You're really my scully, and I'm just like sontering around the FBI like aliens aliens that's probably aliens.

I'm gonna go watch some porn.

Welcome to your wrong about where what is must be.

Oh, I think that a lot of our stories are about disasters that were courted through compounded human error.

Oh, and through the failures of maintenance and control for future misbehavior that worked their way into human schemes of order and hierarchy, you know, like rust.

This is a show about rust. How about how's that?

Two incomprehensible taglines. What do you think of that?

I am Michael Hobbs. I'm a reporter for The Habbingham Post.

I'm Sarah Marshall and I'm a writer working on a book about the satanic panic.

And today we are talking about the 1996 ebonics controversy.

Apidemic.

Yes.

Which I have been obsessed with for years because a lot of the things we do on the show are trying to look at things from a different perspective or trying to tell the story in a more complete way.

But this one, we're fucking wrong.

This is the purest form of the year wrong about narrative that were maybe ever going to get it is unbelievable.

How wrong America got this one?

I'm excited because what I remember as a child growing up in the homes and schools of white America in the 1990s is that it was supposed to be this some sort of initiative where children would be able to take standardized tests in dialects that contained.

Grammar is that they would be able to understand.

And that this was something that people got really hysterical and up in arms about.

There was this idea on on behalf of pro-collecting white America that ebonics was going to become a language and that there was going to be this sort of cultural legitimacy given to black Americans in a way that was fundamentally upsetting.

I remember there being all these jokes and sort of fretful headlines and op-eds and Saturday night live weekend update jokes, which is where I got my entire sense of what happened in the 90s.

And I just think there were like a lot of jokes about it. I think this was like the thing that launched a thousand lettermans or something like that.

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