Leolaia,
Thanks for pointing that out. Black Vernacular English is very interesting to me. It uses, in many ways, a very different set of sounds, especially on letters that would normally end in a hard or rolling r. Typically it is replaced with an "O". Also the consonant accenting is very different, almost like a tonal language. In fact if I were to say which language besides English, black vernacular dialect sounds like, I would say offhand Vietnamese or some other tonal language. People often talk about how English has been such a successful language because it is able to include and aborb so much from many other language, but with (and ill just use the word, because its easier then saying black vernacular over and over), ebonics is a bit different in that it bends english into conforming to a culture, without necessarilly dropping or altering the vocabulary a great deal. It's difficult for persons to accept the fact that slang, and ebonics are two different things, which often walk hand in hand, but not always, and not necessarilly.
I come from East Tennessee. I was born up in the Appalachian hills, not too far from the Smokeys. There was a time when folks from there weren't much more highly regarded then African Americans are now. There is still a mindset that appalachians are foolish, lazy, cousin-screwing barbarians. Over time I have learned to control my accent until it is almost impossible to notice. Sometimes I feel bad about that, but I knew, that among persons who were not from the area, I would sound like a "hillbilly" or "white trash". In fact, my grandmother spoke english which used words that probably haven't been used elsewhere since Elizabethan or Jacobite times. She still remembered a lot of the songs that got told up in the hills as a way to pass news along. She was one of the last of the persons who actually did that, as a younger woman.
Anyway, judging a person by their speech patterns is stupid. No one cringes when a New York Jew lapses into Yiddish, or when Bostonians supposedly mangle the language. Nor do most (I gather) think anymore of Scottish people as ignorant fools just because the rest of us can't tell what they are saying half the time. I guess I understand what Bill Cosby is trying to say, in his own Henry Higgins-esque way, but if crime and lack of economic development are what are bothering him, he needs to harp on that, and not on cultural speaking patterns.