Oakland Ebonics Controversy - Amended Resolution

Amended Resolution

The wording of the original resolution caused a great deal of misunderstanding, which fueled the controversy. On January 15, Oakland's school board passed an amended resolution. The original resolution used the phrase "genetically based" which was popularly misunderstood to mean that African Americans have a biological predisposition to a particular language, while in fact it was referring to genetic in the linguistic sense. This phrase was removed in the amended resolution and replaced with wording that states African-American language systems "have origins in West and Niger-Congo languages and are not merely dialects of English."

Read more about this topic:  Oakland Ebonics Controversy

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