Chapter 4: Language, Race, And Schooling: A Conceptual and Historical Legacy of Educational Language Policies and Politics Affecting the Ethnolinguistic Minority Child of African Descent¹

Sociopolitical trends and demographic realities at the turn of the new millennium suggest that the problems of linguistic discrimination and inequality are becoming central to schooling and our larger society. When in a historical perspective language, race, and schooling are juxtaposed in analyzing the educational conditions of African Americans, “the problem of the language line” represents a major area of concern for educational and language scholars who look to improve the life chances of African American youngsters. This problem of the language line, or the relation of the varieties (dialects) of and languages other than English by men in Asia, Africa, and in America and the islands of the sea represents to the 21st century what “the problem of the color line,—relation to the darker to lighter races of men…” (DuBois, 1969, p. 55) represented to the 20th century. In much the same way that William Edward Burghardt (W.E.B.) DuBois contemplated the peculiar racial and cultural dichotomy for which confronted the American Negro at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, this sense of twoness—being an American and being a Negro, a similar duality today manifests for the ethnolinguistic minority child of African descent who too must consider the duality of language in the shaping of his identity and reality in the United States.