Rahman 2008

Rahman, Jacquelyn. 2008. Middle Class African Americans: Reactions and Attitudes Toward African American English. American Speech 83 (2).

Rahman's 2008 article attempts to fill a gap in sociolinguistic study of African American English (AAE) by examining middle-class (Kerbo 1991) black speech. She argues that both AAE and standard English (SE) features are employed by middle-class African Americans, and explores the use of these features in the significance of "sounding black" in the judgments listeners make with regard to standardness, class, and appropriateness of speech styles. Conducting a two-part experiment among middle-class African Americans at a university, comprised of a survey of 66 African Americans about their attitudes toward AAE and their understanding of it, and also a perception study of 28 speakers, Rahman finds significant effects of phonological and syntactic features of AAE. She argues for a classification of Black Standard English (BSE), a variety which employs the phonological features of AAE with SE syntactic features. Like other studies, Rahman finds there is a continuum in AAE feature use, but also in the perceptions of situational appropriateness, standardness, and social class which it conveys. She concludes that at the base of every style stands a dialect, and that many African Americans are bidialectal, able to style-shift AAE features and SE features to convey solidarity with race-peers or to demonstrate level of education and social class.

Robinson 2010 Disintegration

Robinson, Eugene. 2010. Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America. New York: Doubleday.

In his 2010 book, Robinson, a staff writer for The Washington Post examines how although "black America" is still discussed as though it is a unified group, it actually comprises four distinct segments of society, each of which has different agendas than the others. He labels these four groups the transcendents, or the people like President Obama and Oprah, who represent wealth and power of the highest order, the mainstream, or the increasingly college-educated middle-and-upper-middle class whose focus is no longer on bootstrapping out of poverty but on maintaining a quality of life once ascribed to whites, the abandoned, the lower-income increasingly single-parented, high-school or lower-educated community, and the emergent, the immigrants from Africa who often still have claim identities of their home countries, but whose children increasingly are known simply as African American rather than Nigerian American or Ethiopian American, etc.

This book is particularly useful to my work as it discusses many socioeconomic and racial shifts within various segments of D.C., with a particular focus on the race riots of 1968. Much of Robinson's argument is that during Jim Crow segregation, there was racial segregation and socioeconomic integration in Washington D.C. communities, with areas like U Street being meccas for black citizens of all socioeconomic levels. In the wake of the destruction of the race riots, new settling patterns in D.C. have moved far more along economic lines than racial ones, so that mainstream and transcendent black populations live alongside comparably economically situated whites. This could have profound impact on language practice, especially in the gentrifying neighborhoods which I wish to study