Speaker unverified: commitment

Transcript context

…For questions, we have two mics, one on each side of the room, and I have questions on the iPad. These are questions for John — questions, not statements. If you start making a speech, I will cut you off. First question, please. Hi. I wanted to ask about your experience in the late ’90s and the culture wars. That seems to be something we’re living through again today. I see a lot of parallels. In particular, I will tell you that I was at Duke at the time, and I got to know your work through a great black conservative, Kenny Williams, who was on the faculty in the English department. She was pretty much the only conservative in the English department and one of the only people who defended the idea of the author against the deconstructionism that was running at Duke. She was a great admirer of yours, and I’d like to hear your thoughts about the deconstructionist moment, the attack on the idea of authorship, those views of language — how you saw them in the culture wars at the time when you were involved in a debate over Ebonics, and how you see them playing out today. That’s a very interesting question. You’re going a little beyond what linguistics usually dwells on, as opposed to philosophy of language. So that was never anything that was going on within any department that I was part of it. The Ebonics controversy was less about authorship than about an oppressed group of people making a claim about education and where your allegiance lay, depending on your politics. That was the beginning of me in the media. That’s beginning to seem so abstract that, for me, the reason I’m sitting here is probably because I was on the wrong side of the Ebonics debate because I said the reason that black kids are having trouble in school is because of home lives and neighborhood problems and not the difference between isn’t and ain’t on the page. I had no idea that anybody was going to consider that the wrong thing to say. But it was considered disloyal, and so it got me attention for about five minutes, which I hadn’t expected. But to tell you the truth, to go out of my bailiwick, to the extent that people are beginning gradually to be allowed to read books for aesthetic pleasure again in literature departments, and although it’s just a squeak from what I’ve heard, I’d say that that’s a good thing. But no one ever asked me to toss my hat in on that. Linguists study grammar rather than the literacy code. Is that the answer that you wanted, or am I missing something?…

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