Stuff African People Hate

Have you ever been at a bar or club, or in any sort of loud room where you were asked to repeat everything you said at least four times because the person couldn’t hear you? You try different methods of relaying your words to them–pronouncing each syllable slowly, making silly gestures with your hands–and still they look at you confused and a bit annoyed at themselves that they can’t understand what you are saying. What usually happens (at least to me) is that you get frustrated, give up, and gesture to them that you’ll tell them later.

Imagine that happening to you every time you interacted with someone outside of your family or cultural circle, except it’s no loud room or no airplanes are flying above your head. The room is actually very quiet and all eves seem to be on you. The second repetition would just be a reiteration. On the third you would talk slower. On the fourth you would grow frustrated, since you begin to imagine that it is impossible for someone to be that dumb and inattentive that they still need another replicate of your thoughts.

At home my mom was talkative. Unlike my dad we knew everything about her childhood, her dreams, what life would’ve been like for us if she’d stayed in Africa, and how much she loved Oprah. Outdoors, it was different. Outside I saw her struggle to express her thoughts, her name, even a greeting, though English was her first language. I was six when I began to “interpret English” for her. After the third time she said something, I would jump in and clarify what she was trying to say. It was usually followed by a laugh from the hearing-impaired audience, and an apology. Over time her English, by American standards, became less difficult to understand, and since we were from a small suburb, people became use to the way she sounded.

Still, it astounds me when I think of the length my mother had to sometimes go through to express herself. I wonder what it must’ve done to her spirit, pride, and self-esteem to have her six-year-old child speak for her despite the Ivy League Master’s degree that hung on our den wall. It seemed sometimes that the need for repetition was out of pure laziness, as though who she was speaking to neither cared to or planned to ever try to accept her difference, a difference that is a significant part of this country and its history.

In college I served at a restaurant and I remember the owner of the place talking about how her Hispanic kitchen staff needed to learn English. The amazing part is that she was an Asian-American woman, whose mother or father probably had the same difficulties as my mother. I wondered if that’s how my kids (when I take that step) would feel about newly immigrant groups, if they will be connected at all with their grandmother’s story and frustration.

First of all, English is as original to America as cocoa (both literal and figurative). Aside from that, the notion that there is a right way of speaking English in this country is SO entirely bogus to me, since what has derived from standard King’s English is far from proper. Every group of people that have settled in this country have developed their own form of expression, influenced by the custom of their new lives while still staying true to their cultural root. Spanglish and Pigeon are good examples of this. Come to think of it, the way the majority sounded down south is pretty distinct from what I hear in the Northeast. I’m not only speaking about the way they sound either, but the actual things that they say, the words that each region uses to state a thought. For instance, think about the words used to describe soft drinks. There’s pop, coke, soda, soda water, and many others that I’m sure I haven’t even heard of. Which one is correct? What is American English? What does it sound like? Should my mom have had a twang to match the members of our Southern suburb, or learned how to speak as rapidly as the women I encountered on New York subways?

And how about Ebonics? Although standardized tests choose to ignore it as a tool of holding many minorities back (I’ll expound later), it is something that I believe should be recognized as what it is; another American dialect. Slavery is a dark part of all of our histories. It is. But out of it came a remarkable and mighty culture, full of its own customs and jargon. In private black people expose that custom and jargon, but for some reason around the majority, there is pressure to conform to a fallacy that we call proper English, ashamed to be ourselves because we’ve been taught that it is incorrect. Says who? The guy with the twang (that sounds more like a speech impediment), or the guy that named his child Apple?

I’ve heard arguments about American language and sound, especially when it comes to immigrants. I was involved in a conversation about Hispanic immigrants once when a girl said “If we had to learn English, they should have to too.” Although I disagree with her reasoning, I do think that it’s important to learn the majority language of the country that you are in, i.e. Before going to France I would watch my Rosetta Stone to make sure that I can communicate with French people. Should I expect my French accent to be on par with a native French person? No. Should I feel incorrect, embarrassed, and improper because I don’t sound exactly like them? No. If you notice, when Americans butcher other languages to native speakers, unless they completely don’t understand what you are saying, they won’t ask you to repeat yourself. They may look at you funny, but they understand that you are trying to communicate with them on their terms, and oddly (in my experience) respect that (or laugh at you when you leave).

For some reason, we have a mentality that there is a proper way of speaking English, and rarely try to accommodate difference. The repeated “huh?” and “what?”s are examples of that. We’re all guilty of it. Even when speaking to family.