In January 1973 Robert Williams hosted a conference in St. Louis titled "Cognitive and Language Development of the Black Child." Two years later he published Ebonics: The True Language of Black Folks. There he defined Ebonics in the Pan-African tradition of W. E. B. Du Bois. Over two decades later, Williams affirmed the international foundations of his linguistic creation. During testimony before the U.S. Senate, he stated:

Ebonics has two major dimensions as a language:

1.  A lexicon or the vocabulary of the language, 

2.  Morphology or the study of the structure and form of the language that include its grammatical rules. Ebonics may be defined as the linguistic and paralinguistic features which on a concentric continuum represent the communicative competence of the West African, Caribbean, and United States slave descendent of African origin. It includes the grammar, various idioms, patois, argots, and social dialects of Black people. (Williams 1975: vi) 

As this original definition indicates, Ebonics is the linguistic and paralinguistic consequence of the African slave trade. It developed in West Africa, as well as throughout the former European colonies of North and South America wherever slaves were sold into bondage. Ebonics, under this earliest definition, was never intended to apply narrowly to the United States--and therein lies part of the confusion that has resulted from the Ebonics controversy. Before coining "Ebonics," Williams was best known for his research on standardized IQ tests, and his long-standing critique of racial bias-particularly against blacks--embodied in traditional standardized norm referenced IQ tests. He devised a series of alternative tests, including the Black Intelligence Test of Cultural Homogeneity (BITCH), which proved to he controversial for some because it intentionally inverted racial bias in favor of African Americans. Nevertheless, black children did score significantly higher on the Ebonics version than on the standard English version. The following two examples show Williams' method of code switching or translation:

1.  Standard English: Mark the toy that is behind the sofa.

EBONICS: Mark the toy that is in back of the couch.

 2.  Standard English: Point to the squirrel that is beginning to climb the tree.

EBONICS: Point to the squirrel that is fixing to climb the tree.

As Williams explains:

What I discovered was that, in the first example, the words [sic] "behind" and "sofa" were blocking agents. I translated both words to "in back of" and "couch." In the second example, I translated the term "beginning" to "fixing to." These changes produced dramatic positive changes in the children's test scores. (Williams 1997b:3)

Herein lies another significant source of linguistic controversy: The "Ebonics translations" are not exclusive to African Americans. Are the terms "in back of" or "couch" or "fixing to" unique to Ebonics? No, they are not; rather, they represent colloquial or regional dialect variations that unquestionably exceed black America. Most native speakers of American English--regardless of race--might use the expression "in back of the couch." Others, especially in the South, could easily use the expression "fixing to" with the identical meaning that Williams attributes to Ebonics.

As one who has long been critical of racial bias in standardized tests, I am sympathetic to Williams' aspirations for racially neutral ones, especially in such "high stakes" tests as the Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT) or the Graduate Record Examination (GRE). However, greater linguistic specificity is essential to eliminating test bias. Such "translations" may have closed gaps in standardized test scores between black and white children, but they expose important linguistic problems pertaining to the definition of Ebonics, especially if one claims that Ebonics is unique to African Americans (Smith 1992, 1998). Considerable care and more precise attention to linguistic details must therefore be forthcoming from those who endorse and advocate Ebonics. The transformation of Ebonics from its international origins to its global unveiling as pertaining to Oakland's students of African descent has resulted in competing international and domestic Ebonics definitions. This process took more than two decades, and a host of political, legal, educational, and linguistic ingredients simmered within a racial pressure cooker that eventually exploded. . .

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