Uppity-Negro.com

Drylongso.com advertises itself as "extraordinary thought for ordinary people", and with front page stories on Zora Neale Hurston, Audre Lorde and Langston Hughes, they're not kidding.

Drylongso is also the title of a film by Cauleen Smith, and a children's book by Virginia Hamilton.

The author explains that in the Gullah language, "drylongso" is a black colloquial expression that means something rare has become so common that it is very ordinary.

You can hear the Gullah language/dialect, and see a bit of the culture, in Julie Dash's film Daughters of the Dust.

Languid look at the Gullah culture of the sea islands off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia where African folk-ways were maintained well into the 20th Century and was one of the last bastion of these mores in America. Set in 1902.

There's an (Internet Archive'd) interview with Julie Dash from Sundance, where she discusses using the dialect in the film:

Moikgantsi Kgama: A lot of people said they had trouble understanding Daughters because it was in the Gullah dialect, and the accents were very heavy. When you made the decision to use Gullah, did you consider those things?

JD: Absolutely. I considered them, and I thought about all the other fine independent films that I've seen with very strong dialects in them and how people would struggle through them. Your ear can adjust to them if you want it to. With certain black sounds, people disengage [and say], "Oh, I can't understand it."

Let's look at Miller's Crossing, the wonderful film by the Coen brothers. It's not only in Irish-American brogue, but they're using slang from the twenties. It's a difficult film to understand, [but] people still watch it, no problem. So yeah, I was very much aware of it. Why does our stuff have to be so easy, [with] simplistic, stereotypical characters? I know people are tired of hearing that word, but that's exactly what they love. If you offer a new character to them, a real character who is not a victim, they are like, "I don't know who this is, I can't watch it, it's unacceptable, it's not for me, it's too culturally specific." All of these things start pouring out of them. All these defenses about why they can't watch it.

How many films about different cultures did we watch that we had to learn and understand? I mean if you think about it, as a child growing up, I'm sitting in front of the TV, watching soap operas. I grew up in Queens Bridge Project. I don't know anyone who acts like that. I'm sitting on the edge of the couch, constantly translating, thinking why would she say or do that. [It's a] totally different reality. I didn't know people like that. I grew up translating, so I am not afraid. I am not afraid of different cultures.

Wrote a paper on the Gullah dialect (which is probably sitting on an Amiga-formatted disk somewhere), using the invaluable Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect as a primary source.

A unique creole language spoken on the coastal islands and adjacent mainland of South Carolina and Georgia, Gullah existed as an isolated and largely ignored linguistic phenomenon until the publication of Lorenzo Dow Turner's landmark volume Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect. In his classic treatise, Turner, the first professionally trained African American linguist, focused on a people whose language had long been misunderstood, lifted a shroud that had obscured the true history of Gullah, and demonstrated that it drew important linguistic features directly from the languages of West Africa. Initially published in 1949, this groundbreaking work of Afrocentric scholarship opened American minds to a little-known culture while initiating a means for the Gullah people to reclaim and value their past. The book presents a reference point for today's discussions about ever-present language varieties, Ebonics, and education. For readers today the book offers important reminders about the subtleties and power of racial and cultural prejudice.

Which is background on the people currently having their cause championed by those selfless proponents of Ebonics and fighters against racial and cultural prejudice, the warbloggers:

TED TURNER LAND GRAB UPDATE: Now the NAACP and a South Carolina legislator are siding with the slave-descended black landowners whose land Turner is claiming. This is on top of the Associated Press story that ran yesterday, as well as earlier accounts from local papers, and a story in The Black News.

We still haven't head anything from Michael Moore, Doonesbury, or Molly Ivins, all of whom seem strangely uninterested in the story of a rich white billionaire trying to gain control of land held by the descendants of slaves.

Keep fighting the Man, Glenn Reynolds.

Your links list would make a excellent starting point.