One of the most annoying argument tactics involves the smug use of words like “myth” or “urban legend” to describe another person’s opinion or recitation of facts, or stronger words like “facts” to describe one’s own. Typically, such non-arguments take the following format:

Myth: [Insert your opinion here.]
Reality: [Insert my opinion here.]

What’s perhaps the most annoying about this type of non-argument is that it applies one standard to those who assert certain facts, and another to those who choose to question them. The unspoken message is “don’t believe that other guy without first checking out the facts for yourself, believe me without first checking out the facts for yourself.” And thus, hamhanded efforts abound to “debunk” all sorts of “urban legends,” some of which are ULs indeed, others of which are substantially true but get a minor detail wrong (e.g., Al Gore falsely claimed a role in “creating” the Internet, not “inventing” it), and others of which are 100% accurate.

A blogger I normally trust, Dean Esmay (hat tip: Patterico) walked into this very trap today with his post on Ebonics. His arguments for a “compare and contrast” teaching approach to cross-dialectal learning are interesting, and may even be right, although it should be noted that it’s not nearly the slam dunk he makes it out to be. Those theories are what they are. Where Dean completely screws the pooch is on his recital of the alleged history of Oakland Unified Unified School District’s infamous 1996 resolution on Ebonics. On that, he writes:

There is an urban legend that is pervasive in American society. This urban legend goes like this:

In the 1990s a school district in California announced that they would begin teaching “Ebonics” in the classroom. The kids would be taught this non-standard language, given lessons in it, and taught to regard it as equal to English.

Still to this day most people believe that there was such a program to “teach Ebonics to children.” But it never existed. It is an urban legend, one of the most widely sprad [sic ] urban legends in America.

There’s one problem: aside from the technicality of the program never “existing” (Oakland withdrew it before it was implemented) this “urban legend” is true.
Anyone who doubts that Oakland contemplated teaching students in the Ebonics “language” need only follow my link to the resolution in question, then scroll down past all the bogus “whereases” to find this:

Be it further resolved that the Superintendent in conjunction with her staff shall immediately devise and implement the best possible academic program for imparting instruction to African American students in their primary language for the combined purposes of maintaining the legitimacy and richness of such language whether it is known as “Ebonics,” “African Language Systems,” “Pan African Communication Behaviors” or other description, and to facilitate their acquisition and mastery of English language skills;

[Emphasis added.]

Ah, you say, but surely a reference to teaching kids ni their primary language doesn’t mean teaching in Jive. After all, these students were born and raised in the U.S. of A., so we all know their “primary language” is English, right? Nope, Oakland doesn’t think Black English is part of the English language at all. To verify that, scroll back up to the bogus “whereases,” focusing on the first one:

Whereas, numerous validated scholarly studies demonstrate that African American students as part of their culture and history as African people possess and utilize a language described in various scholarly approaches as “Ebonics” (literally Black sounds) or Pan African Communication Behaviors or African Language Systems;

Note in particular what they don’t call Black English. They don’t call it “jive,” even though they did come up with an idea that seems as though one of them may have watched Airplane and failed to appreciate that it was a comedy. They also don’t call it “Black English,” which is the most common name for it, or “Black English Vernacular” (as linguists do), or even “African-American Vernacular English,” as politically correct linguists do. Instead, they throw out a series of obscure names most people have never heard of, whose only common thread is the absence of any reference to the word “English.” Surely they didn’t intend to exhume that old theory from the black pride movement about Black English being an African tongue with only a tangential relationship to English? Actually, yes, they did (and don’t call me Shirley):

Whereas, these studies have also demonstrated that African Language Systems are genetically-based and not a dialect of English;

Due perhaps to its unfortunate placement immediately after the more transparently stupid “genetically-based” line, the “not a dialect of English” part never really got the scrutiny it deserved, but its purpose was clear: Black English is to be treated as a completely separate language, to be treated in a “bilingual” (primary language/dialect instruction) setting. Bear in mind that “bilingual” education, which is largely banned in California today, was the norm in 1996. Just in case it wasn’t obvious enough that this was what Oakland was aiming for, note that another “whereas” invokes

Whereas, the Federal Bilingual Education Act (20 USC 1402 et seq.) mandates that local educational agencies “build their capacities to establish, implement and sustain programs of instruction for children and youth of limited English proficiency,”

Go that? If you’re black, the dialect most of us call “Black English” is in your genes,* and you are a person of limited English proficiency. That, and not a “compare and contrast” pedagogical experiment, is the resolution Dean has inexplicably chosen to defend. “Urban legend,” indeed.

*Ebonics advocates later backpedaled from that theory, arguing that the word “genetic” was intended as a reference to the language’s origin, or genesis, and not to anyone’s genes. In fact, linguists do use the word genetic that way; however, they do so in order to point out a common origin, or lack thereof, between two languages. It is one thing to say that English and German are “genetically related” (i.e. share a common, proto-Germanic root), and quite another to say that either language alone is “genetically based” (i.e. is based on its own origin?!). The most likely explanation is that someone at the school district skimmed some linguistic study referring to some aspect of the “genetics” (in the linguistic sense) of BEV/AAVE, and mistook this for a conclusion that BEV/AAVE had a “genetic” (in the usual sense) basis. If there is an alternative, coherent explanation of why anyone would describe a dialect as “genetically-based,” I have yet to hear it.

UPDATE: More discussion here.