In what sounds like the setup for a comedy sketch, the Justice Department is seeking experts in "ebonics," or black English. According to The Smoking Gun, a Drug Enforcement Administration office in Atlanta wants to hire up to nine experts in the slang-heavy dialect to help translate wiretapped conversations between African-American suspects. "Hiring translators for languages that are of questionable merit to begin with is just going in the wrong direction," says a representative of English First, a group that advocates English-only laws in the U.S. Does the DEA really need linguists to understand bugged calls between English-speaking Americans? (Watch a local report about the need for ebonics translators)
Ebonics isn't a language, just a way of speaking: The government can't be serious, says Jonathan Capehart in The Washington Post. First of all, "jive," as ebonics was once known, "ain't even a language." It's just a relaxed way of speaking — lopping off words, running them together — that millions of African Americans can slip in and out of with ease. The DEA has some "chutzpah" treating it like some mysterious foreign code.
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
