"Janice Jackson, another team member who is also working on a Ph.D. in communication disorders, conducted an experiment using pictures of Sesame Street characters to test children’s comprehension of the “habitual be” construction. She showed the kids a picture in which Cookie Monster is sick in bed with no cookies while Elmo stands nearby eating cookies. When she asked, “Who be eating cookies?” white kids tended to point to Elmo while black kids chose Cookie Monster. “But,” Jackson relates, “when I asked, ‘Who is eating cookies?’ the black kids understood that it was Elmo and that it was not the same. That was an important piece of information.” Because those children had grown up with a language whose verb forms differentiate habitual action from currently occuring action (Gaelic also features such a distinction, in addition to a number of West African languages), they were able even at the age of five or six to distinguish between the two."
But black Children are s’pose to be stupid… (via howtobeterrell)
ETA: AAVE is a 100% valid dialect, everyone, just in case you didn’t know. There is no such thing as “talking right.”
This is one of the issues that causes SAT and ACT questions to be thrown out after-the-fact when they’re discovered to have a racial bias against AAVE-speaking test takers — if they’re caught and contested by graders.
There is at least one question on the English portion of every ACT that is considered racially biased — and that’s after an overhaul of the entire standardized college testing system (because it was found to intentionally discriminate against AAVE-speakers and non-English speakers by using idiomatic English and “trick” words that have different meanings/significations between AAVE and “Standard American English,” like “reckoning” or this example, the use of “is” versus “be.”)
Just in case you didn’t think that the higher education system in the USA is a perfect example of how racism is institutional… and still alive and well today.