to do the impossible, i.e., separate their identities from their school experiences. It requires Black people to engage in a sort of passing (similar to the way Black people with light skin complexions have sometimes passed as racially White) in order to be successful (Young, 2007). Young (2007) asserts that code switching contributes to academic failure for underclass Blacks by forcing them to perform a kind of educational schizophrenia. Instead, Young is an advocate of code meshing, combining Ebonics with a school-based version of English to better align with how African Americans speak and write anyway. He rejects the notion that Ebonics is incompatible with so-called Standard English. For Young, forcing Black males to reject Ebonics is a surrender to prejudice, sending the message that high achievement requires males distance themselves from their own identity. It makes Black students commit cultural suicide while White students’ culture remains intact. In fact, White students receive the message that their culture is “standard” (Young, 2007, p. 117).
Proponents of code-switching assert that it is an essential tool for Black males to be successful and resilient in multiple social contexts (Brewster, Stephenson, & Beard, 2014; White & Cones, 1999). Young (2007) argues that the reason so many Black males have not learned Standard English is precisely because it comes along with a rejection of Ebonics, creating within them a hostility toward Standard English. Wheeler (2008) advocates that teachers learn code switching and Black English grammatical patterns so they can teach students the differences between Standard English and Ebonics, how to consider the setting they are in, and choose the appropriate language style for that setting.
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The Dozens
A feature of the BML tradition is playing the dozens, also known as roastin’, ridin’, cappin’, jonesin’, clownin’, bussin’ and other names. A form of African American interactive speech, the dozens is a highly stylistic, entertaining, and competitive verbal ritual characterized by the exchange of insults accompanied by physical gestures, body stances, and tonalities (Majors & Billson, 1992; White & Cones, 1999). According to Majors and Billson (1992), while African American females sometimes play the dozens, African American males are the prime players. Nobles (2007) explains the dozens as a rite by which the power of the word is used to make the individual feel better. The practice is similar to rituals among peoples of African descent such as the Avogan and the Lobi Singi ceremonial traditions, where offended persons are given the opportunity to release suppressed emotions by ridiculing one another (Nobles, 2007). Majors and Billson (1992) theorize that the dozens may have originated from enslaved Africans who worked in the field; they created disguised insults targeted at higher status enslaved individuals who worked in the master’s house, or at Whites themselves. Verbal ability was valued as much as physical ability among the enslaved. Therefore, learning to strike without being physical was valued. According to Staples (2006), the dozens are a forerunner to rap, and more specifically, battle rap. In the ritual, insults may be directed toward any aspect of the target, including but not limited to the target’s family, character, intelligence, sexuality, clothing, and much more. During the dozens, the onlookers and listeners act as a catalyst, responding to witty and cunning insults and spurring on the exchange (Majors & Billson, 1992). Young men who practice the dozens learn:
1. To keep calm and courageous under the mounting pressure of insults (from individuals or larger society).
2. To think fast, and be witty, and cunning.
3. To control and redirect emotion and other energy to defend one’s self with clever offensive and defensive insults (Kunjufu, 1986; Majors & Billson, 1992).
Music Making
Music making is a process that is grounded in culture-specific meaning (Burnim & Maultsby, 2006). Any analysis of African American music must privilege the perspectives of the culture bearers (Burnim & Maultsby, 2006). The African American music-making process is part of a larger, dynamic cultural process of continuity and change, from African music-making practices and principles to modern-day music forms (Epstein & Sands, 2006). Starting in Africa, that process involved the transfer of values, ideals, and behaviors through synthesis and reinterpretation (Epstein & Sands, 2006). In spite of the creation of and institutionalized retelling of the myth that Blacks arrived in the New World culturally naked, African American music is indeed a part of an African cultural continuity (Epstein & Sands, 2006). Enslaved African Americans performed music for themselves and for their captors. Music was also a unique expression of African American humanity during slavery and a means of survival and resistance. Black music, in the American context, began on plantations in the rural South (Staples, 2006). According to Nketia (1974), African music often possesses characteristics such as multipart rhythmic structures, repetitive choruses with a lead singer, call-and-response styles of altering phrases juxtaposed or overlapping, and scales of four to seven steps. These elements continue to appear in African American music. Early on, European observers, through the lens of their own cultural chauvinism, typically described Black music as barbaric, wild, and nonsensical.
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Black men played a major role in musical entertainment for both Black and White audiences during slavery (Clarke-Hine & Jenkins, 1999). Within Black communities, both women and men were represented as musicians (Clarke-Hine & Jenkins, 1999). Within Black communities in the South, women engaged in more spiritual music making and performance. However, when Whites selected enslaved a Black person to work as a musician, that person was inevitably a male (Clarke-Hine & Jenkins, 1999). For Whites, the Black male musician was associated “solely with pleasure, revelry, and entertainment” (Clarke-Hine & Jenkins, 1999, p. 23). Cimbala (1995) explained that in the South, the musical occupation was regarded as lowly work, and thus White men refused the occupation. As a consequence, Black men became the primary musicians and instrumentalists in Black and White rural society. Black males also played major roles as ministers. In fact, Cimbala refers to Black musicians as the Black community’s secular ministers.
Music permeated all aspects of life in African societies (Roberts, 1995). Indeed, Cimbala (1995) explains that in many pre-colonial African societies there was very little conflict between sacred and secular life. The same held true in the communities of enslaved Blacks. Black people made music and danced in the evening, and the following morning they engaged in prayer and worship. Sunday, the day of rest, was one of the only days that Africans could dance, although many Whites saw it as a desecration of the Lord’s Day (Epstein & Sands, 2006). Musicians invigorated and strengthened the social and cultural life of Black people during the antebellum period and beyond. By amplifying the Black communal spirit, musicians were chief contributors of Black community and culture creation and maintaining (Cimbala, 1995). But in the eyes of Whites, Black musicians played a far more narrow and single-dimensional role, i.e., sources of entertainment at social events.
Being entertainers for Whites came with some benefits including increased freedom of travel, small amounts of income, and enhanced status (Cimbala, 1995). Frolics represented one of few instances where enslavers allowed enslaved Blacks to come from other plantations to socialize, sing, and dance. A formerly enslaved man, Andy McAdams, described the frolic as “the only time that the slaves ever had to get together” (WPWPA & Rawick, 1972, p. 2451). These events offered enslaved Black people rare moments to congregate and relate to one other at some distance from White supervision. A part of some frolics included contests between fiddlers. Sam Forge, a formerly enslaved Black man, described the event:
W’en de leader say ‘Go’, to de fiddlers, dey all start to fiddlin’ at once, dey play dey own tunes, an’ each one of dem pat his foot to keep time to dey music. Den dey all stop an’ let one of de fiddlers play by himself, he would flip his fiddle over his head, den behind his back an’ away on a hit, den he raise it over his head, den under his right, den his left leg, an’ keep right on a playin’ till de leader calls on him to ‘Halt’. Den dey all line up for dey contest. (WPWPA & Rawick, 1972, p. 1373–1374)
Each continued
