People of Color Must Speak Our Dialects and Native Tongues Even When It Makes Other People Uncomfortable

It’s Not Enough to Speak English Well, We Have to Master and Use Our Own Languages

In her poem, “Choices,” the great Nikki Giovanni says, “When i can’t express what i really feel i practice feeling what i can express and none of it is equal,” and so it is with all language. As we human beings try to get as near as possible to saying what it is we really feel and mean, people of color must speak and preserve our first languages, our non-European languages and distinct dialects to the extent that we know them instead of forgoing them in favor of the languages involuntarily imposed upon our ancestors by colonizers and enslavers or thrust upon us as a condition of relocation in search of better lives as marginalized people abroad often in the very countries who exploited our homelands to achieve their desirability to migrants and immigrants alike.

The predominance of European languages throughout the Americas is premised on a lie and that lie must be exposed and its exposure must be disseminated far and wide: English and other European languages aren’t better than other non-European languages. The lie that they are is couched in colonialism and white supremacy and must be rejected. Because so much of our identity is tied up in the languages we speak, when we speak and preserve our own dialects and languages, we resist their marginalization, and also our own. As a Jamaican American, this is of especial importance today, August 6, as Jamaicans across the diaspora celebrate Independence Day.

This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t use standardized European languages as resources and tools for achievement and access or even as vehicles to bolster our work around issues of equity and equality or otherwise. It’s that in all places of the world where European languages have been superimposed, mainly in the southern hemisphere, people of color have sufficiently proven that we can master European languages and rhetoric. Many of us can codeswitch comfortably and seamlessly when we need to between boardroom and backyard and as Jamaicans say, yard. We have had enough great people of color virtuosos in European languages around the world. I don’t have to list them for you. We have also read enough European literature. We get advanced degrees in these languages and writings. We conduct business in them. We don’t collectively have…