“Is it possible, after all these years, that white folk have come to speak ‘black’ far better than blacks speak ‘white’?” Henry Louis Gates, (New York Times op-ed) Decreasing mastery of standard English among African Americans since the ’60’s, Gates argues, is a result of segregation (due to which “poor blacks tend to live with poor blacks”) and, counterintuitively, of desegregation (“which ended up separating the black poor and the black middle class”).