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Judgments: Improper Speech With Black Males

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From the first moment we see a person, we make judgements about them. Everything they do shapes our opinions about who they are, even if we don’t know about them. A person’s linguistic style can also shape our judgements about them. The problem with linguistics is that often we associate ways of talking with things such as gender or race. One significant issue is the fact that when someone talks proper, it is often associated with being white, and when one doesn’t talk properly, it is associated with being black. This is something that I have heard countless times in my life, and have admittedly done, and we must change that. The fact that we associate improper speech with blacks shows that we have been raised to associate them with being unintelligent …show more content…

One young woman was at the podium giving her speech when suddenly she said, “Sorry for talking so white.” When that was said I must admit I was quite confused. She was giving a very great speech and was speaking very properly, I saw no need for her to have to apologize for that. Then it hit me that she was an African American woman in a class full of mostly African American people. She, from what I assume, felt like she needed to talk in a way that made her sound “Blacker” and by most social standards that means talking improperly. At that moment I realized how ignorant this concept of associating blacks with improper speech really …show more content…

They might ask what is the purpose in trying to change something that doesn’t seem to be that big of a deal, or why should we really care about it. If people want to continue doing it they should be allowed to. Remember that the whole root cause of this stems back to the miseducation of blacks throughout the past few centuries, and it is awful to stereotype African Americans as having poor and improper linguistic skills. Is another idiotic and archaic racial stereotype that plagues our society, and leads to nothing but more racial division and tension. Also when to comes to stopping people from saying this, I’m not implying that we force them to do it, we need to do it through simple methods as I have stated earlier. It is understandable that people are free to say as they please, but we need to work to remove stereotypes that only add to negativity within our

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