...About Language

“I go back and forth sometimes about whether I think he is smart,” my friend said to me as we sat outdoors for drinks at a favorite Boston spot. She was talking about a classmate from undergrad who was already at the medical school she would be attending next fall.

“And why is that?” She proceeded to tell me it was because she noticed they spoke differently in the classroom than they did around their friend group. The classmate was black and their friend group was too; they used more slang than she was used to. My friend proceeded to tell me she hadn’t heard them talk about academic topics outside of the classroom, so I was curious as to why their intelligence was being tied to the way they talked around their closest friends.

“So if they aren’t talking about academics with their friend group, why does that make you question their intelligence?” She paused before answering. “I guess it’s because that friend group talks in a way that isn’t consistent with the English grammar I learned and was taught to use growing up? And because it’s not the dominant form I somehow associate that with lesser intelligence? That doesn’t sound fair now that I saw it out loud.”

I had just read Ibram X. Kendi’s chapter on Culture in “How to Be an Antiracist,” which talked about Ebonics specifically. Being a cultural antiracist, Kendi explained, meant to reject cultural standards and equalize cultural differences among racial groups; thus, being an antiracist as it pertained to language meant equalizing languages that stem from different racial roots. Kendi dives into the history of Ebonics, rooted in African languages, and talks about how racist powers such as those in control of the government, academia, education, and media, labeled African languages as broken, improper, non-standard dialects because they were not French, Spanish, English, Dutch, or Portuguese. And thus, telling Africans that they needed to forget the “broken” language of their ancestors and speak proper, fixed European languages instead was an act of cultural racism, one that clearly still exists in various forms today.

I didn't know the specifics of the language the classmate was using with their friend group, if it was Ebonics or not, but the sentiments of different or "broken" languages and the superiority of European languages Kendi explained remained.

“What actually is different from the way they speak versus the way you and I speak?” I asked. “Ibram X. Kendi’s point is that just because a group of people do not speak in the exact manner you do or I do, with the exact pronunciation or sentence structure, does not mean they are any less intelligent. The reality is that the differences in the way we speak are not markers of things like intelligence. And just because there are differences does not mean there should be a hierarchy attacked to them.” My friend nodded in agreement and proceeded to reflect on her education growing up. She seemed to understand that just because you were taught that something was right or correct in school didn’t mean that there weren’t other possibilities; she recognize that educational institutions teaching one narrative was limiting and unfair, in light of what we had just talked about.

“And you aren’t the only one who falls in this trap,” I offered. “I fall in it, our other classmates fall in it, our professors fall in it. I mean look at the person we started this conversation with; the way they speak in their science classrooms at a white institution is not the same as the way they speak with their friend group at our school’s cafeteria. They too were taught at some point that European languages were a sign of intelligence, or that if they spoke in a non-European way they would be labeled as broken or improper, and the way they speak in classrooms reflects that. But in order to get away from this trap, we need to learn to appreciate each language and accept each has the same value and merit to it. We can’t stand by or support this specific narrative of language intelligence because doing so is ultimately an act of language (cultural) racism.”

“Yeah,” she agreed, nodding, “It’s something we have to unlearn.”