If you’ve ever jammed to a favorite song, kept it real with friends, or were hustlin’ to get all your work done, you’ve used Black Language but probably didn’t acknowledge it as such. Alice Lee, an assistant professor of critical literacy in UCR’s School of Education, credits this disconnect to a long history of colonialism and anti-Blackness that still shapes how we view Black people and Black Language.

As a Chinese American growing up in a small, predominantly white town, Lee’s young adulthood was fraught with racism. Throughout middle and high school, she faced daily bullying, intimidation, and othering by almost everyone in her class.

“I’ve spent the last 20 years trying to understand and make sense of the overwhelming racism I experienced in my first 20 years of life. Learning about ‘white supremacy,’ ‘microaggressions,’ and ‘colorblindness’ gave language to my experiences,” Lee said.

Lee became an elementary school teacher while simultaneously earning a doctorate in language and literacy from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. There, she delved into the origins and equity issues of Black Language — a distinctive language system that many African Americans use in daily conversation. This pivotal time was a “dance between theory and practice” in her own classroom.

“I couldn’t understand how half a century of linguistic research was unacknowledged in all our school curricula and practices,” Lee said.

She was staggered when school leaders told her Black Language was inappropriate for learning environments. In the school where Lee taught, the classes for students deemed to have higher-level skills were disproportionately white, while lower-level tracks were disproportionately Black. When Lee shared her learning of Black Language with a white colleague, she recalls him saying, “These kids can’t even talk right, how am I going to teach them math?”

Since then, Lee has been working with scholars across the country to change school structures that work against Black Language speakers. To do that requires challenging a long-held and misguided belief that “correcting” a student’s language to mainstream English will set them up for future success.

“My original quest to understand why Black Language is ignored and devalued in schools led me to the deep inner work of confronting my own anti-Blackness, and to also consider major roadblocks for Black Language speakers in classrooms,” Lee said.

Understanding Black Language

Originating as a form of communication between enslaved Africans from differing cultural backgrounds in the pre-Civil War South, Black Language has been studied and written about by scholars and linguists for decades. The language uses words and structures of African origin and has unique communication patterns, such as call and response — an energetic back-and-forth between speaker and audience commonly used in Black churches, public gatherings, and music. Like any other language, it follows specific grammar rules and structures.

Black Language is spoken widely in African American communities and homes across the country, but also has geographic variations. It has been referred to as African American Vernacular English, Ebonics, and Black English, but Lee defers to current Black Language scholars who acknowledge the African roots of the language and connect it with racial identity.

The language also has the ability to sum up complicated ideas in few words. Just how many English words does it take to translate the meaning of 20th century Black novelist Zora Neale Hurston’s famous quote, “All my skinfolk ain’t kinfolk,” to nuance familial and racial belonging? Such succinctness hasn’t been lost on the nation’s $360-billion-dollar advertising industry. Consider Coors Light’s “Made to Chill” ad campaign, Coca-Cola’s “Everybody Chill,” and Etsy’s “Let’s Get Lit” line of products. Even former President Richard Nixon took advantage of such an economy of words by using the terms right on, rip-off, chill out, and dis in his speeches. But while the mainstream public has appropriated Black Language in many settings, it is still relegated to the ranks of slang in schools. Lee says this hypocrisy shows how negative views of Black Language have more to do with race than with language.

A Forbidden Learning Tool

As U.S. schools continue to devalue Black Language, bilingual children are being forced to learn with only roughly half their language tools, Lee said. What’s worse, school language skills assessments that consider only what Lee calls a child’s “white mainstream English skills” result in bright students being placed in lower-track classes, which can compromise their learning potential and wrongly label them as underachievers. Language is the primary vehicle for learning, she said.

“Not allowing students to use Black Language to learn is like forcing someone to build a home with only half their tools,” Lee said. “Forbidding Black Language in classrooms sets Black students up for failure.”

The focus in the early grades on phonics instruction and oral fluency tests — which count the number of words students read and pronounce correctly within a short amount of time — inaccurately assesses many Black children, Lee said, since only mainstream English words and pronunciations are considered correct. Students will get marked down for using Black Language grammar structures, such as making a word possessive without an apostrophe. “Johnny book” instead of “Johnny’s book” would be marked incorrect even though it is correct in Black Language grammar.

“It turns out that what some refer to as the ‘science of literacy’ isn’t so scientific after all, especially when they ignore linguistic science,” Lee said.

Such assessments also have grave consequences for student success. Research has shown that once a child is placed in a lower-level class, it can compromise their educational outcomes. Students in lower-level tracks often receive lackluster lessons in phonics and grammar structures and schools have lower expectations for academic success. Meanwhile, higher-level classes have more challenging and inspiring curricula and more fun with creative projects.

Advancing Black Language Scholarship

With grant funding from UCR through the Regents Faculty Development Grant, the prestigious Spencer Foundation, and other sources, Lee’s research focuses on the learning rights of young Black Language speakers, the need for more Black teachers, and confronting anti-Blackness within Asian and Asian American communities. Her work, published in top research journals like Research in the Teaching of English, highlights the shortfalls of current literacy skill assessments and offers practical strategies for incorporating Black Language into curriculum and instruction. The work compelled the Literacy Research Association to recognize Lee with the “More Just World” award in 2022.

“Not allowing students to use Black Language to learn is like forcing someone to build a home with only half their tools.”

— Alice Lee

Lee is also advancing Black Language scholarship through UCR’s first undergraduate course on the topic, which she taught last fall. Several of her students were so moved by the experience that they joined a Black Language research consortium created by Lee. Eight Black students are now collaborating with Lee on research papers that draw from their personal experiences and the academic literature. Other undergraduates are working on papers about Black solidarity from Latino and Asian communities. The consortium is working with local teachers and administrators to host community forums for Black families.

“My vision is to showcase the academic brilliance and beauty of Black Language speakers through critical, diverse research methods,” Lee said. “By working to convene multiple community partners, I plan to build pipelines of Black teachers, school leaders, and Black Language scholars in Southern California.”

Lee wants to see more teachers from African American communities, noting one of the primary roadblocks is the lack of teachers who can understand the language and use it when teaching students.

“The life experiences of Black teachers are imbued with rich language, histories, and ways of knowing the world that then get lived into how they teach in their classrooms,” said Lee, whose theory “Teacher Embodiment as Lived Pedagogy” explores this very topic.

“The terms ‘culturally relevant’ and ‘culturally responsive’ literally came out of studies about mostly Black teachers and their ways of teaching,” she said.

Lee hopes for a future when bilingual students are given full credit for the full scope of their language skills and are allowed to use them for learning. Yet, U.S. schools have a long way to go.

“I am working towards a future in which Black students are able to utilize all their resources to learn,” she said. “I am committed to building fiercely and fearlessly, and I invite partners across the state and country to join me in this exciting movement.”

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