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This article is from the Black Youth Project and it is about the stigma surrounding AAVE.

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Instead of teaching Black kids to leave their identity at home, we should be pushing for more teachers who understand them.

By Jae Nichelle
There has been a language division among Black Americans for decades: African American Vernacular English (AAVE) vs. Standard American English (SAE). AAVE is a dialect used by Black people in social settings that pervades hip-hop culture, while SAE is the dialect generally taught in schools.
Most people across racial lines do not speak Standard American English, yet AAVE is the most stigmatized alternative-and the most debated.
This division has always been about class. SAE was created based on the speech of the old American elite, and this elitism has since trickled down. After the Civil Rights movement, many upper/middle class Blacks denounced the use of AAVE, calling it "improper" and "uneducated" while working class Blacks called the users of SAE assimilationists. This has hardly changed.

I was raised in a middle class (ish) lifestyle. My parents spoke to me primarily in SAE, and I spoke that way too. I do not know how I learned this-maybe from TV and school-but I grew up thinking that AAVE was an inferior English. I remember being told repeatedly that no adult would take me seriously if I spoke it, and the infamous day that my Black English teacher told my class that "'ain't' ain't a word."

At the same time, I was teased by my Black peers for "talking white" because I spoke so "properly." Stuck between these conflicting ideals, I remember thinking, " well... what am I supposed to do?"

Many people have (historically and presently) considered AAVE to be bad English. It is not. Nor is it slang. In fact, many studies done from the 1970's to the present have classified AAVE as a dialect of English or its own language resulting from a combination of English words and Niger-Congo rooted grammar. AAVE has its own words, syntax, and rules. More importantly, it is part of a rich Black culture.
But even though AAVE can be used to express ideas of any level of thought, the language is still ridiculed in education and in the workplace, despite being widely accepted in pop culture.
At a summer camp for Black youth, I told one of the children I was instructing to sit down and pay attention. She responded, "I'm is!" Almost immediately, she was scolded by another Black counselor who told her that her response was wrong. When the child was asked what she should have said, she answered "I am."

The funny thing is that this child, no older than 7, clearly already knew the SAE version of what she wanted to say and still chose to use her version instead. By the exasperated look on her face when she was corrected, it was also clear that she was tired of being told how to speak. We should all be that tired.
RELATED: Black Children Are More Likely to Be Beaten By Their Teachers
Almost four decades ago, a federal court case in Ann Arbor Michigan ruled that schools must take Black students' home language (AAVE) into account when teaching them. The case came about after barriers between the teachers' language vs. the students language were discovered to affect the students' learning. Unfortunately, not much changed.

This is only one of the many examples of how very intentionally ignored speakers of AAVE have been, even we we take our issues to the legal system. For users of AAVE, how often did you have an educator who told you that the way you speak is perfectly fine? We are taught to code-switch in or out of our speech from a young age. This is how you can speak at home, this is how you speak at school, this is how you speak at work.
Instead of teaching Black kids to leave their identity at home, we should be pushing for more teachers who understand them.

"A common language, which we possess, is one

of the defining characteristics of a nation."

- Dr. Geneva Smitherman.

The stigma against AAVE is reiterated even by influential Black people like Jesse Jackson, who once opposed a 1996 proposal to teach "Black English" in schools. Rev. Jackson called it unnecessary, arguing "you don't have to go to school to learn to talk garbage."
This stigma is also used as a tool for Black comedians. It drenches education. But w e should be fed up with letting people tell us how to speak and with telling each other how to speak. While AAVE is a product and reservoir of Black culture, speaking AAVE is not what makes you Black.
AAVE is a language that is distinctly ours, and we should push for it to be recognized as such. Linguist Geneva Smitherman suggests a tri-lingual approach for Black people: SAE, AAVE, and the knowledge of another foreign language. I agree with this approach.

Although AAVE is a language that we need to preserve and fight for, we are way passed the days where speaking Standard English is "a white thing" or a marker of assimilation. Now that I am in higher education and am studying writing and linguistics in more depth, I see a very reverential use of AAVE amongst Black scholars and writers. The upside is that the use of AAVE in intellectual spaces subverts the idea that it cannot be a language of scholarship. The downside: AAVE becomes associated with authentic Blackness, pressuring some people to adopt it to feel "Blacker."

Some Black people use AAVE. Some Black people use SAE. Some Black people use neither or both.
Suggested Reading:
Language is an important tool in liberation. In all instances of colonization, the colonizer began by taking away the language of the colonized. They banned native tongues, they called them inferior, and they opened schools where those languages were not taught.

This history can and should be applied to AAVE. The attempts to take away our differing speech have only served to make us bilingual. We can use both sides of the coin to our advantage. Black people speak a range of languages and dialects, and the sooner we can embrace them all, the closer we'll be to liberation.

" Language and Liberation " by Geneva Smitherman (1983)
Jae Nichelle is a spoken word artist working towards a B.S. in Linguistics at Tulane University. Her work can be found on Blavity, Vinyl Poetry and Prose, and other literary magazines.
Appropriating Blackness by E. Patrick Johnson (2003)

" You're Black, So Why Do You Talk White? " by Christopher "Flood the Drummer" Norris (2017)

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"I'm is talking right": How the stigma around Black language holds us back from liberation

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Instead of teaching Black kids to leave their identity at home, we should be pushing for more teachers who understand them.

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This is an article from the Black Youth Project about recognizing Black language as its own distinct language and about a time when the DEA asked for Black Language translators.

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For the past couple days the internet has been all keyed up over the DEA's search for translators to help them decode the intricate and complex language of the drug game. In short, the DEA is looking for, as they call it, Ebonics experts. Wait what? Are we acknowledging the fact that Ebonics is a separate language? Or is this just another cultural disconnect between Black America and America?

When speakers of one dialect can no longer understand the speakers of another dialect, these dialects have effectively become different languages. And since dialects are born through social and or geographical isolation is the DEA saying that Black America has been disconnected from mainstream America for so long that we are speaking a different language and mostly unintelligible language now?

This isn't the first time that this search for a middle ground between African American Vernacular English and Standard English came about. In 1996 the Oakland School Board came under fire for a resolution that stated that Ebonics speakers would participate in a sort of modified English as a second language curriculum. Teachers who were proficient in both Ebonics and Standard English would receive increased salaries.

This resolution was met with a ton of backlash. The Oakland School Board resolution identified Ebonics as an English dialect with West African influence. In fact, that is how Ebonics was originally defined and what makes it different from Southern American dialects. Structurally, it is West African in origin but the vocabulary is English based. Is there anything wrong with this?

No. Other immigrant groups retain aspects of their native languages. Why should Black Americans be any different? And the children of these immigrant groups receive specialized education that teaches them Standard English in relation to their native language. Why shouldn't Black kids? If we truly believe that standardized tests are culturally biased then we should try to level that playing field as much as possible. Imagine growing up in a household where your parents spoke Spanish exclusively and then being thrust into a classroom where you were expected to use a different language with little to no instruction. While not as extreme, this is what some students face every day. Their teachers use English in a way that they may not be familiar with the language.

The first step is to recognize that African American Vernacular English is not indicative of laziness or ignorance. Hello. For a long time we were segregated from American society through slavery and segregation. It stands to reason that we would develop a unique way of communicating amongst ourselves. Just as any isolated population would.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EvR3_S23KM

There are those that would argue that use of Ebonics decreases as socioeconomic status increases. Perhaps. But that still doesn't mean that use of Ebonics is a mark of ignorance or laziness. Pockets of poor people develop and yes, Ebonics may be more prevalent in those places but that's just because those populations are still somewhat isolated from American society. Just because we find ourselves clumsily integrated into American society now doesn't mean that our unique speech is wrong. Maybe we should accept it and say yes, maybe our children need lessons in code-switching. Ain't nothing wrong with that.

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Speaking Our Own Language - The Black Youth Project

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For the past couple days the internet has been all keyed up over the DEA's search for translators to help them decode the intricate and complex language of the drug game. In short, the DEA is looking for, as they call it, Ebonics experts. Wait what?

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This is an article from The Smithsonian about the history and origins of African American spoken word poetry.

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African American Spoken Word

The spoken word occupies a central and indispensable position in African American history and culture. As a vessel for remembrance, the oral tradition carried African narratives to a new continent and sustained them through bondage; as a political catalyst, speech defined the struggle for freedom and moved ordinary people to extraordinary acts of courage; and as an art form, the word has conveyed itself forcefully and dramatically by drawing on the rich African American musical heritage. The Smithsonian Folkways archives contain an unparalleled range of examples of African American spoken word recordings that express the richness, complexity, and diversity of African American oral traditions.

Sharing Stories, Creating Identity

Institutions of slavery and racism attempted to silence generations of African Americans; thus oral history became a means of maintaining identity, surviving, and resisting oppression and exploitation, as well as a tool for achieving freedom. Oral histories showcase personal stories and reflections, and offer African Americans a platform from which to define experiences and viewpoints apart from racist constructions. From the inspirational thoughts of visionary scholars and revolutionaries to the narratives of artists and everyday individuals, each history has added a chapter to a living document of struggle through powerful statements of identity. Viewed collectively, oral histories and recorded interviews demonstrate the rich diversity of African American experiences.

From the Pulpit to the Streets

African American history encompasses an abundance of speakers with inspiring things to say, and exciting ways to say them. The greatest of these speakers imbue their words with meaning by exploiting the musical potency of speech. As with African American preachers, who tend to involve their congregations in sermons through the dialectic of call and response, great speakers make their individual performances into communal ones. Words become vehicles for feeling and inspire a sense of shared experience in listeners. Political speech also provides a forum for powerful ideas. Though mere words, statements like Dr. King's "I have a dream," Sojourner Truth's "Ain't I a woman?" and Booker T. Washington's "Cast down your buckets" have changed the course of history.

The Art of the Spoken Word

The artistic use of the spoken word in African American culture today draws on and reflects a rich literary and musical heritage, and the interaction among these genres, as in the past, has produced some of America's best-known art forms. Just as Langston Hughes and writers of the Harlem Renaissance were inspired by the feelings of the blues and the African American spiritual, contemporary hip-hop and slam poetry artists are inspired by poets like Hughes in their use of metaphor, alliteration, rhythm, and wordplay. Similarly, the experimental and often radical statements of the Black Arts Movement developed a synergy with cutting-edge jazz and funk music that would expand the boundaries of African American cultural expression, and thereby provide space for increasingly alternative political ideologies to be raised, discussed, and acknowledged.

The voices here testify to the power of African American oral traditions. As professor and music writer Robert Cataliotti notes in the liner notes to Smithsonian Folkways' collection Every Tone a Testimony, these oral traditions serve not merely as pieces of history; rather they have provided "a way of remembering, a way of enduring, a way of mourning, a way of celebrating, a way of protesting and subverting, and, ultimately, a way of triumphing."

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The spoken word occupies a central and indispensable position in African American history and culture. As a vessel for remembrance, the oral tradition carried African narratives to a new continent and sustained them through bondage; as a political catalyst, speech defined the struggle for

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This is a poetry reading by Sonia Sanchez from A Sun Lady For All Seasons.

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African American Spoken Word

The spoken word occupies a central and indispensable position in African American history and culture. As a vessel for remembrance, the oral tradition carried African narratives to a new continent and sustained them through bondage; as a political catalyst, speech defined the struggle for freedom and moved ordinary people to extraordinary acts of courage; and as an art form, the word has conveyed itself forcefully and dramatically by drawing on the rich African American musical heritage. The Smithsonian Folkways archives contain an unparalleled range of examples of African American spoken word recordings that express the richness, complexity, and diversity of African American oral traditions.

Sharing Stories, Creating Identity

Institutions of slavery and racism attempted to silence generations of African Americans; thus oral history became a means of maintaining identity, surviving, and resisting oppression and exploitation, as well as a tool for achieving freedom. Oral histories showcase personal stories and reflections, and offer African Americans a platform from which to define experiences and viewpoints apart from racist constructions. From the inspirational thoughts of visionary scholars and revolutionaries to the narratives of artists and everyday individuals, each history has added a chapter to a living document of struggle through powerful statements of identity. Viewed collectively, oral histories and recorded interviews demonstrate the rich diversity of African American experiences.

From the Pulpit to the Streets

African American history encompasses an abundance of speakers with inspiring things to say, and exciting ways to say them. The greatest of these speakers imbue their words with meaning by exploiting the musical potency of speech. As with African American preachers, who tend to involve their congregations in sermons through the dialectic of call and response, great speakers make their individual performances into communal ones. Words become vehicles for feeling and inspire a sense of shared experience in listeners. Political speech also provides a forum for powerful ideas. Though mere words, statements like Dr. King's "I have a dream," Sojourner Truth's "Ain't I a woman?" and Booker T. Washington's "Cast down your buckets" have changed the course of history.

The Art of the Spoken Word

The artistic use of the spoken word in African American culture today draws on and reflects a rich literary and musical heritage, and the interaction among these genres, as in the past, has produced some of America's best-known art forms. Just as Langston Hughes and writers of the Harlem Renaissance were inspired by the feelings of the blues and the African American spiritual, contemporary hip-hop and slam poetry artists are inspired by poets like Hughes in their use of metaphor, alliteration, rhythm, and wordplay. Similarly, the experimental and often radical statements of the Black Arts Movement developed a synergy with cutting-edge jazz and funk music that would expand the boundaries of African American cultural expression, and thereby provide space for increasingly alternative political ideologies to be raised, discussed, and acknowledged.

The voices here testify to the power of African American oral traditions. As professor and music writer Robert Cataliotti notes in the liner notes to Smithsonian Folkways' collection Every Tone a Testimony, these oral traditions serve not merely as pieces of history; rather they have provided "a way of remembering, a way of enduring, a way of mourning, a way of celebrating, a way of protesting and subverting, and, ultimately, a way of triumphing."

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The spoken word occupies a central and indispensable position in African American history and culture. As a vessel for remembrance, the oral tradition carried African narratives to a new continent and sustained them through bondage; as a political catalyst, speech defined the struggle for

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This is an article from The Smithsonian about the power of Black voice and its importance in oral poetry, storytelling, and other mediums.

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Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage

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The Power of Oratory

The power of words in African American culture is the power to affect the heart and head, ideas and ideals, to disclose the truth, to change lives. This phrase also refers to the power to influence others, either for good or evil, through language. The impact of strong oratory on American history is well documented. Some examples that come readily to mind include George Washington's Farewell Address, Frederick Douglass's "What to the Slave is Fourth of July?," Abraham Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address, or Fannie Lou Hamer's testimony before the Credentials Committee at the 1964 Democratic National Convention.

Because of the early limitations on their communication with one another, the concept of freedom of speech holds a special meaning for Americans of African descent. These Americans place a high value on effective speaking and rhetoric. Traditionally, the most eloquent speakers garner influence, respect, and admiration. Some, such as activist-comedian Dick Gregory and educator-comedian Bill Cosby, rely primarily on wit and economical verbal devices; others, among them museum director Johnnetta Betsch Cole and the late U.S. Representative Barbara Jordan, look to elevated diction and elaborate grammar. Whether speakers employ a less formal or a more structured approach, they often find inspiration or source material in oral expressions from the past, including spirituals, gospel, blues, and work songs.

Some of the first African American voices to gain the attention of whites were orators who could speak powerfully of the experience of being enslaved, such as Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth. Others included abolitionist figures such as Henry Highland Garnet, who in his famous 1843 "Address to the Slaves of America," exhorted enslaved blacks to strike for their own freedom. "Rather die free men than live to be slaves," he pronounced.

Several generations later, in response to the post-World War I race riots of 1919, the poet Claude McKay expressed a similar view in his poem, "If We Must Die": "Like men we'll face the murderous cowardly pack,/ pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!" Although the poem appeared in written form, its rhythm and rhyming beg for recitation aloud. During World War II, Winston Churchill uttered these now famous lines over the radio airwaves to rally the British during the blitzkrieg. These eloquent calls for resistance represent the often-expressed sentiments of blacks throughout their long struggle against repression and discrimination.

The 1920s and '30s brought a new, more literary voice to the desires, needs, and aspirations of black folk. The Harlem Renaissance flourished at that time, bringing to prominence African American intellectuals and writers with a keen ear for the voice of the folk, such as Sterling Brown, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston. In addition to the work of such distinguished literary figures, poetry in the form of the blues, gospel, ballads, and sermons revealed characteristics of black expression. Also in the 1930s, other common folk had their say when the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the Federal Writers' Project recorded the oral testimonies of ex-slaves. These personal stories provided firsthand accounts of the experience of slavery and valuable examples of vernacular black expression.
"Sounds of the Civil Rights Movement," a Smithsonian Folkways playlist
In every epoch of American history, black voices not only have called for resistance, but also have spoken constructively to reaffirm the nation's principles and to hold America accountable for the fulfillment of its core democratic values of freedom and equality. The calls for deliverance from the bonds of slavery later became the language used to demand civil, labor, women's, gay, and disability rights, as well as political, social, and cultural change. During the height of the modern civil rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr., in his 1963 speech "I Have a Dream," gave eloquent expression to the idea of equal rights for all Americans:

When we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! Free at last! Thank God almighty, we are free at last!"

"We Shall Overcome," the anthem of the movement led by King, became and remains the mantra for numerous social justice causes that have followed.

Storytelling

Rex Ellis, of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture, is a great storyteller himself and a member of the National Association of Black Storytellers. He likes to emphasize the storyteller's particular power to communicate and provide common ground:

[It is] the stock in trade of the spoken word ... and the tellers who bring the words to life ... who understand the essence and meaning of the words that have the power to inform, interpret, represent, transform, and empower the listener. Storytelling is a universal art that teaches norms, customs, and perspectives about a community and its culture.

The oral tale, as contrasted with a written text, is usually improvisational and to some degree communal-performed interactively, in dialogue with an audience. While storytelling is distinctive, it shares similarities with the art of oral poetry.

In recent years, storytelling has found new forms of expression in music videos and in the many interactive platforms of the Internet. At these online sites the doors are open to shared stories and experiences. A private incident or local performance can become a touchstone for millions.

Notable also is the way in which storytelling has evolved within the African American deaf community. Their signs, gestures, and body language represent art as well as communication. One need only experience the signer who performs with Sweet Honey in the Rock to recognize this distinctive mode of black expression. Like other black communities, deaf African Americans were segregated for decades from the larger deaf population and evolved independently. As a result, black sign-language users developed their own distinctive gestures, and a general preference for using more two-handed signs than is common amongst the broader group.

Poetry

Young poets during the second half of the twentieth century were inspired and nourished by earlier generations of black poets, including such renowned figures as Phillis Wheatley, Paul Laurence Dunbar, James Weldon Johnson, and Langston Hughes. But these later artists felt the need for a new genre of poetry that would suit their activist approach to the world.

They developed a more assertive, confrontational style of writing and delivery that allowed figures such as Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, Haki Madhubuti, E. Ethelbert Miller, and Sonia Sanchez to play an important role in the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Through performers such as Gil Scott-Heron and the Last Poets, this new black poetry influenced early street rap poetry and rap music, which in turn nurtured the hip-hop and spoken word movements among a younger wave of artists.

Building on the past, the new black poetry functions on a sacred-secular continuum. It favors a pronounced rhythmic pattern and uses the Black idiom-including rap, call-and-response, and signification.

Spoken Word

Classified sometimes as poetry and sometimes as hip-hop, spoken word is a literary art form in which the lyrics or words are spoken, not sung. Spoken-word events are presented occasionally as performance poetry set against a musical background with a percussive beat. In African American spoken word, those artists whose backgrounds include more formal literary training (and who generally are older and defined as poets) are distinct from the younger, more contemporary practitioners who may come from an educated background or the subcultures of hip-hop, rap, or the street. As a result, the realm of spoken word has seen an evolution of the form and an expanded range of practitioners across several generations.

Since the mid-1980s, one popular venue for observing spoken word in action is the "poetry slam," a competitive art form that combines poetry and performance. Events sanctioned by Poetry Slam, Inc., and those organized by Russell Simmons's Def Poetry Jam, take place across the United States. Tanya Matthews, an active spoken-word artist based in Cincinnati, suggests that in such venues spoken word can be evaluated by the way in which the words are rhymed to a rhythm, by the back beat, by its musical accompaniment, and by whether it is an oral or written composition.
Read "Say It Loud: African American Spoken Word" from Smithsonian Folkways
Oral Histories

Walt Whitman, one of America's great poets, observed in 1855 that "the genius of the United States is not best or most in its executive or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges or churches or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors-but always most in the common people." In the case of African Americans, oral sources-coming directly from "common people"-offer new, illuminating perspectives and insights to inform American history.

And in the case of the 1930s WPA recordings of former slaves, oral testimonies and personal narratives provide fertile material for cultural historians who seek not only the content of these testimonies, but also their manner of verbal expression. Similar benefits came from the narrative use of oral history in Alex Haley's book, Roots, as well as the hundreds of interviews of African Americans collected recently through StoryCorps' Griot project done in collaboration with the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Oral histories may supply important information on a variety of practices-including agricultural methods and foodways, clothing styles and adornment, and tangible places such as one's home, neighborhood, school, sanctuary, street, or street corner. Exposure to such firsthand accounts can evoke personal memories and help others to recall their own favorite tales and stories.
Read the Smithsonian Folklife and Oral History Interviewing Guide
Conclusion

The National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Smithsonian Folklife Festival have demonstrated their commitment to documenting and preserving the oral expressions of a people whose voices were muzzled, who were denied the opportunity to read and to write, and whose speeches and oratory often did not survive.

A people's culture is inexorably linked to its language, and by helping to raise public awareness of African American linguistic creativity, the museum highlights a major aspect of black culture. In the process, the museum moves closer to its goals of helping all Americans to learn more about African American history and culture, and to understand and appreciate how this history and culture provide a powerful lens for understanding what it truly means to be an American.

James Alexander Robinson was the curator for Giving Voice: The Power of Words in African American Culture at the 2009 Smithsonian Folklife Festival. He is a doctoral candidate in interdisciplinary black studies at the University of Iowa.

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Giving Voice: The Power of Words in African American Culture

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The power of words in African American culture is the power to affect the heart and head, ideas and ideals, to disclose the truth, to change lives.

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This is a poem by Neiel Israel, "When a Black Man Walks."

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"Become a Slam Poet in 5 Steps" by Gayle Danley

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"Become a Slam Poet in 5 Steps" by Gayle Danley

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This is a TedEDU feature of Gayle Danley's spoken word poem about writing spoken word poetry. It is told from the lens of a student in an English Classroom trying to write his first spoken word poem.

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Become a slam poet in five steps - Gayle Danley

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Steven Willis's poem talks about Ebonics and Black language in his poem "Ebonics 101."

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"I Want To Write A Poem" by Rudy Francisco 

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"I Want To Write A Poem" by Rudy Francisco 

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This is a video of Rudy Francisco's performance of "I Want To Write A Poem."

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Rudy Francisco -  I want to write a poem

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This is an article further detailing the history and origins of slam poetry and its connection to Black culture.

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Early in Spoken Word: A Cultural History (Knopf, 2023), Joshua Bennett assures the many parties keeping vigil over poetry that the ancient art remains alive and well in the United States. "Spoken word is the best possible rejoinder to anyone claiming that poetry in this country is dead or not relevant to younger generations," he writes. The curiously evergreen and SEO-friendly question of whether poetry matters has been posed so often this millennium that, in 2014, the Los Angeles Review of Books responded with an essay titled " How Much Does 'Does Poetry Matter' Matter? "

Although the late literary critic Harold Bloom disparaged slam-a competitive form of spoken word-as "the death of art" in 2000, its attitude, aesthetics, and techniques seeped into films, TV shows, music, and other art forms around the world. Bennett details this global footprint in Spoken Word, but he never treats his tour of the genre, which he defines as verse crafted to be performed for an audience, as a victory lap. For him, spoken word isn't interesting because it won the culture war against stuffy academics and their dusty canons; the value of spoken word lies in how it reared and continues to nurture its own culture. And in his view, that heritage of autonomy and aegis should shape how people understand it.

Bennett, a repeat slam champion who writes poetry and criticism, has intimate knowledge of his subject but approaches it with humility and imagination. He threads research, interviews, autobiography, and close readings of poems and related texts into a nonlinear jaunt through the spoken word archives. Perhaps in deference to prior books, such as Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz's Words in Your Face (2007) and Susan B. A. Somers-Willett's The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry (2009), he does not attempt an exhaustive account. He's more interested in highlighting the genre's radical and communal roots and views history as a means of rekindling that rebellious upbringing. "I hope to reclaim the political ethos and persistent dreaming of a moment that is both part of our shared past and still among us," he writes, alluding to the legacy of activism in spoken word circles. Even readers who don't share Bennett's political investment in spoken word will appreciate his use of our and us, which underscores the welcoming spirit of his project. At its core, his history invites readers to appreciate spoken word's myriad contributions to the arts, community organizing, and self-expression. Its culture, as he shows, surrounds everyone.

***

Bennett opens the book with an anecdote about performing at the Obama White House in 2009, when he was a junior in college. He nimbly details the sights and sounds of each leg of his journey from the University of Pennsylvania to Pennsylvania Avenue: the hip-hop and dancehall blaring in the hallways of his dorm establish his immersion in the rhythms of Black music and Black speech. His nervous recitation of his poem aboard Amtrak captures the constant practice performing well requires; the soundcheck and a cipher with other poets and performers convey the easy camaraderie of the scene. The attendees, which include Bennett's family and luminaries such as Spike Lee, demonstrate the diversity of spoken word audiences.

By the time Bennett performs "Tamara's Opus," a work about his once-ableist relationship with his deaf sister, he has quietly laid out the breadth of the world of spoken word as well as the thesis of his book. "At its heart, spoken word is a social form," he argues. "It demands engagement and requires an audience of listeners in order to function." That social dynamic imbues spoken word with political power, but Bennett never says the form is inherently radical, noting that oral poems can be as whimsical or slick as they are militant. Though he admits the political thrust of the poets he studies, in his view, the genre is defined by the spaces it creates and connects through readings, competitions, workshops, and the simple act of congregating. The thrill of the book is how expansive his idea of space is, a mode captured in the opening anecdote's sinuous movement from private to casual to formal settings.

Bennett organizes the book into meaty but digestible chapters on the Nuyorican poetry movement, the birth of slam, and spoken word's new life on social media. Though he devotes ample time to marquee names such as Paul Beatty and Patricia Smith and storied institutions such as the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in New York, the Green Mill Cocktail Lounge in Chicago, and the Brave New Voices festival, he treats these as concourses rather than terminuses. Within every famous space or career, he finds bridges, footpaths, and portals that connect the art to social movements and to the world around it. The result is an account of spoken word that's compact but wide-ranging.

The Nuyorican Poets Cafe is the first major stop. Beginning in 1973, the late poet and Rutgers professor Miguel Algarín hosted regular readings, workshops, and hangouts in his Lower East Side living room, gatherings that Bennett describes as "some combination of a rent party and a rehearsal for the future world." The attendees-mostly poets and playwrights Algarín knew-read their work, critiqued each other, and chatted. "More than anything, there was a lot of talking going on," poet Sandra Maria Esteves tells Bennett. She doesn't romanticize the space, though, noting that some of the men in attendance patronized the women. "I was not silenced. I spoke my mind. That got me in a lot of trouble with a lot of people," she says with a mix of pride and mischief.

That defiant and playful sensibility was a calling card of the group's poetry and Nuyorican art, which was taking shape in Algarín's apartment, at other local venues such as New Rican Village and El Museo del Barrio, and in the lived experiences of second- and third-generation Puerto Ricans then coming of age in New York City. Straddling the cultures and languages of their island and city homes, the Nuyoricans turned their alterity into art, an ethos Victor Hernández-Cruz distilled in a 1975 interview: "Because of the position I am coming from, my mission is to change the English language into what I am." By 1975, Algarín's gatherings were so popular that he rented a pub across the street. That move allowed performers and listeners from beyond Algarín's orbit to drift in, an accessibility that changed the salon into a public forum. After three years of packed weekly shows at the pub, Algarín used state and federal grants to buy a building in his neighborhood, thus giving the cafe a permanent home.

By this point, the cafe featured performances by established writers such as Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Amiri Baraka. Bennett seizes this overlap to thread the links between the Nuyoricans, Beat poetry, the Black Arts Movement, and hip-hop, which had been fomenting since Algarín first assembled people in his living room. Jumping back in time, Bennett details the short-lived Black Arts Repertory/Theater School that Baraka founded in Harlem in 1965. The school was open for only a year because of infighting among staff and a racist disinformation campaign that tanked public funding, but Bennett dwells at length on its ambitions. The BARTS curriculum combined dramatic, political, technical, and remedial instruction, a program that Bennett reads as an attempt to "prepare a generation of young people to enter the world with any and every instrument they might need to flourish in an anti-black world."

Bennett argues that spoken word became a microcosm of that effort to make radical art with and for the public, aims Baraka made explicit in 1980 when he told The Greenfield Review, "The page doesn't interest me that much-not as much as the actual spoken word." Though BARTS vanished, its ideas lived on, propagated through records such as Nikki Giovanni's Truth Is On Its Way (1971) and The Last Poets' 1970 self-titled debut and collectives such as the Nuyorican Poets Cafe and Boricua Artists Guild. To speak aloud was to summon an audience, and to be heard by that assembly, poets had to recognize the crowd's needs and demands, a dynamic that became important as slam emerged in Chicago.

***

Slam is undoubtedly the most recognized form of spoken word. In the 1990s and 2000s, films such as Love Jones (1997) and Slam (1998), television shows such as Def Poetry Jam and United States of Poetry, live events such as MTV's Free Your Mind and Spoken Word Unplugged tours, and regular media coverage pushed slam into the national spotlight. The audience for the form grew so rapidly that spoken word record labels such as Mouth Almighty and NuYo Records launched. Much of this momentum was a product of slam's proximity to rap, which by the 1990s was both a commercial juggernaut and a fixture of American youth culture. The art forms became so intertwined that a lengthy New Yorker feature touted the connection. "In the next couple of hours, the audience will be rowdily cheering on the performers; we could be at an evening of Martin Lawrence doing standup, or KRS-One giving a rap concert. Actually, we're at a poetry reading," Henry Louis Gates Jr. wrote in 1995, reporting from a slam at New York's famous music venue S.O.B.'s. But Bennett notes that the genre also grew on its own grassroots terms, cultivating audiences in libraries, coffee shops, and bookstores.

Slam originated in Chicago in the mid-1980s. Construction worker and poet Marc Smith hosted weekly competitions at the Get Me High Lounge, a small jazz storefront in the city's Wicker Park neighborhood that blended vaudeville, comedy, and traditional poetry readings. The events were inspired by other Chicago gigs, such as "poetry boxing" matches that took place in actual boxing rings and a traveling poetry circus, and coalesced into a form that prioritized audience reception. Random attendees judged poets through cheers, jeers, and, later, scores. Smith exported that structure to a weekly cabaret show at the Green Mill Cocktail Lounge in 1986.

From there, slam spread across the country, finding homes in such major urban centers as Atlanta and Los Angeles and in smaller cities, such as Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Dayton, Ohio. The Nuyorican Poets , which closed in 1982 but reopened in 1989 as slam was taking off, became a bulwark of the form, hosting multi-night competitions and designating slam champions. In 1990, organizers held the first National Poetry Slam in San Francisco, an annual event that was the subject of the documentary SlamNation (1998).

Slam's raised profile and populist design drew criticism from the academy and from some written and spoken word poets. Musician, actor, and poet Saul Williams became a slam champion, but when he first encountered the genre in Brooklyn in the 1990s, he "was actually disgusted by the idea of competing with poetry," he tells Bennett. The poet Rafael Alvarado told the Los Angeles Times in 1997, "In slams, whoever screams the most and performs best, wins. It's not the quality of the work." That internal criticism intensified as commercial forces entered the picture. Tyehimba Jess describes SlamNation, a cult classic among slam poets that was their introduction to the form in the 1990s, as a double-edged sword. He tells Bennett that over the course of the film, competitor Taylor Mali is "formulating ... how to win the slam. It became formulaic."

By 2009, following the HBO docuseries Brave New Voices, which follows the teen competitors of the annual Brave New Voices Festival-and which Bennett stars in-even Marc Smith grew frustrated with the form. "At the beginning, this was really a grass-roots thing about people who were writing poetry for years and years and years and had no audience," he told the New York Times. "Now there's an audience, and people just want to write what the last guy wrote so they can get their face on TV." Bennett's emphasis on the political potential of spoken word stems from the same frustrations regarding how commerce affects art.

But throughout the book, he notes the ways in which slam poets raised during and after this commercial boom resisted cheapening the form, a spirit that the comparatively more-obscure documentary Poetic License (1999) captures. That film ends with the teen poets canceling the competition to "go on strike" and throw a party, a precedent that Bennett's own Brave New Voices team followed when they resigned from the competition and performed to be heard rather than to win. "We realized that we had gotten entirely too caught up in the competitive element of the festival," he writes. "The festival was supposed to be a way to feel a little bit less alone, to share new work and meet people you never would have otherwise."

***

In the book's final chapter, Bennett details contemporary efforts to maintain the communalism of spoken word through recording and sharing performances online. Noting the closure of many performance venues and the dissolution of regional and independent festivals, trends that predated the Covid-19 pandemic but worsened during it, he considers the complexities of the art's finding a new home on social media. Bennett's own attempt at an online spoken word space, The Strivers Row, flamed out after a few years as he and his cofounders pursued other interests. But in the Minneapolis-based Button Poetry, whose founders Bennett interviews for the book, he scries the future of spoken word. In some sense, the sheer audience of the hybrid YouTube channel and publishing house demands his attention. "As it stands, the way a vast number [of] young people on Planet Earth are encountering the genre of spoken word poetry is through the Button Poetry platform," he writes, citing the million-plus subscribers and video views.

But Bennett's conversations with the Button team aren't particularly fruitful. No strong or clear purpose seems to direct their dutiful chronicling of spoken word performances across the country. Sam Cook, the group's head honcho, offers a rather transactional origin story for the company. "The desire is there, the audience is there, and I have the skills to connect the two," he says of the epiphany that led him to build Button in 2011. There's nothing wrong with finding a niche, but the functional motive highlights the relative silence of audiences throughout the book. As Bennett cited subscriber and viewer numbers, I wondered: who are these people seeking spoken word? Why do they choose to experience poetry together?

Bennett shows that across the genre's history, writers have come to spoken word in search of community and their own voices and to realize their personal and political ideals. But he doesn't dwell much on the audience members who jeer, cry, applaud, and now comment virtually from the sidelines. Won't they shape the future of spoken word as much as the poets soliciting their eyes and ears? More important, can anyone fully understand the genre's past without hearing their voices?

This silence is not unique to Bennett's account nor does it sink it. Spoken word has long been historicized primarily by and through evangelical practitioners and organizers, many of whom say the form saved their lives, as rapper, actor, and slam poet Daveed Diggs told the Washington Post in 2016. But this silence stood out to me in Bennett's book because one of the most affecting scenes in HBO's Brave New Voices is Bennett reading his family a powerful poem about his father's sacrifices. His dad is interviewed after and says, "Now I feel complete as a father." It's a striking and deeply particular response to poetry, one I can only imagine many people must share as they fill auditoriums, bars, cafés, and living rooms worldwide.

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Spoken Like a True Poet by Stephen Kearse | Poetry Foundation

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In Joshua Bennett's history of spoken word, poetry is alive and well thanks to a movement that began in living rooms and bars.

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My goal for this text set is for it to accompany a poetry unit, focusing on poetry that was written to be performed, as well as tackling the issue of the historic failure to recognize Black language as a powerful and legitimate form of expression. I also hope this text set will accompany the work I would like to accomplish in the poetry unit of dismantling the idea that there are certain types of poetry (elevated, flowery language in White Mainstream English) that are better than others. One of my favorite courses I took here at the University of Georgia was 20th Century American Poetry. While we read many diverse poets and had exposure to a wide range and selection of artists, there was a lack of linguistic diversity in the curriculum. I have noticed a similar lack of many of the poetry units I completed in my own secondary education. While no professor or teacher I had in the past ever advocated that poetry written in WME is better than any other poetic language, I do think that its lack of inclusion in the curriculum is something that must be corrected. As a student, I have heard many conversations surrounding the definition of poetry and what deserves to ‘count’ from other students. There are many who advocate that ‘good’ poetry must have a certain formulaic standard, adhere to certain meters and rhymes, typically found in older European poetry. My hope is that this text set can work to challenge these harmful misconceptions. The articles “I’m Is Talking Right,” and “Speaking Our Own Language” are designed to educate students unfamiliar with linguistic injustice on the historic and continued discrimination against Black language usage. “Say It Loud,” “Spoken Like a True Poet,” and “The Power of Voice,” are designed to educate students both on the history and power of Black language as a medium of spoken word. I have also included the examples A Sun Lady For All Seasons by Sonia Sanchez, When A Black Man Walks by Neiel Israel, and Ebonics 101 and I Want To Write A Poem by Rudy Francisco are all examples of poetry that use powerful language and expression to advocate for a variety of social issues, including linguistic justice issues. Finally, students will have the option to write any kind of the poems covered in the broader poetry unit. The last text, Become A Slam Poet In Five Steps by Gayle Danley, is a poem about writing spoken word in Black language. This text would be a helpful mentor text in modeling not only the process, but also the form of Black spoken word for Black students that may want to choose this type of poem to create.