What does it mean when you tell a little black girl that the unprofessionality of her tongue will get her nowhere in the world? That she must strip herself of the words she is familiar with, the ones she has found comfort within, the tongue of her mother and her mother’s mother, who brought her up telling stories of the strength of her race and the strength of black women through this exact tongue. I believe the meaning of this chastisement is deeply rooted and complex; the rejection of different dialects due to the assumptions and expectations surrounding “Standard American English”, and it’s multiplex history and creation, in North Carolina’s public school curriculum.
So many of my influential interactions with writing were traumatic, in which I found myself being looked down upon for my use or misuse of certain diction and grammar. I was taught that writing had particular boundaries that I could not permeate or shift. When I was eight, and told that “ain’t” or “I don’t gotta” had no place in my writing, I began to understand how writing works; that it is not a space for my creativity or tongue, rather a tool to convey ideas that at the time, did not align with my idea of expressing them. And as I was continuously assigned authors who looked nothing like me nor had anything in common with myself, I began to understand that the purpose of writing within the curriculum I was being taught was its use to perpetuate inequality and the feeling of difference.
When I sat in a class full of white peers and was asked if they had my permission to use ‘nigger’ while reading To Kill a Mockingbird , and my face turned scarlet and my heart began to beat rapidly, I realized that writing is often used to make excuses; like justifying homophobia because one is “living by the book”. When I was told that I won an essay competition because I was black by my sophomore English teacher, rather than for the content of my writing, taking me aback, as I had spent hours rearranging diction and figuring out the perfect syntax, I realized that writing began to shape itself into my enemy, or rather, the bane of my identity. When chastised for using too much of my “personality” within a piece, I realized that I was being told that writing can only be effective if it doesn’t concern my own personal opinion.
And yet, I could not retire my pen. Writing had become catharsis, rejecting what I was taught within the classroom, forced to write within certain frames, I began to refuse them. When I opened the cover of “Their Eyes Were Watching God” by Zora Neale Hurston, my perception of what writing had to be was transcended; rejection of my classroom expectations folded neatly into each of her pages. And from that, I crafted prose that contained all of me: ebonics, personal experience, and every bit of emotion I could convey in words. And thus, through being chastised for my writing, ultimately my personal identity, I reclaimed this tool as an outlet. I began to reject openly in my classes these standards that keep us within these suffocating and isolated boundaries, that writing’s sole purpose is to impart a message to an audience who is receiving it, in whatever way allows for the information to best be conveyed. And though my essays were returned with grades not in my favor, I was proud of what I had written. And thus, my identity as a writer, a reader, and a user of language, forged from trauma, became the basis of my existence.
So when you tell a little black girl that her language is unprofessional, you are telling her that she is unworthy of accessing a part of herself that is honest and raw. Through this exploration, of self and assignment, I have gained gratitude for the challenges that got me to where I am today. Academic writing and I have a past forged around hostility, and I would like to reacquaintance myself with it- learn it’s true purpose that isn’t shaped by bias from the mouth of a professor. Ultimately, I plan to tell that little girl that her tongue cannot be hushed, rather allow it to rage upon the page condemned by her oppressors, and her words will become soldiers that fight against those who cannot accept her identity.