. . . And the Last Word in Desperate Talk

A producer for the CNN show "Both Sides With Jesse Jackson" is on the phone, and she wants to know what I think of "Ebonics." This is not an idle question but what's known as a pre-interview. If she likes what I have to say, if she finds me interesting, I'll be asked on the show. But two can play this game. I ask her what she thinks of Ebonics. As for myself, I confess, I haven't a clue.

My confusion -- and that's what it is -- stems entirely from the insistence of the Oakland school board in defining its Ebonics resolution in the negative. It will tell you what it is not, but not really what it is. It is not, for instance, an insistence that children be taught in what is often called black English -- and thank God for that. What could be worse than for these kids to learn what they already know.

Neither, for that matter, is Oakland asking that black English be officially considered a separate language. That would, maybe, entitle it to federal funds for bilingual education, but that -- no matter what -- is not about to happen. The feds have said "No!" and Oakland has said that wasn't its intention anyway.

So what have we here? It's hard to tell. Now we are told that what Oakland wants to do is instruct its teachers in black English so that they can better understand their pupils. Ah! you want to exclaim. But before the hand goes to forehead with the appropriate slap, ask yourself what in the world the school board is saying.

Can it really be possible that Oakland's teachers, many of them African American, cannot understand their African American students?

Where, exactly, has Oakland been doing its recruiting -- Greenwich, Conn.?

Can it be that the notion of community control of the schools now has been extended from the offensive to the ridiculous -- from the claim that whites cannot teach blacks to one that not even blacks can teach blacks? They have to be African American teachers who are schooled in Ebonics?

As the producer and I bat around this subject, I am informed that Jackson himself is giving a press conference in Oakland. He is taking back much of what he originally said about the Oakland proposal, which was a hearty and scornful dismissal -- "an unacceptable surrender bordering on disgrace," he called it.

Now, though, he is not so sure, although to be sure, no one is sure of anything anymore. Jackson wisely hedges because what the Oakland board has been saying does not, in significant ways, conform to its own resolution. In it, for instance, it elevated black English to a distinct language. Jackson won't buy that, and anyway, to no one's surprise, the school board is now saying it did no such thing. This is a language we all know -- the doublespeak of the bureaucracy: Buronics.

The more the producer pre-interviews me, and I, cagily, pre-interview her, the more I am beginning to have a view on the subject. It cannot be, I think, that the Oakland school board is composed of idiots or crackpots -- out to prove that Washington's is not, as we parochially think here, the worst in the nation. No, I reasonably reasoned, these are not dumb people: What are they saying?

They are crying for help, I think. They are at their wits' end, I think. They have tried everything -- everything old and everything new -- and still the test scores remain painfully low. This, as Jackson rightly notices, is the lament of good people watching their children go to ruin.

But there is no quick fix. The answer, the remedy, the magic bullet, lies in the family -- in the universal language by which parents instruct children: mostly by example.

The answer lies in the rehabilitation of a culture that is now so battered, so tattered and under such duress that a mere component of it -- its vernacular -- gets mistaken for the cause of the problem. Change it, elevate it, eliminate it, establish it -- do something with it -- and you think you have done something.

So, finally, I have an opinion, although it is really more of a sentiment than anything else: sadness. There is something pathetic about this attempt to better the plight of these ghetto kids. I am not sure whether Ebonics stigmatizes them or merely recognizes reality. But whatever it is -- and the school board clearly has a language problem of its own -- it is no crazier than the social conditions that produced it. In any language, we're talking about sad kids condemned to a sad fate.