Your Blackness Is Not Meant to Be Diluted

In certain settings, black people often feel the need to tone down their blackness in order to make others comfortable and to avoid judgement. This is called code switching, by definition this is the practice of alternating between two or more languages or varieties of language in conversation. Say you have a big job interview coming up, you plan to speak a certain way, to look a certain way, and act in a way that isn’t who you truly are. You do not have to act like “them” to be accepted! There is a difference between being professional and sacrificing your true self to get a job. When you are up planning the night before your interview practicing how to speak differently and how to remember to say “yes sir/ma’am” and “no sir/ma’am”. When you tone down how you regularly speak, thats you toning down your AAVE dialect. AAVE stands for African American Vernacular English also known as Ebonics.  AAVE is a vernacular not a language. AAVE is not “bad english”, it is a complete dialect, with its own grammatical rules which have been present, it is only when you are reading AAVE without knowing that it appears to be incorrect English. AAVE is geographical and is meant to only be used by African Americans. There is a controversy between speaking AAVE and it being the opposite of “talking white” or “proper”.

What Exactly Does AAVE Look Like?

If you’re African American, you have probably been speaking AAVE or in Ebonics longer than you can even remember and you might not even realize it. Some of the rules to AAVE include leaving the words is/are out in sentences. For example, you may say “he sleeping” instead of he is sleeping. This may seem like lazy grammar but this is a common practice in many other languages such as Arabic and Mandarin. If you speak in AAVE you may use frequent double negatives which translate into a positive connotation, for example “he ain’t never gonna stop singing” which would mean he will always sing. Another rule of AAVE is leaving out the dummy expletive which is simply removal and replacement of a word that isn’t needed in a sentence to be understood. A classic example of this is, if you are saying “there is a man at the door” you could say “Its a man at the door.” In this example the words “there is” can be removed in the sentence and replaced with “its a”. As you can tell, there are minor changes that can make a big difference as to how a sentence sounds, but the meaning remains the same.

There Is No Such Thing As Talking White

Speaking in fluent english is not “talking white”. When you abide by the grammatical rules and sentence structure according to Standard English you are simply speaking fluently. Being black and articulate is not “talking white”, whiteness is not synonymous with professionalism. It is a preconceived notion that black people are less professional and can’t be taken as seriously in a work or work-like environment. There is an imaginary door that black people don’t have the right key to, unless we act as if we aren’t black. Speaking fluently is what you should do in a job interview because you are in fact being judged by your employer and you do want to make a good impression. Code changing is more of a mindset than anything. You can and should say “yes sir/ma’am” and “no sir/ma’am” to someone who is interviewing you for a job, but it should be for that reason and that reason only. You should never be overly polite to someone simply because you think their race makes them superior to you. You don’t have to grovel at the feet of someone because you want a job, just use standard english and show them your true intelligence, you’ll be bound to get the job.

Let’s Drop The “AAVE Is Negative” Stigma

You are an African American and speaking AAVE is nothing to be ashamed of. You can speak in AAVE to anyone, just be mindful of the setting. If its a job interview, code switching to Standard English is probably for the best, but that is just job etiquette. If you are out at a restaurant and you notice there are aren’t many other African American customers around you, aside from whom you’re with, there is no need to code switch. The way you speak is not hurting anybody. AAVE isn’t something you have to speak in the comfort of your own home, you don’t need to hid that you speak Ebonics because its not a negative trait. The moral of the story is embrace your blackness, embrace AAVE, and love who you are.