Language ain't just about talking. It’s about power. It decides who gets heard, who gets ignored, who gets respect, and who gets dismissed. And for us, as Black people, language has always been some high-stakes game we didn’t even sign up for.
Our ancestors didn’t come over here speaking English. They were forced to learn it. Their languages were beaten out of them, and they had to figure out how to survive using the same words as the folks who enslaved them. Over time, that turned English into way more than just a language, it became a way to measure how “civilized” or “smart” we were.
And here we are, centuries later, still playing that same game. We judge each other hard on how we talk. Too proper? “Oh, you tryna be white.” Too much slang? “You sound ignorant.” There’s no winning, because the whole system was never meant for us to win in the first place.
But, Everybody got an accentS o why are we still out here clowning each other over how we speak?
Let’s talk about it.
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