A former student of the Oakland public schools argues that from slavery's spirituals to today's hip-hop, black English has been critical to black Americans' survival. What's needed now is to revamp the educational system in Oakland so it serves the community. PNS commentator Kevin Weston, an associate editor of YO! (Youth Outlook), is an editor at Bay View, a weekly black newspaper in San Francisco. This article also appeared in the Sunday Opinion section of the Los Angeles Times.

OAKLAND, CA. -- It's called "Ebonics" now.

The blues then.

It's really pain.

I remember coming home from kindergarten, Afro blowin' in the Oakland wind, talkin' about:

"I'm fixin' to go outside."

"What did you say, boy?"

My mother was always wary of those "fools in the streets," and when I came home talking like somebody she was afraid of, or afraid of me becoming, she put me right in check.

"Fixin' is not a word. I am about to go outside. Say it."

"I am about to go outside."

Standard English was drummed into my head until I decided to speak it exclusively around white people, "bougie" Negroes and the elders in my family. I would speak to my homies as I pleased.

I already knew the majority of teachers would not understand a word I said (they were mostly old, white and looked at me with a smirk that I couldn't understand). I knew I'd have to struggle to learn in a hostile environment; that the culture of my neighborhood streets was considered worthless at home as well as at school.

Later, I came to know how that culture developed, what it meant. The transatlantic slave trade robbed Africans in America of our land, culture and language; the experience of slavery further dehumanized and divided us. We've had to turn English upside down to survive this North American madness.

"Bad" became "good" to us.

Spirituals dedicated to a strange and foreign god became freedom songs with hidden messages, letting the people know when it was time to break north, or burn the fields and kill the "massa." The rhythm of working in the sugar-cane fields from "can't see in de morning to can't see at night" became the rhythm of funk and blues.

Hip-hop music, the latest modification in the art of black language, transmits ideas and culture among the descendants of a stolen people, across continents and waters. Hip-hop's lexicon changes month by month, region by region. A word may mean one thing in Oakland, another in Atlanta. A term we use today is old by next week. The youth drive the changes as a new generation adds on to the language of a people who need to be able to speak to each other without the master culture in our mix.

The way black people communicate is always a magnet for controversy. This season's furor is over the Oakland Unified School District's resolution recognizing Ebonics as a language, and its practitioners as bilingual. The initial frenzy was based on a misconception: that the school board was advocating Ebonics be taught in the classroom. The district hired a PR firm to swear that's not what they meant.

Maybe they should have meant it. We need Ebonics.

What we don't need is the Oakland Unified School District, the very same institution that inspired point five of the Black Panther Party's 10-point program:

"We want an education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches our true history and our role in present day society."

The hubbub over Ebonics obscures a deeper issue: The Oakland schools are falling apart. Take Castlemont High School, serving black and Latino East Oakland. Major renovations were halted midway because community groups were upset over the lack of minority contractors on the work site. Cost overruns and administrative red tape have made things worse. The side of the building facing MacArthur Boulevard is "toe' up from the flo' up." An entire class, graduating this year, has never taken a class in the main building.

Students and teachers are so frustrated that everyday learning has been replaced by socializing, weed smoking and general pandemonium. Students know they are receiving an inferior education that is preparing them for a shrinking welfare system or a booming penitentiary industry. But they feel powerless to change the way their education is administered.

Ebonics' opponents say black children must learn standard English to make them employable, to prepare them for a role in mainstream society. But as affirmative action is gutted and top-level discrimination revealed, where are the jobs that standard English is supposed to win us? Does corporate America have a new plan for us "black jellybeans" that we haven't been told about yet?

Until that plan is revealed, why stop with resolutions legitimizing black English? If Castlemont is toe' up, why not rebuild it from the flo' up? At the legendary Tuskegee Institute, Booker T. Washington had students build their college from the ground up. Why can't the students of Castlemont be instructed on how to make that happen for themselves and their community?

In a post-welfare black America, something as basic as education of the children should be under the control of the community. Then, Ebonics would make sense. Children would be trained to serve the community, not corporations that have little use for them, anyway. Teachers would be from the community, well-versed -- not "trained" -- in the students' home vernacular.

Worn-out children's rhymes would be replaced by hip-hop music, which would transmit complex ideas while retaining ghetto rhyme and rhythm. Standard English would be taught, along with Spanish and other languages spoken by people the students need to communicate with.

Today, Ebonics is the issue that has everyone up in arms. Tomorrow, it just might be the takeover of the district by a people in need of a relevant education.