Latest news with #BlackEnglish
Yahoo
30 minutes ago
- General
- Yahoo
Tampa City Council member Gwen Henderson dies at 60
Gwendolyn Henderson, a Tampa City Council member, has died, a council member confirmed with the Tampa Bay Times. She was 60 years old. Henderson went to Florida A&M University for her bachelor's degree in education. She went on to receive a master's of education and an education specialist degree from Saint Leo University. She was the chairperson of the city's Community Redevelopment Agency board and was a board director on the Hillsborough Area Regional Transit Authority. Council member Luis Viera said Tampa administrators notified him and other council members of Henderson's death. He didn't have information on the cause of death. 'Gwen had a passion for Black History - from 1619 to today. If you wanted to see the beauty of Gwen's heart, you should stop by her dream realized - her Black English bookstore,' Viera wrote in a text message to the Times. 'That bookstore was about the pride she had in the journey of her family and families like hers. It showed a beautiful heart. Gwen's life and values were intertwined in the journey of Black Tampenos.' Council member Lynn Hurtak said in a statement she was shocked and saddened to hear the news of Henderson's death this morning. Hurtak said Henderson, similar to herself, was a neighborhood advocate. 'She dubbed me 'Fifteen,' and I in turn called her 'Sixteen' in reference to our places in the sequence of the very few women to ever serve on city council,' Hurtak wrote. 'I deeply regret that I will no longer be able to enjoy her laughter, infectious spirit, and boundless energy as we continue our work to build a Tampa that works for everyone.' This is a breaking news story and will be updated. Check back at
ABC News
06-05-2025
- Entertainment
- ABC News
Met Gala 2025: 5 Australian fashion experts on the best looks, from Rihanna to Doechii
There's never been a Met Gala like this one. The 2025 gala had a heightened sense of purpose, with the "Tailored for You" theme celebrating 300 years of Black self-expression across the diaspora, in recognition of the contributions Black people have made to high fashion. It was inspired by With the red carpet over for another year, it's time to judge the celebrities on their interpretation of the theme. We asked five fashion experts in Australia — Samala Thakialee Cronin, Lynn Mathuthu, Tamara Leacock, Natisha Tabua and Sofia Stafford — for their takes on the stand-out looks of the night. Want more of the couture from fashion's night of nights? Catch up with our Precision tailoring and a moment in fashion history Tamara Leacock is the designer behind Naarm/Melbourne-based label . Tyler Mitchell US photographer Tyler Mitchell wears Wales Bonner. ( Getty: John Shearer ) "Tyler Mitchell is renowned for his use of diasporic storytelling in his image-making, so I was waiting for this look — and it didn't disappoint. Mitchell's outfit, by iconic Black English designer Grace Wales Bonner, is the embodiment of Black dandyism and multi-dimensionally expressed Black masculinity. "It features precision tailoring, provocative excess from grill to layer, and was complemented by precise hair and makeup. "I wish more Met Gala guests would have used the theme to platform Black designers like Mitchell, given we are in a time of diversity, equity and inclusion reversal, international art tariffs, and mono-nationalistic insularity. "But the fact not all did turns daring outfits like this one into a glimmer of hope." Doechii US rapper Doechii wears Louis Vuitton. ( Getty: Theo Wargo ) "Doechii — forever the icon, a Black queer femme artist who has danced in the realm of dandyism, sartorial explorations of Black masculinity, and an intentionally curated style — also made a moment of the details. "Working directly with Louis Vuitton creative director and Met Gala co-chair Pharrell Williams, she curated a look that reinterpreted the LV logo — often a sign of status within Black American diasporic communities — through the customisation of her suit and the integration of the logo into even her makeup. "The entire look felt like a nod to one of the most prominent figures of contemporary Black dandyism, [late Vogue editor-at-large] André Leon Talley. "Her decision to celebrate her Afro was a point of refreshing difference, as was the sartorial choice to don shorts. "Her look would have been more subversive had she collaborated with a Black-founded independent design house — nonetheless, it was a moment in fashion history." Zuri Hall US actor Zuri Hall wears Bishme Cromartie. ( Getty: Dimitrios Kambouris ) "Zuri Hall integrated garment re-imagining, potential upcycling inspo and even a potential nod to sustainability aesthetics with her custom backless suit gown by upcoming Black designer Bishme Cromartie." Storytelling in silhouette and a Harlem Rose Samala Thakialee Cronin is the Butchulla and Woppaburra designer behind Naarm/Melbourne-based label . Colman Domingo US actor Colman Domingo wears Valentino. ( AP: Invision/Evan Agostini ) "Colman stepped out like a sermon in silk. A tribute to the late, great André Leon Talley, he arrived as Black royalty draped in a beaded and embroidered royal blue cape — regal, reverent, and ready to deliver. "The suspense? Delicious. You knew he had something under there. And then…the custom Valentino zoot-suit-inspired reveal! Domingo blessed us not with just one outfit, but two. ( AP: Invision/Evan Agostini ) "It referenced the Zoot Suit Riots, the Moors, Mansa Musa — a whole legacy of resistance, style, and survival. "The brocade embroidery, the structure, the echo of Harlem and Renaissance lines with futuristic shine — this was storytelling in silhouette!" Teyana Taylor US singer-songwriter and actor Teyana Taylor wears Ruth E Carter in collaboration with Marc Jacobs. ( Photo by Michael Buckner/Penske Media via Getty Images ) "Teyana is the moment — quintessential Black excellence with a dandy twist. Styled in a striking red pinstripe suit by Ruth E Carter, complete with an ostrich feather plume, rose pin, cane and immaculate layering, she embodied everything the theme silently stood for: tailored resistance and radiant self-definition. "Her look was political, powerful and beautiful. It reminded me of our struggle here: to be seen other than just Black and white, that we are still here, all fine and dandy and colourfully lubly! "My first thought was 'Harlem Rose' and that was before I knew it was written on the cape. "In these interesting times, when diversity is seriously threatened, Teyana slayed this brief!" Whoopi Goldberg US actor, comedian and all-around icon Whoopi Goldberg wears Thom Browne. ( AP: Invision/Evan Agostini ) "Whoopi brings proper Boss energy as the High Priestess of Dandy. "She gave us powerful matriarch vibes, dressed in a custom Thom Browne creation that hit every note: a sequinned hourglass coat; a sculpted suit-dress; a sharp top hat. And the ultimate touch? Her silver-capped fingers. "With a wink (Whoopi style) to classic dandy styling and a full embrace of effortless Blak matriarch energy, Whoopi showed us that real icons don't need to shout. She kept it old-school, elegant, and untouched by trend." Quiet power and a look that transcended gender norms Sofia Stafford is the designer behind Naarm/Melbourne-based label . Imaan Hammam Dutch model Imaan Hammam wears Magda Butrym. ( Photo byfor The Met Museum/Vogue ) "Imaan Hammam dazzled in a modern reinterpretation of the zoot suit, showcasing a one-piece creation of stunning proportions. "The striking ensemble was complemented by Margiela x Louboutin heels, peeking out from the hem of her pants. A polka-dot tie added whimsy and served as a subtle homage to the jazz age, a period synonymous with Black cultural innovation and creative freedom. "The statement cane referenced the Harlem Renaissance and embodied themes of self-expression, dignity and resistance. To crown the ensemble, an ostrich feather hat delicately danced as she moved, adding both elegance and a touch of playfulness to her look. "Hammam displayed a bold statement of pride, defiance and the power of sartorial symbolism, perfectly capturing the essence of Black dandyism." Hunter Schafer US actor and model Hunter Schafer wears Prada. ( Photo by) "Layers of cool: adorned in a multi-layered Prada look, Hunter Schafer stunned in classic tailoring with crisp white shirting and a matching jacket that cinched at the waist, a black blazer effortlessly draped over her shoulders, and coordinating tailored trousers. "A white turtleneck peeked from beneath her collar, complemented by white leather gloves and a beret — paying homage to the iconic Black Panther uniform, symbolising political resistance. "It was a thoughtful, refined and quietly powerful interpretation of the theme." Janelle Monáe US singer-songwriter, rapper and actor Janelle Monáe wears Thom Browne. ( Getty Images: John Shearer/WireImage ) "Janelle Monáe is always one to watch, and they didn't disappoint in a captivating look by Thom Browne in collaboration with Paul Tazewell [who this year became the first Black man to win a costume design Oscar for his work on Wicked]. "She embodied a 'time-travelling dandy', drawing inspiration from 1930s tailoring while incorporating bold, futuristic elements. "The structured overcoat gave the illusion of stepping out of a time machine and revealed a deconstructed suit beneath. "The entire look transcended gender norms and stood out as a celebration of personal expression, paying homage to cultural and historical references." Embracing Sunday best and throwing out the rules is a stylist and fashion commentator living in Sydney on Gadigal land. Zendaya US actor Zendaya wears Louis Vuitton. ( AP: Invision/Evan Agostini ) "Zendaya and Imaan Hammam had similar looks, in the sense [they were both] very well-tailored white suits with super-high-waisted pants, hugging the body in all the right places — and just a beautiful accessory, the hat, to tie everything together. "It also reminds me of André Leon Talley, who talked a lot about his grandmother's Sunday best dress. There's something very church-y about [the hat], but not in a religious way: it's just very ritualistic." Lupita Nyong'o Kenyan-Mexican actor Lupita Nyong'o wears Chanel. ( Getty Images: Theo Wargo/FilmMagic ) "It was fun! I loved the colour. I don't think we saw a lot of colour this year — when people think of tailoring, they think of suiting, and of black and white. "I also just loved the little hat, it was reminiscent of that church dressing style [like Zendaya]. And that fabric, the chiffon [cape], and the Chanel camelia — it's letting you know what [designer] it is without being too overzealous. "And it's the same teal colour she wore when she won her Oscar! She must have her colour theory down, she knows what works for her skin tone." Rihanna Barbadian singer/businesswoman/icon Rihanna wears Marc Jacobs. ( Getty: Gilbert Flores ) "The history of the dandy, especially with the Harlem Renaissance, is Black people with money who play around with different elements because they're not trying to fit into a certain mould. "It's a little bit flashy, but it's fabulous — actually, A$AP Rocky said it was 'ghetto fabulous', which is my favourite comment. "She doesn't necessarily have to stick to a certain structure when it comes to dressing, because the whole point is you're not trying to align yourself with a white audience, so you've got no restrictions. You can play with the rules, the materials, the structure. "It's throwing out all of the rules. It's like she's playing with silhouette and she's playing with structure and she's playing with tailoring. It doesn't feel like it's abiding by anything." Black history in contemporary style and fashion as art Natisha Tabua is the Hanuabada, Daru, Kalkulgal, Fijian and Indian designer behind Naarm/Melbourne-based label . Khaby Lame Senegalese-Italian influencer Khaby Lame wears BOSS. ( Getty Images: Dia Dipasupil ) "Unapologetically, my favourite look from this year's Met Gala, Khaby Lame opted for a vintage-inspired grey pinstripe suit, also known as the zoot suit. "In the 1940s, zoot suits represented identity and cultural expression in the Black American community, with the intended desire of being seen and politically heard — a perfect alignment to the Gala's theme. "Topped off with a classic trench coat and accessorised with pocket watches, I can't help but love how much depth and Black history is in this look." Coco Jones US singer-songwriter Coco Jones wears Manish Malhotra. ( Getty Images: Jamie McCarthy ) "An exaggerated suit jacket cascading to the floor with matching pants, Coco Jones's look is absolute craftsmanship. "Handcrafted and embroidered by Manish Malhotra, this is why I love fashion. Fashion is art and expression and this garment is exactly that to me." Alton Mason US model, actor and dancer Alton Mason wears BOSS. ( Getty Images: Michael Buckner/Penske Media ) "This look to me is culture in contemporary style, which really speaks to me and the way I create. "It's an expression of the current generation being themselves unapologetically, creating how they want to create, with respect to their cultural backgrounds and upbringings. "Honestly, they look like a Black Anime superhero and I'm so here for that." Quotes lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
New York Times
24-04-2025
- General
- New York Times
Yep. Right on. Forsooth. Word. Mm-Hmm. Shupp?
We may be a polarized nation, but on a verbal level we are witnessing an explosion of ways to agree. Even a professional observer of linguistic change struggles to keep up with the variety of ways that the younger folk have to say 'yep!' This fecundity is evidence not only of how language evolves but also of how dialects mix. And it's fun. Back in the days of Middle English, the way to communicate agreement was 'yea verily.' Also 'forsooth' — 'sooth' meant 'truth,' now perceivable only in 'soothsayer.' Today our default affirmation marker is 'yeah.' Not 'yes': In most circumstances, 'yes' has a distinctly chilly ring, a hint of displeasure with whoever is asking the question. Or it can sound socially awkward, as when Miss Prissy, a chicken in the Looney Tunes Foghorn Leghorn series, intones her flutily schoolmarmish 'yeh-ess!' 'Yeah' drafts an 'ah' on to 'yes' that softens it up, just as it does with 'nah,' conveying negation in a 'no offense' way. 'Yep' subs in a p, which when attached to the end of a word can make it seem more amiable, as it does for 'nope' or 'welp.' All fine options, but nothing compared to the cornucopia that Black English produced. The hip and jolly 'right on!' was probably the first affirmation to gain national attention in the late 1960s. By the late 1970s it was starting to sound dated. Before long, one was more likely to say 'word' (or the slightly more embroidered 'word up'), based ultimately on a medieval proverb that 'one's word is one's bond.' Also, we got the similarly flavored 'mos def' and 'true dat.' These affirmation words have been key markers in the influence of Black English on the language as a whole. Beyond individual words, they have contributed a sense, now commonplace, of language as a creative and kinetic zone. Young speakers of all shades now expect a constant turnover in ways of saying 'yep.' White American dialects have been fertile ground as well. I remember a spirited conversation I once had when a white friend of mine suddenly erupted with 'primo!' It sounded so strange to the rest of us that we laughed, a lot. That was decades ago but I still chuckle when I think of how the word took us all by surprise. My friend said 'primo' was a cherished word of assent among young folk in the Massachusetts area she came from. 'Totes' originated in white dialects, as did 'totally.' Remember Valley Girls? More typical is the Black slang import 'bet,' which is opaque to the untrained ear but just a shortened and melodically flattened version of the longstanding 'you bet.' Someone says 'The show wasn't even that good, anyway'; his friend answers, 'Bet.' Similarly incomprehensible to the uninitiated is 'no cap.' Its basic meaning is 'no kidding' — in Black English, one meaning of 'capping' is lying — but it's now also used as a marker of agreement. Also on the smorgasbord these days is 'say that,' a descendant of 'you can say that again' and 'you said it' with the flavor of the Black 'preach it!' A West Coast friend reports that her (white) teenage boys' versions of assent are currently 'peak,' 'fire' and 'facts.' On the East Coast I recently encountered a (white) 20-something whose preferred affirmation marker was 'period,' which threw me the first couple of times. One can only begin to imagine all the variations to be found between. Another affirmation marker is 'mm-HMM.' One theory is that it was brought into English by enslaved people, most of whose West African languages are tonal, like Mandarin. That makes for a great story, but I'm not convinced. For one thing, 'mm-HMM' is not especially associated with Black people or even the South. For another, there is a more economical explanation available if we pull the camera back a little. 'Mm-HMM' is what linguists call a melodic expression. In English, others include 'MM-mm' to mean 'nope,' 'mm-MM-mm' to mean 'I don't know,' and 'hm-M' to mean 'What?' The melodies of the latter two seem to be based on the way we say 'I don't know' and 'What?' 'Mm-HMM' most likely derived from the way we say 'OK' or 'That's right.' The impulse to reach for sounds instead of words to mean 'yep' and 'nope' crosses cultural boundaries. Swedes can agree by just inhaling while saying something like 'shupp.' In Italian, 'bo' is a way of saying you don't know. Most of our idiomatic ways to agree come from Black English, but some transcend dialect entirely. Thus we can even count a kind of singing among our efflorescence of ways to convey warm agreement, much of it driven by Black English seasoning the general American vernacular. Language changes, dialects mix — even in how we say 'yeah!' By the way, I recently did an interview with Bari Weiss of The Free Press about my new book, 'Pronoun Trouble.' If you watch it, you will see me assert — with a certain take-a-stab confidence — that there are no languages in which words for men and women are based on body parts, along the lines of recent proposals like 'people with uteruses.' I must eat crow. Mark Post, a linguist at the University of Sydney, informs me that in Galo, an Indigenous language of India, the word for son-in-law translates as something like 'mister penis' (i.e., the source of future offspring), and names and nicknames of daughters often refer to birth order along the lines of 'first vagina' and 'last vagina.' To use another melodic expression the youngs are using these days, 'womp womp.' Now I know!
New York Times
20-02-2025
- General
- New York Times
The Twisting Tale of ‘Woke' Is the Story of the English Language
For all the workout it's gotten in the last couple of years, you would be pardoned for thinking of the term 'woke' as relatively new. Chances are you first heard it within the last 10 years and change. I did. However, seemingly novel words often turn out to have a longer history: 'Anyhoo' may feel relatively modern but is actually attested in the United States as early as 1924, and appears in the Cole Porter song 'Where's Louie' in 1939. 'Woke' goes a ways back, too, and it stretches into the future, continuing to evolve in what feels like real time. The way that change unfolds has a lot to teach us about both language and our cultural moment. 'Woke' has often been reported (including by me, previously) as first appearing in print in 1962, in an article about 'Negro' slang published by The Times. But my colleague Emily Berch has recently brought to my attention that in 1940 the Negro United Mine Workers, a West Virginia labor union, issued a statement that included the lines, 'We were asleep. But we will stay woke from now on.' The blues singer Huddie Ledbetter gave us the first 'woke' on record — pun intended — on a 1938 recording of his song 'Scottsboro Boys,' urging us to 'stay woke.' 'Staying woke' meant understanding that there are larger forces operating to keep power unequally distributed in our society, disfavoring especially the poor and people of color. Genevieve Larkin, the wisenheimer social climber in the film 'Gold Diggers of 1937,' might not have known the term, but she was getting at something similar when she said, 'It's so hard to be good under the capitalistic system!' Why 'woke' rather than 'woken'? Black English tends to collapse the past tense and the participle forms of verbs. Textbook English is present tense 'sink,' past tense 'sank' and participle 'sunk.' Black English is just 'sink' and 'sunk,' a simplification that's been catching on more broadly for some time. (An example is in an NPR interview from a few years ago: 'Once they sunk that investment into, you know, one of these anchors, they are very reluctant to let go.') Or think about people who have been swindled. You could say they had been taken, but one might also hear it described as having been took. 'Spoke' can replace 'spoken' even in natively written, formal English texts. 'James gives two more examples of patience,' I read in a sermon from the First Presbyterian Church of Unionville. 'First, he had spoke of the farmer. Now he speaks first of the prophets, and then of a particular person, Job.' 'Woke' for 'woken,' then, just follows a general pattern in how verbs seem to want to work in English. In the early 2010s, amid what the journalist Matt Yglesias has titled 'the Great Awokening,' the word jumped the fence from Black English into wider usage, joining a class of words we could call mainstream demotic — slang that becomes what we think of as legitimate words. Other examples include 'diss,' 'legit' and 'brunch' (which for the record traces back to 1896). Quickly after its embrace, however, 'woke' underwent what linguists call pejoration, by which a positive or neutral word takes on a negative meaning. In this case, it went from referring to those who possess leftist political awareness to those who believe anyone who lacks that enlightenment should be punished, shunned or ridiculed. Pejoration comes as no great surprise; as words change over time, they are more likely to pejorate than to ameliorate (more research is needed as to what this says about human nature). 'Reduce' in its original meaning meant to take back to, and could refer both to increase and decrease. In 1665, a writer described the ancient Romans in Britain as having 'reduced the natural inhabitants from their Barbarism to the Society of civil Life.' What was surprising about the pejoration of 'woke,' however, was how quickly it happened. The expression 'politically correct' emerged among Communists in the 1930s and became common in the mainstream as both a term of praise and as an ironic comment on adherence to party dogma. Only in the late 1980s did it become a slur from the right against the left, hissingly abbreviated to 'P.C.' 'Woke,' in contrast, became a slur within a mere few years of its appearance in the mainstream. This was partly due to the fact that race issues were so contentious in the late 2010s, but anyone who thinks race wasn't being discussed hotly in the late 1980s either wasn't there or was living quite hermetically. The more important difference was social media, which propagates and even transforms terms more rapidly than broadcasting and print. The transformation of 'woke' up through that point has already been documented. The reason to revisit the subject now is that we have lately entered a new phase in the word's evolution, one that seems to turn its original meaning on its head, but instead finds a deeper logic. The phrase 'the woke right' started appearing with frequency in 2022 but became especially well entrenched after an essay on Substack late last year by the satirist Konstantin Kisin. Rather than applying specifically to the concerns of the left, 'woke' is now being used to refer more generally to a conspiracy-focused and punitive orientation to social change. The journalist Andrew Doyle has noted that the ''woke right' is a kind of ideological Doppelgänger, whose members exhibit the same precisionist and absolutist tendencies of their leftist counterparts.' The author James Lindsay describes how 'the Woke Right have accepted as fact that there's a conspiracy against people like them and that their only real hope is to lean into the identity grouping and advocate for collective power under that heading.' This third phase of the life cycle of 'woke' demonstrates a different kind of turn: semantic broadening. Centuries ago, the word 'dog' referred to one particular strain of canine while 'hound' was the general word for the species; over time, 'dog' broadened while 'hound' narrowed. 'Business' first referred to being busy but broadened to refer to the 'busy' work of capitalist enterprises. So when the scholar and editor Paul Gottfried insists, 'There is no 'woke right' any more than there are Burkean Marxists, Black Dixiecrats, or patriarchal feminists. Attempts to create such unlikely fusions of opposites border on the ridiculous,' he misses how semantic broadening works. 'Woke right' gets at an orientation that the illiberal strains of left and right share, whether focused on the left's 'The Man' or the right's 'deep state.' This is how language change happens, and it is happening especially quickly these days in the language we use to talk about culture and politics. The language is morphing to an extent hard to process day to day. Here is a useful comparison. Many students have learned the opening lines of Chaucer's 'The Canterbury Tales': 'Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote' and so on. It's easy enough to get the meaning, but that's just luck. Shortly after those lines is language more typical of Chaucer's Middle English: 'And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes to ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes.' It meant 'And pilgrims start to seek foreign shores to distant shrines, known in various lands' but almost might as well be Swedish to us. That unfamiliarity is the residual effect of six centuries of gradual linguistic change. Now take this sentence: 'The woke right oppose D.E.I. programs, the conception of 'trans' as an identity, gender-affirming care for minors, and terms referring to groups such as Latinx and BIPOC.' These unfamiliar uses of 'woke,' 'D.E.I.' and 'trans' and the novel terms 'gender-affirming,' 'Latinx' and 'BIPOC' would not strike someone from even just 15 years ago as Swedish, but would be nearly as incomprehensible. Much of our English vocabulary is in a kind of hypercharge of late, and this is why 'woke' has seemed to be such a slippery shape-shifter. *** By the way, a fast-changing language gives rise to a lot of questions about what's correct and what's not. I recommend not only reading Ellen Jovin, the polyglot and language expert who wrote the excellent book 'Rebel With a Clause,' but also bookmarking the documentary about her national tour as the guru of the 'Grammar Table.' The film's New York premiere is on March 4.
New York Times
13-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
The Truth and the Fiction of Black English
Friends had been telling me I needed to read 'James,' the best-selling novel by Percival Everett that revisits 'Huckleberry Finn' from the perspective of the character Jim. They said I would be intrigued by Everett's ideas about language as a strategy of resistance. After hearing that from roughly the sixth person, in the spirit of Black History Month I decided to go ahead. My friends were right. Everett pulls off a masterly linguistic confection, in which enslaved people use Black English only as a wary affectation. Among themselves, they speak standard English, but they switch into Black English in the company of white people, who prefer to hear 'incorrect' English because it allows them to feel superior. Near the book's end, Jim ceases to indulge the custom. 'Why are you talking like that?' Judge Thatcher repeatedly growls in bafflement. Everett isn't offering a cynical take on the origin of today's Black English. Instead, the Black characters' speech is the dialect the way it was commonly depicted in 19th and early 20th century culture. This is the speech of minstrel shows and characters like Topsy and Uncle Tom in 'Uncle Tom's Cabin.' It seems ungainly and even false today, partly because it was a distortion of the way the dialect was actually spoken at that time. In his 1873 novel 'What Can She Do?,' Edward Payson Roe — one of those best-selling, three-named novelists of the era who are utterly unknown today — has the old Black servant Hannibal using 'I'se' as a pronoun throughout: 'I'se hope you'll forgive me,' 'I'se isn't.' History offers no evidence that actual Black people have ever used 'I'se' in this way. Having the Black characters speak standard English with one another makes them more readily human to us. I doubt I am alone in guiltily finding it hard to really 'feel' Twain's Jim or the less educated Black characters in 'Uncle Tom's Cabin,' because even without outright distortions like Roe's, their speech seems so unfamiliar. When Harriet Beecher Stowe had Tom saying things like 'And your 'gettin' religion,' as you call it, arter all, is too p'isin mean for any crittur' (p'isin is 'poison'), she meant it as a respectful depiction of real speech. But Black English has changed so much since then that 170-plus years later, we have to strain to quite hear a person underneath it all. For the same reason, it can take practice to hear Zora Neale Hurston's characters as round, in the literary sense, despite the author's accurate rendition of the older rural Black English she was raised in. 'James' is going to have a long life. I can't wait for the film — I'm imagining, perhaps, Daveed Diggs slipping in and out of dialects depending on whether Huck (Timothée Chalamet?) is around. Yet I worry somewhat that with its influence, 'James' may encourage a longstanding myth: that Black English was created as a kind of secret code to keep whites from understanding what we were saying. In 'James' the whites can understand the Black English, but the situation is still a variation on the idea of the dialect as a grim ploy, rather than as something that emerged organically. Black English originated when slaves were exposed to nonstandard English dialects spoken by plantation owners and white indentured servants from Britain and Ireland. Most of what distinguishes Black from standard English traces to these dialects — a fact that may seem strange, given how little Americans today encounter those dialects. Gullah Creole of the Sea Islands was also a small part of the mix. And people who were captured into slavery learned English as a second language, in many cases when they were adults, a brutal introduction that caused the more uselessly arbitrary features of the language to get shaved away: 'Why you didn't tell me?' instead of 'Why didn't you tell me?' A great many of the world's nonstandard speech varieties arose on their own, without any deliberate choice, and unconnected to any concern with any outsider's comprehension. This has included Creole languages in oppressed colonial outposts, such as Jamaican Patois and Papiamentu in the Netherlands Antilles. Afrikaans, in South Africa, is the result of a process similar to the one that gave rise to Black English: Dutch, the language of an expansionist empire, got a handy sorting out as speakers of other languages undid its needless wrinkles such as the habit of assigning gender to objects for no reason. In Brazil, there are people descended from enslaved Africans who speak rural varieties of Portuguese that could be termed Black Portuguese. The idea that Black English was concocted as a kind of deliberate survival strategy is satisfying on many levels — i.e. it makes for a great novel — but there is no actual evidence of it happening. Even some of the oddest-seeming features from the dubious depictions of 19th-century Black English were rooted in linguistic reality. Take that quote from a few paragraphs back where Stowe's Tom says 'arter.' Twain's Jim does as well, saying 'I raise' up de sheet en I says, all right, boss, you's de chap I's arter.' It may sound contrived, but this was an import from Britain. Think of the off rhyme in 'Jack and Jill' who went to 'fetch a pail of water / Jack fell down and broke his crown and Jill came tumbling after.' Surely that isn't the best whoever composed it could do! In many colloquial British dialects, 'water' and 'after' rhymed. Made-up dialects, on the other hand, follow no discernible pattern. George Herriman, who I mentioned last month, for some reason gave the title character of the comic strip 'Krazy Kat' a weird lingo mixing Yiddish pronunciation ('cat' is 'ket'), grammatical eccentricities (Krazy calls the mouse 'Ignatz Mice') and lots of plain weirdness ('villain' is 'willin' and 'vagabond' is 'wagabone'). You can see the difference: Black English is of readily reconstructable origin, its grammatical features are typical of dialects born in similar circumstances, and it contains no more or less weirdness than any human speech. 'James' has justly been celebrated, having won the National Book Award and the Kirkus Prize and been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Though I'm mostly a nonfiction sort, I ended up all but living in the book for three days. His literary innovation — his clever and perfectly executed depiction of Black English — is an enormous part of that. But there is a difference worth pointing out, just to make sure, between his creative genius and the true history of America's most interesting English dialect.
