For as long as I can remember, my friends (particularly my black friend) always told me, "for a black person, you speak so white." Due to the fact that I was young and naïve, I never thought anything bad of it, I actually used to think it was a compliment. I remember saying to myself one day, "Wow, my friends must think I'm so smart to tell me I speak like a white person/" The more I thought that to myself every time someone told me I spoke so white, the more I started to believe that being compared to a white person was one of the best compliments one could receive.
It wasn't until I was older that I started to realize that not only were my "friends" mocking me for not speaking like the rest of them, but they were also unintentionally discriminating against their own race. After I stopped taking that line as a compliment, I would often ask people what they meant when they told me that I spoke like a white boy or I spoke white. Their response was often something like: "What you mean, what do I mean? You be talking all proper like you're better than us, you want to be white so bad." I would stand there in disbelief because I truly could not believe what I was hearing. To assume that all blacks speak nothing but Ebonics, while white people pronounce every syllable and speak "perfect" English is nothing more than a serious form of microaggression.
I realized that my "friends" were trying to change the person I was and for a short period of time, it worked. I thought in order to keep my friends, I had to completely change the way I spoke. As soon as I started saying "ni**a" at the end of every sentence, I started to see more approval from them all, but this wasn't who I was. Deep down, I felt disgusted with myself because I was starting to become the very person I did not want to be. It was at this moment in time that I knew I needed to start cutting people out of my life. I knew that if I did not make the move to kick them out of my life, I wouldn't have been happy because I would've been surrounded by people who were unintentionally insulting me and putting me down for not speaking like them or "speaking too white."
At the end of the day, we need to understand that the color of our skin should not automatically limit our language skills and stop us from trying to succeed in life. As a community, if we see someone climbing the "ladder of success," we should offer support and help them reach the top, instead of trying to keep them at the bottom with us so that one day they will return the favor and lend a helping hand.
