The need to defend myself led me to use language as a weapon to
deflect jokes about the “whiteness” of my spoken English and to
launch harsh verbal counter-attacks. Simultaneously language served
as a mask to hide the hurt I often felt in the process. Though over
time my ability to “talk that talk” – slang – gained me a new respect
from my peers, I didn’t want to go through life using slang to prove I
am Black. So I decided “I yam what I yam,” and to take pride in
myself. I am my speaking self, but this doesn’t mean that I’m turning
my back on Black people. There are various shades of Blackness; I
don’t have to talk like Paul Laurence Dunbar’s dialect poems to prove
I’m Black. I don’t appreciate anyone’s trying to take away the range
of person I can be.
(Aponte 1989)It seems that African Americans who speak SAE are not immune from a
different kind of trouble: Aponte’s experiences and reactions to those
experiences are perhaps the best possible illustration of push–pull, and his
story seems to be a common one. Blacks who speak primarily AAVE are
subject to ongoing pressure to assimilate to SAE norms in a number of
settings outside their communities; in fact, they are threatened with
exclusion if they do not. Blacks who do not speak AAVE may be treated
with skepticism and distrust by other African Americans. Language
ideology becomes a double-edged sword for those who are monodialectal
- threats originate from inside and outside the home language community.
At this point it is necessary to consider that there are many persons of
African descent resident in the U.S. who are immigrants from the
Caribbean and from Africa, and who come to this country speaking
another language entirely. Within the indigenous African American
community there is a complicated set of reactions to these immigrants
which can be overtly negative, in ways which are not always visible to
outsiders. Edwidge Danticat’s (1994) novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory brought
these issues into the consciousness of the public. Her story of the Haitian
experience in the U.S. makes clear how important a role language plays in
the negotiations between African Americans and immigrants of African
descent: