“dat.” She absolutely abhorred double negatives, and her face would
screw up in pain at the sound of one. But her corrections also tapped
my racial vulnerability. I felt racial shame at this white woman’s
fastidious concern with my language. It was as though she was saying
that the Black part of me was not good enough, would not do, and this
is where my denial went to work.Steele’s initial reaction is anger at the woman’s rejection of “the Black
part of me [as] not good enough.” This episode seems to have been his
first direct experience with language-focused discrimination. Thus he
confronts the conflict between the experience of being discriminated
against and his experiences with AAVE as a viable and functional
language. As a 14-year-old, then, Steele was not yet convinced that AAVE
was an inappropriate or bad language. Corresponding to his anger toward
the woman is a recognition of the link between it and his race (“the Black
part of me”). On this basis, his early conclusion is that the woman who has
corrected him is racist.
Now, he does something perhaps unusual. He confronts the woman
through her son, and she seeks him out angrily to have a conversation
about her motives in correcting his language:
A few days later she marched into the YMCA rec room, took me
away from a Ping-Pong game, and sat me down in a corner. It was the
late fifties, when certain women painted their faces as though they
were canvases ... it was the distraction of this mask, my wonderment
at it, that allowed me to keep my equilibrium.
She told me about herself, that she had grown up poor, had never
finished high school, and would never be more than a secretary. She
said she didn’t give a “good goddamn” about my race, but that if I
wanted to do more than “sweat my life away in a steel mill,” I better
learn to speak correctly. As she continued to talk I was shocked to
realize that my comment had genuinely hurt her and that her motive
in correcting my English has been no more than simple human
kindness. If she had been Black, I might have seen this more easily.
But she was white, and this fact alone set off a very specific response
pattern in which vulnerability to a racial shame was the trigger,
denial and recomposition the reaction, and a distorted view of the