -exclusion and about the respective rewards and penalties of same and about the use of dialect and syntax and slang as signals of affinity and inclusion. Kids learn this stuff not in Language Arts or Social Studies but on the playground and on the bus and at lunch... what the SNOOTlet is being punished for is precisely his failure to learn... the SNOOTlet is actually deficient in Language Arts. He has only one dialect. He cannot alter his vocabulary, usage, or grammar ... and these abilities are really required for "peer rapport" which is just a fancy academic term for being accepted by the second-most-important Group in a little kid's life."

"One is punished in class, the other on the playground, but both are deficient in the same linguistic skill—the ability to move between various dialects and levels of "correctness," the ability to communicate one way with peers and another way with teachers and another with family and another with T-ball coaches and so on. "

Finally, Wallace comments on race. This sounds like roundabout way of talking about "talking white," a contentious subject that many people think is made up. Others, like John McWhorter, think are all too real. It's also a good explanation of why learning Standard Black English, and dismissing SWE, is so important to many African Americans, it helps ensure ingroup distinction.

This is a lesson many white children do not have to learn. Their dialects seem to more closely transition into SWE and there isn't an aversion to distancing themselves from an outgroup, since SWE is mostly spoken by white people.

"Here is a condensed version of a spiel with certain black students who were bright and inquisitive as hell and deficient in what US higher education considers written English facility:
'...when you're in a college English class you're basically studying a foreign dialect... the SBE (Standard Black English) you're fluent in is different from SWE in all kinds of important ways...
It's not that you're a bad writer, it's that you haven't learned the special rules of the dialect they want you to write in." 

Overall it was a really interesting read about how people use language to both fit in and to exclude.