So I was watching that in this, this Spanish bar. And then George Bush came on the television news, and he said, ‘We are gonna get them folks what done this.’ And that annoyed me for two reasons. One, because it was grammatically inaccurate. And secondly, ’cause you could already see the terrible kind of cultural fallout of what this was going to mean. There was suddenly a horrible tension between the Arab Spaniards and the white European Spaniards in this previously…

Black English is the creation of the black diaspora. Blacks came to the United States chained to each other, but from different tribes: Neither could speak the other’s language. If two black people, at that bitter hour of the world’s history, had been able to speak to each other, the institution of chattel slavery could never have lasted as long as it did. Subsequently, the slave was given, under the eye, and the gun, of his master, Congo Square, and the Bible—or in other words, and under these conditions, the slave began the formation of the black church, and it is within this unprecedented tabernacle that black English began to be formed.This was not, merely, as in the European example, the adoption of a foreign tongue, but an alchemy that transformed ancient elements into a new language: A language comes into existence by means of brutal necessity, and the rules of the language are dictated by what the language must convey.