"Oh, stewardess? I speak jive."

With these words, Barbara Billingsley gave us one of the biggest laughs in film history. I had one of the biggest laughs in undercover investigations history when I read that federal agents are seeking to hire Ebonics translators to help interpret wiretapped conversations involving targets of their inquiries. For those of you who don't recall, Ebonics is African American Vernacular English. It caused quite a fuss back in 1996 when educators in Oakland suggested that it was a separate language. Many believed that this meant that their children were going to be taught this new language, or that much of the instructional day would be heard in this exotic tongue.
There was a good deal of discussion and debate, most of it centering on the question of whether Ebonics was, in fact, its own language. So confounding was this proposition that the Reverend Jesse Jackson initially called this school board's decision to teach Ebonics "an unacceptable surrender, bordering on disgrace," only to reverse his position a few weeks later, saying that he hadn't fully understood the resolution. Feel free, at this point, to make your own joke about fully understanding Jesse Jackson.
All of this came to pass in the year before I started teaching in Oakland. By the time I was ready to enter the classroom, however, most of the tempest had escaped from this teapot, leaving us to discuss, as educators, the difference between dialects, languages, creole and pidgin. I remember one fifth grade teacher who preferred to tell his students that there was such a thing as your everyday talk, which was fine for hanging out on the street corner, and "money talk." Standard English is the language you want to use when you are interviewing for a job, or when you are trying to impress your teachers. Ebonics, he told them, was for hangin' with the homies.
And now, apparently, when you're trying to catch the bad guys. Where is Mrs. Cleaver when you need her?