The DEA is hiring black people to snitch on other black people. This is how slavery got started – using black people to catch other black people. Today, tricks are paid in cash.
What qualifies someone to be a traitor, er, translator? Will they actually hire someone from the streets or do they just only have to understand street? I’m sure the highly educated, qualified black people with “ethnic” names that cannot get hired elsewhere because of their names are running for this position!
Didn’t the DEA see the Thank You For Not Snitching episode of The Boondocks? I know they watch the news every day and see that black people don’t tell on each other. Unless there’s a price involved. What’s the going rate of snitching these days, anyway?
2. Nine translators are being hired. This really puts a dent in the high unemployment rate in the African American Community. The overall unemployment rate is 9.5 % with total rate of black people being 15.6%. The rates for black men and women are 16.7% and 12.9% respectively. I feel the progress already!
3. Translators are needed for “undercover drug investigations.” What happens when if they find out their targets are not black? Will they get fired? I guess they’re not good enough for white collar crimes of Wall Street. No translation needed, there.
4. Ebonics was not recognized as a language, but it’s acknowledged at the government’s convenience. This is the same entity that said that black slaves were not human; they have to vote to determine if black people should have the right to vote; and they used Negro on the 2010 census. I guess now that the government has acknowledged Ebonics, Microsoft will include the translation in the next Office upgrade.
5. “…The ideal candidate would be a native speaker who also has had some linguistics training.” Translation: Ebonics is my first language with English running a close second. When they can understand me, knowwhatimsaying?
I could go on and on with this one. Just had to humor myself a bit.
Straight from the Associated Press:
“ATLANTA – Federal agents are seeking to hire Ebonics translators to help interpret wiretapped conversations involving targets of undercover drug investigations.
The Drug Enforcement Agency recently sent memos asking companies that provide translation services to help it find nine translators in the Southeast who are fluent in Ebonics, Special Agent Michael Sanders said Monday.
Ebonics, which is also known as African American Vernacular English, has been described by the psychologist who coined the term as the combination of English vocabulary with African language structure.
Some DEA agents already help translate Ebonics, Sanders said. But he said wasn’t sure if the agency has ever hired outside Ebonics experts as contractors.
“They saw a need for this in a couple of their investigations,” he said. “And when you see a need — it may not be needed now — but we want the contractors to provide us with nine people just in case.”
H. Samy Alim, a Stanford linguistics professor who specializes in black language and hip-hop culture, said he thought the hiring effort was a joke when he first heard about it, but that it highlights a serious issue.
“It seems ironic that schools that are serving and educating black children have not recognized the legitimacy of this language. Yet the authorities and the police are recognizing that this is a language that they don’t understand,” he said. “It really tells us a lot about where we are socially in terms of recognizing African-American speech.”
Rickford said that hiring Ebonics experts could come in handy for the DEA, but he said it’s hard to determine whether a prospective employee can speak it well enough to translate since there are no standardized tests. He said the ideal candidate would be a native speaker who also has had some linguistics training.
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