Black Kids Don’t Need to “Talk Right”
Tags: Education, Justice, Equality, Fairness

Educational justice is a social justice initiative aimed at closing the learning gap for underserved students. Educational justice includes a wide range of actions such as changing the discipline policy when it dis-proportionally affects marginalized students, testing students from underserved populations for learning disabilities instead of assuming they’re troublemakers, and working with students’ accents and dialects instead of working to erase them.

In essence, educational justice acknowledges that students may come from unequal backgrounds and work to meet them where they’re at to ensure that they have the time and resources necessary to learn the material just like their more privileged peers.

The problem with my speech class in elementary school is that it wasn’t based on educational justice; it was based on assimilation.

For most of my K-12 education, my class has mostly been about 49 percent white, 49 percent Black, and two percent other. My teachers, on the other hand, have been mostly white. After having about 50 teachers throughout that time, four were Black; 46 were white. Because of that, whiteness, white supremacy, and anti-Blackness were taught and reinforced in the classroom often without the conscious intent of the teachers.

Many of my white teachers believed that they “talked right.” It was the way the world was supposed to talk. Ebonics — which was what it was called at the time — was wrong. Living in the South, you also have to deal with Southern American English which in many ways is akin to African American Vernacular English (AAVE). These ways of speaking were something that needed to be fixed instead of something to work with.

The Black girl who was in my gifted and talented class was there because she was smart. She understood the material thrown at us. She aced spelling and vocab. She mastered history and social studies. She was in speech because the white teacher couldn’t understand a word she was saying.

Black students have to navigate a different world in a white-led classroom. Not only do we have to learn new material, but we have to learn and master a whole new way of speaking. If we don’t, we’re cast aside as hopeless and unintelligent — which is simply not true. This need to assimilate causes a division in Black children. There are those who learn to code-switch and those who can’t.

Those who can’t code-switch can equate the idea of “not talking right” with being unintelligent and lash out at those who do code-switch, accusing them of “talking white.” Those who do code-switch often reply with they’re “talking right” or “being intelligent” playing into the anti-Black notion that speaking Standard American English (SAE) is the “right” way to speak. Honestly, I don’t think either is at fault. They’ve internalized what they’ve been taught by their teachers and society.

I know it seems harsh to blame teachers when they’re part of the most underpaid and overworked industry. I get it; it’s adding more to their already full plate. But when a chunk of your classroom doesn’t look, speak, or act like you or most of the world, you’re doing them a disservice by not bridging that gap. You’re adding to the system and society that casts underserved students aside for their failure to assimilate to whiteness. You’re participating in white supremacy.

There are small ways white teachers of diverse classrooms can better serve all their students. My senior year of college, I was a writing center consultant. We had to take semester writing center classes in order to better serve our students. In one of those classes, we read and discussed Facing the Center: Toward an Identity Politics of One-to-One Mentoring by Harry C. Denny.

That book helped many to acknowledge the ways in which we support a system that excludes those who can’t assimilate to the center. In education, that center is whiteness, maleness, suburban, and American. Our work as consultants was to figure out how to work with those who academia believe don’t belong. As proficient writers, we knew how to write to the center so we knew how to help people who were already the center. Our goal in that class was to learn how to help those who aren’t.

In writing, instead of changing the student’s native dialect or language to fit the standard, we accepted students for how they spoke. We didn’t critique students on their inability to adhere to SAE rules; we critiqued them on their ideas. Many times these students had great ideas. They were articulate in their native dialect or language, but they couldn’t write to the center. If they can’t reach the center, the center must reach out to them.

Once I learned of this concept, my only problem was that it was not taught sooner. I’ve written before on how I lost years of my life assimilating to whiteness and the mental distress it cost me. I’m sure I’m not alone. There’s so much brilliance and talent that’s lost because of a teacher’s refusal to bridge the educational gap for underserved students. Imagine how much richer our world would be if we worked to educate every student, not just those that fit the mold.