Why, It's Just Like a...

...foreign language.

It's really too loaded a topic for me as a white southerner to cover. I'll just say, then, that if a white southern accent sounds ignorant and bigoted to the rest of the US, so too does Ebonics sound ignorant to many white southerners, and probably others in the US as well. I'll say further that the New York/New Jersey regional accent also sounds ignorant, and I associate it with arrogance and rudeness, as well. There's probably a reason that obnoxious US tourists in movies are usually given the NY/NJ regional accent.

I'll venture just a little further and theorize that abandonment of Ebonics marks the point at which an African-American leaves the lower class and migrates to the middle class and upward mobility, just as weeding out a "white" regional accent marks departure from the lower class by whites.

h/t Drudge Report.