Reading Connection DW1b

The reading that I feel I connected the most with is Smitherman’s “Ghetto Lady” passage. In this she speaks about how when she was a young girl, she was constantly under linguistic attack, thus causing her to go into a silent mode to avoid them. To attend college she had to take and pass a speech test, which she failed. “…they were linguistically and culturally biased against all varieties of U.S. English…” She states along with, “…Although the overwhelming majority of those who failed these tests were People of Color I recall that there are a couple of whites in my group…” (pp. 54 A Reader for Writers). This expresses how broad the English language is, and how it shouldn’t be a specific right way to talk. I feel that another aspect that causes bias in writing and mostly speaking is the attitude of the writer.

My father is a very intelligent black man, and spoke like one too. He uses word I almost never hear or only have read in books by scholars, but the one part that gets him in trouble is the way he may say something or his past lifestyle. He has a strong, demanding, you have to listen to me voice, and grew up in a volatile environment, he isn’t given the same respect. He much like Smitherman was put in communication and speech therapy classes because thought he was saying intelligent profound comments the way he said them, was not approved. Smitherman cites W.E.B. DuBois with his very precocious view. He said “…the American Negro problem is and must be the center of the Negro university….a French university is found in France; it uses the French language and assumes a knowledge of French history….in the same way, a Negro university in the United States of America begins with Negroes. It uses that variety of the English idiom which they understand; and above all, it….should be founded on a knowledge of the history of their people in Africa and in the United States, and their present condition.” (pp. 93 Field and Function on the Negro College) Basically for the English of “blacks” in a sense is misconcepted because it is not totally understood. The history is not taught so how could it be understood. Similar to what Smitherman expresses in both “Ghetto Girl” and her piece “It bees dat way sometimes” in her book “Talkin’ and Testifyin”.

What I have in common with Smitherman is not as direct as her similarity to my father. But I much like her am able to “code-switch”, the difference was at a young age I learned the “school taught” way to speak so I was code switching in sense to fit in more with my family, not with the environment of my teachers and peers.