Along with many people in the news business, I have been puzzling about why the controversy over the Oakland School Board decision happened when it did, and I've also tried to understand how it got to be such a big national issue. A vote by a lameduck local school board, taken past 11 at night, within a few weeks became literally the talk of the nation, consuming public broadcast, commercial broadcast, the newspapers, the Internet and posing sharp questions, not just addressed to the local Oakland officials, or the California State Superintendent of Public Instruction, but also to the US Secretary of Education. And it wasn't just the professional and intellectual elites engaging in the feeding frenzy. From the very parochial perspective of the news business, this was a fascinating phenomenon to observe. This controversy unfolded over the Christmas holiday season.
Holidays are notorious for a slowdown in real news.
The news media were bored with doing more stories about holiday shopping, the Simpson trial was in hiatus, election coverage was mercifully over. December 19, when the board took its fateful vote on the Ebonics policy, was the perfect timing for a new controversy to begin in order to make the biggest possible impact. Besides the timing, another inside-journalism factor was involved. A handful of gatekeepers in the news business allowed a novel and mysterious term to be loosed suddenly on an unsuspecting public. As the linguists tell us, the term Ebonics has been in the literature for more than 15 years.