Abstract
The history of whitesʼ scientific discourse on blacks (U.S. descendants of enslaved Africans)ʼ mother tongue, called black language, in the United States can be divided into four periods: 1st period: Abnormal English View; 2nd period: Error English View; 3rd period: Deficient English View, Deviant English View; and 4th period: Ethnic English View and Distinct Language View. Each period corresponds to a particular social change and structure and a recurrent surge in the demand for racial equality among blacks with white privileges threatened. This process has led to incremental, not fundamental, shifts in the scientific discourse on black language.
This study examines the Deficient English View in the third period. I hypothesize that the View is a paradigm which derived from the interplay of the Cold War, the Brown court decision on school segregation in 1954, the successive civil rights legislation in the mid-1960ʼs and a subsequent rise in the demand for rights and equality, and counter efforts to protect white privileges, but which white elites constructed nearly unilaterally. It discusses the Viewʼs five features, partly seen across periods, in terms of interest convergence theory (Bell 1980, 2004)―colorblind discourse, black language as error, black language as pathology, black language to be eradicated, and evasive correlation analysis. This perspective allows me to situate the View under a holistic, critical lens, which claimed itself severed from the pre-WWII biological determinism, clarifying the way it rationalized racism and helped maintain the existing social structure.
