Samuel Yette's "The Choice: The Issue of Black Survival in America" belongs to an honorable tradition of African American writing, a tradition which draws attention to a necessary distinction between the promise of freedom and democracy and what people actually experience in their everyday lives in the United States. Yette's language comes from the practice of journalism, the first draft of history (as writing). "The Choice" is written in plain and vigorous standard English. Determining something about the language of honesty in "The Choice" is connected with pragmatics (the systematic relations between structures of text and context) in the reading process. The book functions as a model of how to read/study the text of America as a democratic experiment. The language of Yette's book refers ultimately to the deep structures of the struggle for "Lebensraum" in the United States. (RS)