Exploring the Racial Gap

It's the night before Christmas

and here in our house,

It ain't nothing moving,

not even no mouse.

There go we-all stockings,

hanging high up off the floor,

So Santa Claus can full them up,

if he walk in through our door.

Just for the fun of it, William A. Stewart had translated Clement Moore's famous poem into a loose imitation of ghetto language as a Christmas greeting from the Center for Applied Linguistics in Washington. By chance, a twelve-year-old Negro girl with a serious reading problem picked up the parody in Stewart's presence. To his astonishment, she breezed through it with ease. Yet when she was asked to try Moore's original, she fumbled and stammered over the words, exhibiting all her old reading difficulties.

In Linguist Stewart's eyes, this modest and unplanned experiment is one more proof of a challenging and controversial thesis put forward by a small and informal coterie of investigators who call themselves "the Cultural Mafia." Afro-American culture, they contend, is not a poor imitation of its white American counterpart but a fully developed life-style of its own. By their reasoning, the origin of the little girl's reading trouble is really simple: compared with her customary ghetto speech, standard English is virtually a foreign language.

Black Laughter. Nor, they hasten to add, is it necessarily a superior one. Although educational psychologists have long insisted that Negro dialect shows all the characteristics of cultural deprivation, Stewart and his fellow investigators argue that linguistically it is as rich and diverse as standard spoken English. Many white Americans were astonished when Muhammed Ali, who earned reams of sports-page attention with his endless flow of doggerel, flunked an Army intelligence test. Psychologist Stephen Baratz, of the National Institute of Mental Health, insists that there was really nothing particularly surprising about his jab at poesy: Negro children usually start playing improvisational rhyming games shortly after they learn to talk.

The differences between white and black American culture go well beyond speech patterns. In a pioneering study called The Myth of the Negro Past (1941), the late Melville Herskovits, an anthropologist at Northwestern University, argued that many black cultural patterns are basically African in origin. Although his thesis was initially dismissed by the majority of sociologists and anthropologists--including most Negro experts--the Cultural Mafia agrees with Herskovits. Its members believe that they have discovered a number of behavioral parallels between native Africans and black Americans. One similarity is the typical way that many Negroes laugh: they cover their mouths, lower their heads and do a little dance with their feet. Such behavior was once explained away as light-hearted childishness, but some anthropologists now believe that it may well be African in origin.

Another example is Negro eating habits. Unlike white Americans, who tend to dine with their families at certain ritual hours, many blacks eat whenever they feel like it, taking food from pots and dishes that always seem to be simmering on the kitchen stove. In Africa, tribesmen still leave food on a fire in the middle of the village for everyone to sample. Another Afro-American characteristic is the habit of eye rolling. Typically, blacks roll their eyes upward when they are daydreaming; preoccupied whites gaze vacantly into space.

White Americans not only misunderstand these cultural traits but are frequently annoyed by them--the volume of Negro voices, for example, which are often loud and boisterous because blacks are frequently less inhibited in public than whites. If a Negro youngster responds to a white teacher's scolding with a "Tsk, tsk," she will probably assume that the child is perhaps a little bit contrite. The black teacher, on the other hand, is more likely to recognize tongue clicking--possibly another African habit--as a sign of a youngster's deep resentment.

The eyes are the source of endless black-white misunderstanding. In the presence of elders or superiors, American Negroes have long averted their eyes, just as blacks are accustomed to do in West Africa. Nonetheless, whites still interpret such eye aversion as an insult or a token of inattention. Pondering the implications of eye aversion, Linguistic Anthropologist Edward T. Hall says: "How often has a polite black schoolchild cast his eyes downward as a sign of respect, and failed to meet a teacher's eye when questioned? How many teachers have thought students were 'tuned out' because they gave no visible sign they were listening? How many have said, in angry tones, 'Johnny! When I talk, you listen! Is that clear?' What is the child to do? Sometimes blacks feel they are supposed to do something, but just what isn't clear--shuffle their feet, perhaps. Sometimes blacks find that if you move around a lot and say 'Yassa, boss,' it seems to make some white people less hostile."

Alien Culture. The Cultural Mafia has just begun to explore the behavioral characteristics of Negro life, but its ideas have already provoked a lively professional debate. Many sociologists and anthropologists argue that the supposed correlation between the American ghetto and the African village is tenuous at best. Black Sociologist James Elsberry, assistant director of New York's Center for Urban Education, contends that the black man's distinctive cultural patterns are due not so much to his African past but to his long alienation from the hostile white American society around him.

To the Cultural Mafia, proving the African link is less important than promoting greater understanding and tolerance of the special qualities of ghetto culture. Baratz, for example, argues that such well-intentioned programs as Head Start are doomed to failure because they implicitly seek to rob the Negro child of his uniqueness and absorb him into an alien white culture. "We have to meet the Negro in his world," he says, "explore his ghetto for its strengths, and understand the processes whereby this seemingly wicked environment sustains a viable culture." White America must not only learn to appreciate that culture, he argues, but to teach Negroes about white culture in a language that they will understand.

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