Lifelines - African proverbs for daily living: Miss Lou leaves us the full loaf

Lifelines - African proverbs for daily living: Miss Lou leaves us the full loaf is a wonderful post. Miss Lou reminds me of Zora Neale Hurston and Mama Africa-Miriam Makeba. These women identified the same pattern of war against our identity and the need to be proud of who we are, especially without apology. This is what I love most about these women. They were who they were and that is what they celebrated.





I remember playing games at home and on the school playgrounds like the games you see the little girls in the videos playing on the Lifelines link above. We played Old Mary Mack where we had to slap hands together correctly, going faster and faster while we sang the song.

My parents here in Shreveport would tell me to speak correctly like you hear Miss Lou saying in the video. In America and in Jamaica and in Africa, the languages we speak have been under attack since slavery and colonialism. When we force our children to learn that the way they speak is incorrect, we perpetuate racism. By who's standards are we judging our own languages? Certainly not our own. We've been trained to assist white people in their racism against us. When will we stop?

I had an older white communications professor who was from a very poor place in South Carolina. Her people were uneducated and they spoke a dialect of English that made the professor ashamed during her days as a college student. She shared with us a lesson that took her many years to learn. She accentuated the difference between her original dialect and what she called the "power language"--English.

This helped me a little to be able to explain the difference between Ebonics and standard English, but it isn't enough. There are too many black people speaking European languages in the same African rhythms to allow Europeans to get away with calling their minority languages "power languages".

Our ancestors were geniuses to hide African rhythms and speech patterns in the European languages that were forced upon them. These rhythms can be identified easily among blacks across the world if we just look for the patterns they left us. Miss Lou, Zora Neale Hurston, and Mama Africa were heroes for preserving the languages and stories and songs for us to go back to. Thank You! Thank You! Thank You!

Yvonne McCalla Sober, thank you for posting Lifelines - African proverbs for daily living: Miss Lou leaves us the full loaf.

Geneva Smitherman was a great scholar of Ebonics in America. If you want to learn more, you might try these books: Black Talk: Words and Phrases from the Hood to the Amen Corner and Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America (Waynebook, 51).