In his spoken words “Ebonics 101”, Steven Willis has amazingly described the struggles of an African American person by combining it with his/her way of talking in a brilliant way. Steven has successfully managed to keep a them throughout the whole poem that literally portraits a clear picture of how angry an African American person is because of a long history of racial injustice towards African American people, and how passionate he/she is about changing the stereotypical way an African American person is usually treated in our society.
It is safe to say that in this poem, Steven has reached a new level of creativity and the ability to combine several great thoughts in just one sentence. The whole focus of the poem is to defend the slang language which is spoken by African American people. Steven has made it real clear that “Ebonics” is not just some street language. As he defined it in his own words, “Ebonics is the official language of the undefined black culture”. To establish his claim, he literally created three grammar lessons of “Ebonics”. The most impressive thing I found was how he connected those three rules to all the oppression and racial injustice that an African American person has been facing for over a century now. Like when he explained the first rule which stated that “any English word that holds an (in) combination, the (i) becomes an (a)”. To elaborate this rule, he gave and example of Dr. Martin Luther king Jr. This clearly proves my above claim that Steven created a strong link between the way African American people speak and the racial injustice against them. Steven did the exact same thing with other two lessons and made sure that his audience understand the fact that African American people intentionally speak the way they speak. They want to have their own identity, culture and language, not the one their oppressor “White Person” has.
To sum up, the main goal of Steven is to tell the world that the way African American people speak, it’s not just some street words. There is a whole culture behind it. A culture that represents African American people, their identity, their thoughts, their rights and the fact that they are different then “the man”.
Questions
- Do you think that I was able to provide a general summery of the poem in my introduction?
- Do you see any broken thoughts in there?
- Do you think that I was able to mention all the main points?
- Is there anything that you would disagree?
- I always have hard time coming up with a conclusion, how successful do you think I was in summarizing my essay in the conclusion?
