Reported!: Scalafani

Probably I should’ve recognized that I would one day become a sociolinguist the morning I found myself in a heated argument with my Algebra II teacher over the Ebonics controversy. She was the authority, I was a fourteen-year-old freshman, and yet I had pretty strong opinions on the legitimacy of a language variety and its use in an educational setting—most of them stemming from my own academic success as a speaker of standard American English (SAE) and my years of being termed “articulate” (a term I only much later realized framed my African American peers as poorly-spoken).

While Scalafani unravels a number of pieces of the debate over Ebonics, beginning with the word itself and the way it was framed in headlines (c.f. “The Ebonic Plague” and its homophony with “bubonic plage”), there are two features I want to look at more closely. One is the level at which Scalafani unravels individual words used in the articles, looking at their semantic relationships with other parts of the text, as in my example of the frame created by referring to me as an “articulate” (black) student. This, I believe, will be a useful site for me, as much of the process of WK is a process of responding to and anticipating future text based on often very short stretches of discourse. Looking at the ways words presuppose the use of other words, or examining the frames evoked by the choice NOT to use other words strikes me as a fruitful area for my own research.

A second piece which I found interesting in Scalafani’s article was one which whe dies not explicate herself but rather which emerges from her own writing, and that is the evoking of the prior text of “Frost/Nixon” by her shortening of the 3rd article headline to “Ebonics/Nixon.” The shortened headline does not actually encapsulate the comparison between the Ebonics and SAE (however skewed) that appears in the text of the article and with which Scalafani enages, but rather laminates an additional layer of interpretation—“Ebonics” in this textual frame takes the place of “Frost,” the reporter who trounced Nixon in getting him to admit to the wiretapping and illegal activities surrounding the Watergate scandal. By shortening the article to “Ebonics/Nixon,” Scalafani activates this prior text and much in the same way Nixon detractors celebrated Frost for his victory over the reclusive president, invites the reader to similarly side with and celebrate Ebonics.