Politics & Power Quote by William Labov

Labov’s line detonates a comfortable origin story: that African American English is a linguistic fossil preserved from slavery. By calling it a “creation of the second half of the 20th century,” he shifts the frame from inheritance to innovation, from passive survival to active social engineering. The phrasing matters. “Appears” signals a scholar’s caution, but it also dares the reader to abandon a moralized narrative in which Black speech is either a wound or an artifact. Labov is insisting on agency, change, and modernity.

The subtext is political even when the syntax is clinical. If AAE isn’t simply a relic, then treating it as broken English with a tragic backstory collapses. It becomes a system shaped by migration, segregation, urbanization, media, schooling, and peer networks - the same forces that produce any dialect. The “second half of the 20th century” points straight at the Great Migration’s aftershocks and the cementing of Northern and Western ghettos, where dense social ties can accelerate linguistic features into a recognizable, shared variety.

Contextually, Labov is pushing back against both romantic primitivism and deficit models. He’s also reminding linguistics (and the public) that languages don’t only drift; they can crystallize under pressure. That’s the sting: America didn’t just inherit a dialect from slavery. Postwar America helped manufacture the conditions for a new one, then punished its speakers for sounding like the world it built.