Racism. It's in there.

I saw a TV spot the other day for Prego tomato sauce. It featured a nice middle-class African-American couple in their nice middle-class kitchen. The spot ended with the man proclaiming that the Prego sauce was perfect as is by saying, "Nah, it don't need nothin'."

Middle-class white people in TV commercials never use such atrocious grammar -- unless they're supposed to be hillbillies of the Jethro Bodine variety.

I'd love to hear the rationale for making the African-American actor in the Prego spot sound like he had a fourth-grade education.

Comments

[Damon]

As a linguist, I'm a little offended by the notion that the way a lot of people (yes, even middle-class people in their middle-class kitchens) is treated as something "atrocious" and shameful to be hidden away. Many, perhaps most, varieties of English feature negative concord; a lot of people - educated, middle-class people, even - talk that way day to day, particularly in informal situations (like, say, cooking dinner with one's spouse). Research demonstrates that most middle-class black people are conversant in both Black English and Standard English and switch freely between the two depending on context.

I view it as a mark of progress for our culture that middle-class black people can be depicted talking the way some (though not all) middle-class black people actually do talk without it being considered shameful. Some middle-class white people say "it don't need nothin'" in real life as well, and maybe one day we'll be able to see them on TV without the implication that they're shamefully demonstrating a lack of sophistication or education.

[asd]

I wonder who wrote the Prego commercial? Do you know? What race did the writer belong to? People like you can never be satisfied. I have heard a lot of black people talk exactly like that.