I didn’t always respect the way we speak.
At 50-something years old, I can admit that plainly now.
For most of my life, I saw what is now called African American Vernacular English—AAVE—as ignorant speech. I wouldn’t have used that exact phrasing back then, but the belief was there. Quiet. Unexamined. Reinforced by school, media, and the subtle rewards of fitting in.
I spoke what people call “proper English.”
Some would say I “talked white.”
And to be honest—it served me well.
In corporate environments, my speech opened doors. It made conversations smoother. It lowered resistance. It made white colleagues more comfortable. There’s an unspoken ease that comes when you sound familiar to the dominant culture. You are heard faster. Questioned less. Accepted sooner.
At the time, it felt like success.
Now, it feels more complicated.
The Comfort We Learned to Provide
There’s a thought I heard recently that stuck with me:
“Proper speech is considered better because it is more acceptable to white people—and easier for them to understand.”
That idea forced me to sit still for a moment.
Because if that’s true, then what we’ve been calling “proper” isn’t just about clarity or correctness. It’s about comfort. Not our comfort—but theirs.
And that raises a harder question:
How much of our communication has been shaped not by authenticity, but by the need to be accepted?
For generations, Black Americans have learned—explicitly and implicitly—that survival often requires adaptation. Language became one of those adaptations. A tool. A shield. A passport into spaces that were not designed for us.
But tools come with trade-offs.
What I Didn’t See
What I failed to appreciate for years is that AAVE is not a broken version of English. It is not lazy speech. It is not a lack of education.
It is structure.
It is rhythm.
It is history.
It is community.
It carries the weight of people who had to build meaning under pressure—people who were forced to communicate across languages, across cultures, across systems designed to silence them.
What I once dismissed as “incorrect” is, in reality, deeply intentional.
And more than that—it is ours.
Voice in a Time of Tension
We are living in a time where racial tensions are not hidden—they are exposed, amplified, and, in many ways, weaponized.
And in times like this, something subtle but important happens:
Voice becomes sharper. Identity becomes louder.
At the same time, there is a sense that our political and cultural voices are being diluted, redirected, or stripped of their power. Narratives get reshaped. Messages get softened. Anger gets reframed.
So what happens when the systems around you begin to control the message?
You return to the voice they cannot easily control.
For many of us, that voice sounds like AAVE.
Leaning Back In
I’ve started to see something differently now.
Leaning into AAVE is not about rejecting intelligence or professionalism. It’s not about abandoning the ability to code-switch. Those skills still exist—and they still have value in navigating certain spaces.
But leaning into AAVE is something else entirely.
It is a reconnection.
A quiet but intentional shift toward authenticity.
A movement back toward the community.
A refusal to constantly translate yourself for the comfort of others.
It is, in its own way, a seed.
And seeds don’t always look powerful when they’re planted—but they carry the potential to change everything.
The Mirror It Creates
There’s another layer to this that I’ve started to notice.
When you truly understand and appreciate AAVE, it becomes easier to recognize when it is being used outside of its cultural context.
You start to hear the difference.
The rhythm is off.
The intention is different.
The connection isn’t there.
And suddenly, what once blended in begins to stand out.
It reveals imitation without experience.
Adoption without understanding.
Performance without belonging.
In a strange way, reclaiming the language sharpens your ability to see clearly.
A Personal Reckoning
This realization didn’t come overnight. It came with discomfort.
It meant acknowledging that I had internalized ideas about language that were never neutral. They were shaped by power, proximity, and perception.
It meant recognizing that what helped me succeed in one context may have distanced me from something deeper.
And it meant asking myself a simple but difficult question:
Who am I most fully when I speak?
Closing Thought
This isn’t about abandoning one way of speaking for another.
It’s about understanding what our language represents—and choosing, consciously, how we use it.
For me, this moment is less about rejection and more about return.
A return to something I didn’t fully value before.
A return to a voice that carries more than just words.
A return to a part of myself that had been quietly set aside.
Because sometimes, growth doesn’t come from learning something new.
Sometimes, it comes from finally seeing what was there all along.
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