Grammatically and syntactically (although not vocabularily, of course), Ebonics is very similar and obviously directly related to the English spoken by upper class English folks at the time of major colonization of the South. It's not surprising. The slaves learned the English they knew from the plantation owners and white middle-class workers who mimicked the upper class English in an attempt to show superiority.
Which comes back around to a point that you are already making: Language has long been used as a tool of emperialism and class oppression.
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Which comes back around to a point that you are already making: Language has long been used as a tool of emperialism and class oppression.
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