Summary Of Speaking In Tongues By Zadie

It is difficult for a person to be themselves when being mainstream is more important. For a person to be completely themselves is easier said than done. If a person were to take an observation around a busy surrounding and analyze everyone around them they would find that almost everyone is doing similar actions. There is a greater satisfaction when people are just blending in and not making themselves noticeable. The reason behind why people adapt to their surroundings is to not look or feel like the odd ball of the crowd not fitting in like a grizzly bear trying to hang out with polar bears. They might have the same features by both be bears, but they are different in their habits and actions. In the essay, “Speaking in Tongues” author Zadie

In other words when people accommodate it viewed as a way of flexibility for the fact that people are able to control those differences of race, language, or actions they obtain and balanced them all into a way of living without them interfering with each other at different places. Zadie Smith experience something of this sort when she moved away from home into college. Smith felt the difference in the astophemer in college than the one from home. At college she chose to learn the spoke different tongue that was spoken than sticking to how she would speak at home. It was like two completely different languages for Zadie. In Zadie Smith’s words she was like “adding a new kind of knowledge to a different kind I already had. And for a while, that’s how it was: at home, during holidays, I spoke with my old voice and in the old voice seem to feel and speak things that I couldn’t express in college, and vice versa,”(Smith, 247). There was a different vibe at home compare to the college vibe. The change from something a person has been custom to from childhood is what adapting to a new environment is about the new experience. For Zadie Smith It was a choice to change the way she spoke at college it was not an obligation and she maintain that flexibility of being able to speak her original tongue at home as well. The changing of a person’s

A general meaning in a dictionary when looking up the word covering would be hiding something or concealing. But another definition covering is known to mean is that “to cover is to tone down a disfavored identity to fit into the mainstream,” (Yoshino, 293). Author Kenji Yoshino uses the word is when people hide whom they are to self identify as someone else whom they are not really are just to fit in. Changing to fit in is not a choice it must occur to fully be a part of this new surrounding there is no option in Yoshino’s option. It is like going to the beach one has to put on sunblock to avoid the burning sensation from the sun. According to Kenji Yoshino due to the enforcement of covering in society many groups of people stuck being citizens of society who they do not desire to be in life. It is “the reason racial minorities are pressured to ‘act white’ is because of white supremacy. The reason women are told to down play their child-care responsibilities in the workplace is because patriarchy..so long as such covering demands persist, American civil rights will not have completed its work,”(Yoshino, 295). In a way it is holding these groups of people back from prospering in their own societies and achieving more than what they are assigned to complete in life. The word covering can hide behind the word of