According to Ralph Ellison in his 1970 Time magazine piece, “What America Would Be Like Without Blacks,” “if there is such a thing as a Yale accent, there is a Negro wail in it–doubtless introduced there by Old Yalie John C. Calhoun, who probably got it from his mammy.” I completely disagree with Ellison. The effects of blacks on certain parts of American English are evident in a few places, but the history and development of English follows that of the white native sons and tongues of Shakespeare and Chaucer, not the assorted (non-written) languages of west African chattel slaves. This is one of the things that I don’t like about blacks; their tendency to lay claim to the building and resulting greatness of the West.
Picking cotton, tilling soil, and whipping up sweet potato pies were helpful and important in their own way, but were nothing like the establishment of private property rights or the implementation of Enlightenment-era ideals in the New World, which guided the nation for generations. It would be akin to a Native American claiming that, because his ancestors shared corn and turkey with early European settlers one fine November day, they are as important as the descendants of those white settlers who would fight the British and build the America in which we live today.
Picking cotton, tilling soil, and whipping up sweet potato pies were helpful and important in their own way, but were nothing like the establishment of private property rights or the implementation of Enlightenment-era ideals in the New World, which guided the nation for generations. It would be akin to a Native American claiming that, because his ancestors shared corn and turkey with early European settlers one fine November day, they are as important as the descendants of those white settlers who would fight the British and build the America in which we live today.
