In this opinion piece, James Baldwin makes a cogent, well-reasoned, and passionate argument that Black English, or African American Vernacular English, is a language. Not a dialect, but a language. He begins by chronicling various reasons for languages to arise—the need
Textbook: Reading Culture
Reading Culture, edited by Diana George and John Trimbur, was the first textbook I used and is used throughout Emerson College’s First-Year Writing Program. Based on George and Trimbur’s backgrounds in rhetoric and composition, the reader comes from a social-epistemic
Reading: Gloria Anzaldua’s “How to Tame a Wild Tongue”
“So, if you want to really hurt me, talk badly about my language. Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity—I am my language.” —Gloria Anzaldua, “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” Gloria Anzaldua’s “How to Tame a Wild Tongue”