Black English vs. standard usage in the courtroom
Many of the black kids at Ann Arbor's Green Road Housing Project in Michigan do not talk much like their well-to-do white classmates at the neighborhood King elementary school. Some of it is simple pronunciation: "We do maf work" for "We do mathematics work." Some of the differences lie in odd verb tenses: "She-ah hit us" for "She will hit us." More often the difference involves the verb "to be." Green Readers say, "He be gone" when they mean, "He is gone a good deal of the time"; "He been gone" when they mean,...
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