as small as a world and as large as alone

2:40pm June 2, 2014

seekingwillow:

bana05:

soshigay:

So is AAVE basically ghetto black slang with a fancy name so that people don’t think blacks aren’t stupid and just special?

I’m black myself and aside from saying ‘aks’ instead of ask because of the way my mother always pronounced it, I speak perfect English.

I was born and raised in London in a mixed area. I lived with family who all have Jamaican accents but with the people I grew I’ve always spoken proper English. My own mother who can cuss out like the best of the Jamaicans quickly learned to speak with a British accent and use proper English.

So why is it that people feel the need to use AAVE living in a country where English is spoken nationally?

Fair enough if you’ve got an accent or tend to say words in a different language because of you’re upbringing, but to use useless slang and then excuse it by acting like it’s part of your heratige is stupid.

I’m proud of being black but I’d rather speak English properly, allowing everyone to understand me than sound stupid and act like I’m above everyone because I’m black.

1.) You are not American.

2.) You are not a Black American.

3.) You are sipping on that White Supremacy Juice.

4.) Code Switching is a thing.

5.) If I’d’a ever walked in my grandmother’s house - the house where I lived, where I was raised - and told my grandmother, a woman who was a teenage mother, a high school dropout, a fluent speaker of AAVE, who put all three of her children through high school and college - one a historically black college and university; one considered an Ivy League of the American South; and one the preeminent of Ivy Leagues, then did it again with the next generation of me and my sister (preeminence once again) - and told her a.) she was stupid and b.) I’m too good to speak the way I’d been speaking before I went up north, then all the shame upon me, because it certainly wouldn’t belong to her.  Get it together, OP. “Proper English” doesn’t exist. And furthermore, maybe folk don’t want all and sundry understanding what’s being said. Everything isn’t for everybody.

____

I’m here pondering telephone voice and interview/office voice via home voice (aka codeswitching) and pondering what those Jamaican relatives would think to hear their own claiming ‘proper English’/  as actual ‘proper English’ and not code for ‘The King’s/Queen’s English’ aka ‘What our colonial masters insisted on’ vs y’know ‘OUR English’.

I just… Diaspora Dilution, boyeah.

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