“Why does he talk like that?”

I was sitting in my freshman composition class as my professor assigned us an assignment about language and speech. I turned over and asked a classmate (Erik Weathers) the question, “Do I talk white?” In turn, he gave a small smirk and silently nodded. Was I surprised at his response? No, not at all, I have been hearing comments such as that for as long as I can remember. Growing up, my mother put a large emphasis on language when it came to how my brother and I spoke; she often quickly corrected us on our grammar to be as articulate as possible. As a college graduate herself, she often tried to make my brother and me talk like her; she would frequently make fun of the slang and terms we picked up from social media and our friends, reminding us that wasn’t how we normally spoke. She was the first person to teach me code-switching, going from a more casual tone to a professional tone when speaking on the phone, and using all the little tricks and quips that she had taught us to use.  Inevitably, I picked up her way of speaking and would then speak to my friends at school the same way. I used to be rather annoying as I was told to fix other people’s grammar the same way my mom would, and I didn’t understand why. In my own head, I was helping them fix their speech that needed fixing. 

“James, why do you talk like that?”

 “What do you mean, how do I talk?”

 “White bro, you sound so white.”

 “I just talk like a normal person, do I not? 

“No, you sound proper, you don’t talk black.” 

“Thanks…”

I received a comment like this in 5th grade, if I can remember correctly, and it was the beginning of a cycle when I met someone new. At first, I didn’t really pay attention to it since they would also say something along the lines of me talking “proper” and I took it as a compliment. I like to think this is a pretty common occurrence for a certain group of black Americans in America, since there is a stereotype for how we’re supposed to talk. My mother is Colombian and Chinese, while my father is Jamaican; my mother has her own fair share of comments that I normally let go under the radar when it came to how she addressed POC, especially those of darker skin tones, while we spoke about my speech. She often classified AAVE as a form of “gangster/hood” talk and would boast about how my father is basically a white boy in a black man’s body, and eventually, I started to question where these comments stem from. As I got more social while progressing in school, I discovered people with different forms of speaking, including those who my mother would deem “improper” or “gangster”. I became close friends with some of these people, and despite our differences in speech and my comments about my talking white and my tendency to correct people on their speech, we continued to converse with each other. It made me eventually have some of my speech bleed into theirs, and theirs is the same with mine. I began to discover my own way of speech that I think works for the environments that I place myself into. As Erik told me that I spoke white, it all came back to me for a split second. My professor continued to talk about the assignment she was going to give us, which caused me to write this short narrative. My professor’s words completely vanished from my perspective, and the only thing that mattered was Erik nodding because, for that split second, I remembered my mother and her lessons of teaching me how to speak.  

Presently I do look back on how my tendency still is there with wanting to correct people, a pet peeve I have specifically is when a person can use the correct versions of “there”,” your”, ”to”, and “were” for example but it does boil down to how people were raised and you come to the realization that for the most part is does not matter when you’re speaking as long as the other person gets your idea then the language used to get there does not matter. English as a language is constantly changing, so for me and other people to hold a “high” level of speech to only exist as a white person’s quality is absurd. There will always be a way of speech that certain groups speak with but it does not mean their is a language that is “lesser” or less important, i have always been mindful of ridcueling someone else for how they speak since it’s a part of everyone’s culture how they speak and there isn’t a direct correct way of speaking when it comes to all forms of english.

This was the university my mom graduated from in the 80s with a bachelor’s in education and a minor in romance languages (she speaks 5 languages)

This is a meme about how my mother would react when I spoke “hood.”

This was my translation method of my LLN, where I wrote a poem. The following shows the poem, but this is the first couple of lines

Do I talk white

My Professor assigned us a narrative, with the topic… language 

Turning to a peer, I asked the question, “Do I talk white?”

Eric nodded in agreement with a smirk 

My mother had always said for me to talk  “right.”

Growing up, my mother said not to talk like a “gangster.”