Power and those who preserve it

I took a sociology course last year and, of course, we talked about power, privilege, and culture. Somewhere in my readings, an author suggested that the effects of culture are the most significant when we don’t notice them, when we think that that is just what it is. Language is a culture transmitter and is a dominant medium for participants of a culture to communicate. So then, language, like culture, has the greatest impact when we do not notice it. Similarly, it is easy to come to this planet and to accept various power structures without challenge because you know nothing different. It just happens that these three things are not isolated things that have something in common; rather, they work in tandem to support each other, maintaining their grip on denizens of that group.

I hated all of my English classes in elementary school. I found it disdainful. Poetry was stupid. I often felt dumb. The teacher would chide the way I spoke, the way I wrote. It was always wrong. I always had female English teachers, some white, some black. It seemed like they all had it out for me. I made c’s and a few b’s while must of my peers could boast of all a’s every semester. It’s amazing to me now as an English major in college. I remember the first time the thought of majoring in English skittered across my mind in the ninth grade. I was talking to my literature and composition teacher, a smart and beautiful black woman. It actually frightened me. I use to hate the subject. Then I realized that I didn’t. I always liked stories and communicating. I just hated the associations that I had with English instruction.

Where did the change happen? Sixth grade rolled around like roly polies. I was smart, I guess, but I was going nowhere. I was in an accelerated program at a nearby public middle school. I clashed with my teachers, all black women. They always called me smart-alecky since elementary. Sixth grade was no different. English classes were about the same as before, prescribing to me a world that contrasted what I observed and experienced. I was getting fed up, disillusioned. I failed English that year. As everyone in my family prepared to go on vacation in Puerto Rico that summer, I had to navigate among preteens at summer school who had already done short bids in juvenile detention centers. I will not say much about this, but I will say that it is there that I really learned about the reptilian fight or flight mechanism. Teachers tried prescribing but typically ended in disciplining which isn’t all that different when you think about it. How much English do you think I learned there?

Fortunately for me, the mailman came. I received a scholarship to go to a private school. Then, I enrolled into a small, predominantly white school. Counterpane, named after a poem by Robert Louis Stevens (I think), the Montessori approach along with some distinctive features. I took English and History from a white man, Eric Marshall. In his courses, he taught me the most I ever had in any class before that and for sometime after. He didn’t mind my English. He didn’t mind my writing. He would correct me sometimes, but he did so gently, without making it a big deal. Instead, he enjoyed my discovery and joy of literature. We shared it. We read books together. He started to teach me how to ask questions and find answers. He taught grammar too. I could not even begin to count the number of sentences that we diagramed. I didn’t enjoy it but I do appreciate it which is much more than I can say for those other English courses.

When surveying a certain group, you can start to find who is dominant in that group. In America, white males are at the top of this social hierarchy that we all have learned through institutions, relationships and symbols. It doesn’t take much to teach a person what is all around her. Language, on the other hand, is a little bit different. We learn the language that we experience. The younger we are when we experience, the easier we learn and the less we question it. But, if that language does not coincide with that of the dominant group, then there is an all out assault to regularize your language usage to the point where you feel like your intelligence is inadequate. The peculiar thing, however, is that often, at least in my experience with black female English teachers, that the people who demand your compliance with the language of the dominant group are not a part of that dominant group, the ones who profit least. Conversely, it was a member of the dominant group, a white man that helped sparked my love of literature and language that help put me back in the academic and life game and not continue the unfair treatment of nonstandard English speakers which results in a partly educated and disenfranchised group that never learns to talk propa noway.