Robin Sabino
 

In June 2008, a comment that vividly illustrates continuing existence of a Eurocentric bias with respect to culture and language in the African Diaspora appeared in the Sound Off column of a local newspaper. The anonymous contributor wrote, “We have training of insurgents in the United States. We call them hip-hoppers. They are trained as thugs in culture and language.” Although the recent election of an African-American president has brought comments such as these to public attention, flagrantly racist notions have been a part of the West’s thinking about the people and cultures of sub-Saharan Africa since Classical times. As the quote illustrates, they continue to influence perceptions of members of the African Diaspora.
            We can achieve an understanding of how such thinking came about and why it persists by examining the intersections between 1) the development of European grammar writing and language standardization, 2) the development of Europe’s understanding of the relationships between race, culture, thought, and language, and 3) the development of the African slave trade and the emergence New World contact languages.
            Arguing from the perspective of language contact in the Caribbean, the discussion considers evidence from several academic disciplines: linguistics, history, religion, philosophy and biology. The paper illustrates why our Western hegemonic perspective predisposes us to incorrectly assume that the superiority of European languages made them a universally desired outcome of cultural contact. It also suggests that due to this assumption, researchers have underestimated the roles that resistance and cultural persistence have played in the creation and maintenance of the languages of the African Diaspora.
            The discussion concludes by observing that since educational systems are loci for cultural bias, even though linguists eschew blatantly racist assumptions about human language, we should continue to be vigilant when interpreting or discussing material relevant to creation of the cultures and languages of the African Diaspora.