‘Why do you talk so white?’

As a kid, I always believed that the way someone spoke was a reflection of who a person really was. Those who spoke clearly, cautiously, and concisely were successful and intelligent, whereas those who spoke carelessly and without effort had a very different mindset. I eventually came to believe that if you did not care about how you spoke, then you did not care about yourself.

This idea of “proper” speech had become an essential part of who I was. Since I aspired to be an intellectual, I thought I had to articulate every single letter, carefully pronounce every syllable, use long and intricate words, and avoid slang. I felt that if I deviated from proper English, then I would be giving myself a handicap.

By the time I had reached my teenage years, I became completely accustomed to speaking this way. Regardless of where I was, I wanted to maintain sounding as clever as I thought I was. I hadn’t run into any serious issues regarding my speech until my freshman year of high school. Everything that I had thought to be an absolute certainty was shaken up by one simple question:

“Why do you sound so white?”

The first time someone asked me this, I struggled to understand what they meant. I had never imagined that speaking “properly” would put my blackness into question. Although I associated speech with identity, personality, and intelligence, I never even considered the crucial link between language and race.

What’s more is that most of the people who accused me of sounding “too white” were members of my own race. Classmates, friends, and even members of my own family pondered why I did not speak like the typical African-American teenager. After so many years of carefully crafting an intellectual identity, I was now made to believe that I was forsaking my own kind. It seemed as if I were putting on a false front because I did not speak the way I was supposed to.

Black teens weren’t allowed to ask questions – they had to aks them. We weren’t supposed to call each other friends, but only refer to each other as n****s. Every time we spoke, we had to sound black. If we were to divert from the stereotypes, we weren’t truly black.

I was torn between two identities. I wanted to be black and intelligent, but the two seemed mutually exclusive. According to many of those around me, it was impossible to be both. I became what some referred to as an “Oreo”: I had a black exterior, but on the inside, I was creamy white. I truly believed that there was no easy way out.

Thinking about this binary only brought me more questions and never any answers. Was I a traitor to my own race because I did not speak the way we were expected to? Was I intentionally conforming to a white identity? And worst of all, did I truly have to sacrifice my blackness in order to find intelligence and success?

Because I was unsure of my own blackness, I had trouble befriending other black teens. Most of the African-Americans at my school didn’t speak the way I did. I did not feel fully accepted into the black community at school or anywhere else. I was unable to embrace my black identity, so I unconsciously fulfilled my “white” identity. I became the “token black guy” in my predominantly white friend groups. I had developed an unconscious aversion to people who sounded black because I felt that I could never connect to them.

This partially affected where I would go to college. Although I had received multiple offers and letters of interest from HBCUs, I still could not envision myself mixing with members of my own race.

I still struggled with my identity in my early college years. It wasn’t until my second year at W&M that I started to find answers. I discovered that “sounding black” wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. In fact, it even had a name: African-American English (or AAE).

The way someone speaks doesn’t necessarily reflect intelligence. I discovered that I had been brought up under a false and problematic ideology. However, even though I’m now aware of the concept of AAE, the stigma associated with it has left lasting effects on my identity.

I can’t change how I grew up, and I can’t simply adopt AAE as if it were my native tongue. I can only use this knowledge to amend my ways of thinking. I now see that language is a product of cultural influences, not cleverness.