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Language Means a Lot

I Tried Writing a Paper about How Awesome Language is But Then I Accidentally Roasted My Mom for 5 Pages

I didn’t realize my mother was a victim of internalized racism until I paid attention to her grammar. It wasn’t until I was on the train thinking of this paper, that I understood the distance between herself and myself when it came to our respective communities. She does not embrace Black English the way I do. She speaks it mockingly the way I imagine people who are not black do. To her, Black English was not “proper” English; it wasn’t a dialect at all. I initially wanted to write about Cioffi’s myth nine, about those little grammar rules, persnickety and unimportant. My mother taught me young the prescriptive and nitpicky grammar of Standard English. Of course, I didn’t question it at the time. Her persnickety grammar lessons eventually led to my love for minute details, especially concerning the English language. As I grew older though, I realized that to her, she was arming me against the influence of Black English. She wanted to lay down the rules so completely that Black English would not become my default or first language. She succeeded. She taught me early on that “speaking like that” wasn’t proper in the real world and that no one would take me seriously because no one took “them” (native speakers of Black English) seriously. And she honestly believed that! Luckily for me, though, I grew up in the Bronx and was able to learn the language that allowed me to communicate with my peers. But, for the rest of my life, I’d always wonder if what I learned was Black English or a mixture of Black and Standard English, like Spanglish. Because my mother adamantly pushed for Standard English, whenever I was told by my friends that I spoke “proper,” I felt suddenly adrift— alone. Her distinction between both English dialects made it hard for me to know where I belonged.

The issue, I believe, was that my mother did not feel accepted by the black community, and in turn, attempted to distance herself from it. To her, teaching me Standard English was the way out. Standard English was the elite or prestige language and its use would propel me towards people who would better understand me because that had worked for her. She was the victim of internalized racism, only able to see her people the way white America did. African-American Vernacular English(AAVE) was not something my mother knew about when she was raising me. Her own prejudice, shared by most of America, and the stigma surrounding AAVE stopped her from appreciating the language used by so many Black Americans throughout the country. My mother prides herself on her critical thinking and vast knowledge, but like many privileged people who feel similarly, she was limited by her own arrogance. It was not until AAVE was studied by linguists that the dialect was even noticed or taken seriously.

Communication and understanding are vital to survival. The minor grammar rules add up. What those rules do is help make communication more effective, more universal. The rules of language make it easier to understand others. Brock Haussamen said in Guidelines on Some Questions and Answers About Grammar, “…to be able to talk about how sentences are built, about the types of words and word groups that make up sentences—that is knowing about grammar. And knowing about grammar offers a window into the human mind and into our amazingly complex mental capacity.” My mom shut part of herself off from understanding and embracing the lives of the people around her. By disregarding Black English, she cut herself off from a large part of her culture and community. And she ingrained that in me as best she could. But when I learned that the be used in Black English gives more specificity to timed actions, it made me see the dialect in a different way. What my mother didn’t know, what I’ve since learned in this class, was that Black English is very much its own dialect with its own sensical grammar rules.

The little parts of grammar that we learn in school are important because they become part of the language we all speak to each other. Standard English could be used the way it is internationally, as a common language. Children should not be shamed for speaking any Non-standard English. Those children, even those adults who use Non-standard English, are no less capable or intelligent because of it. It has been proven—through the linguistic study of Black English—that it has its own set of grammar rules. For instance, in Wardhaugh’s Introduction to Sociolinguistics Textbook, he comments on the treatment of Black English in schools:

…black children live in a rich verbal culture in which linguistic ability is highly prized and in which many opportunities are offered for competition in verbal skill. To assume that such children cannot affirm, negate, categorize, or think logically because they perform poorly in certain extremely inhibiting testing situations is absurd. They must use language all the time in order to get by, and any fair test of linguistic ability shows them to be as skilled as any other children. p.347

The issue is not that children cannot learn the rules of standard English (there are many cases that disprove this), but rather that schools and teachers have a faulty approach. By furthering the distinction between “good” (Standard) English and “bad” (Non-standard) English, the children who do not speak the “good” English feel further ostracized. Furthermore, Wardhaugh goes on to say:

That such children need “compensatory education” for their lack of linguistic ability is a complete misinterpretation of the facts. They may need some help in adjusting to certain middle-class values about how language is used in education, but that is a different matter and is a problem for many non-black children too. Such views also assume that a major function of school-ing is to indoctrinate working-class children into middle-class ways, with language central to this process. (347)

The problem begins to be about the way English is generally taught in schools. Language is transformed into a business skill, and its beauty as a form of communication and its ties to culture is lessened. It becomes completely scientific, a skill that needs to be mastered so that it can be useful. Language becomes less about communicating ideas clearly and more about communicating ideas in a way palatable to people in power.

As a child, my mother created a list of contractions and abbreviations I couldn’t use. She wanted me to learn the “right” way to speak and write. She put the list on a whiteboard on our fridge. In black marker, she drew and color coded the following list:

Cannot Use

Can’t

Don’t

Ain’t

Instead

Can Not

Do Not

Am not

Homework

As a child, it just seemed like another thing I had to learn, but when talking to friends and even writing and speaking in class, I used the contracted version of words. It was a hassle not to. Looking back, I appreciate the attention she paid to my grammar and vocabulary, but some of what she did was in line with the prescriptive and oppressive implementation of standard English. She did help with something else, though. From an early age, I could code-switch—very well. The standard English that my mother taught me left me with an ambiguous accent. When we moved—to New Jersey, Virginia, and California—people couldn’t place me. I do not know if that helped me or not.

She inadvertently created in me a linguistic identity crisis. In school, whenever I spoke “proper,” people would sometimes call me “white girl.” Obviously, this hurt. I grew up in the Bronx, not often exposed to white people (outside of my teachers). Culturally, black Americans see white Americans as very different from themselves, unable to understand and bridge the gap between the two cultures. By calling me “white,” my peers effectively created a divide they believed I couldn’t bridge, even though I was one of them. What they said didn’t affect my speech (that I’m aware of); it did, however, make me more aware of the way I spoke and of how I spoke differently from the norm. I didn’t realize, at the time, that I code-switched— I didn’t even know there was a word for it— and doing it seemed to be putting on a different persona. In actuality, I was catering my language to my audience, changing as I needed to. This became a problem when I had a mixed audience. I’d opt for Standard English, and have my peers regard me curiously, wondering why I “switched-up” sometimes. I was confused, too.

My mother’s dedication to teaching me the nuances of Standard English nurtured my curiosity, so even though I code-switched regularly, I still tried to find out why the English she taught me was so different from the language I used with other people. When I talked to her about it later in life, she told me that it wasn’t proper to speak the way black people in our neighborhood did. She joked about it, but I knew she really did feel that way and nothing I told her would change her perception of it. I was lucky enough to attend Frederick Douglass Academy in Harlem, where one of the slogans was “Agree to disagree.” After talking to my mom about language, I knew it was something we’d never agree on.

Edited by: Sheila Janeo, Jonathan S., Nedmond

Pictures by Denise Bullock(mother of author) and Author, respectively.

#the gritty

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