Introduction

Abstract

Academic scholarship is typically motivated by an urge to explore new frontiers of knowledge, and guided by a time-honored tradition that values objectivity – that is, a point of view on the subject matter as free as possible of bias – totally unaffected by myth, misconception, hyperbole, and other “contaminating” features of “unscientific“ thought. Such was undoubtedly the primary incentive for linguists who, in the 1960s, began to produce books, articles and other academic material on a variety of language called Black English.¹ An unavoidable source of bias, however, which applies to the case at hand, is the stigma associated with membership in a marginalized social group.