The College Fever - Roots

              Tiffany Hendrickson, personal essay, “Talking in Color” (March 21, 2013), asserts that many people of color or people in general raised in certain places with accents (mainly “black accents”) struggle to fit in and tend to experience some type of racism from the world. Hendrickson develops this statement by talking about her personal experience on how white people in her neighborhood would judge her by attending a public school that has a majority of African American students, as well as when she was in college and getting told to stop talking like a N-word. Hendrickson’s purpose in writing this was to bring attention to how people can judge certain linguistic cultures to find common ground with other people. The intended audience would be people of color or people of other races but with similar accents.

 

               After reading “Talking in Color” by Tiffany Hendrickson, it made me feel very interested in her personal experience with racism because as a person of color I would never have thought that a white person would get judged or bullied by other white people. Her writing reminds me of a similar experience I had along with my mother who also got judged because of her broken English. It made me think the same way about how people can judge other people based on their linguistic skills without knowing why they speak that way. Being born in the South in a predominantly black neighborhood, my whole life I have been surrounded by AAE, and I can relate to her experience, I also had to learn how to "code switch" when I got to high school, and I felt more force to speak differently in college.

 

              

              In Tiffany Hendrickson personal essay, “Talking in Color: Collision of Cultures” she speaks on her personal experience of judgment and racism, because of the backlash she experienced from the way she talks she had to learn to code-switch, she states, “Code-switching is common within any community, white or black, where people change the tones of their voices in relation to their environments.” Hendrickson uses Logos to prove her point stating that she learned that it was a common thing to do in her college Communication class, she realized that she shouldn’t have to hide her black voice to make others comfortable. She also used Pathos in her essay to get an emotional interpretation of how guilty she felt trying to speak white and code-switching, she states, “I may have wisdom and knowledge, but if I SPEAK wrong then what is it worth?” because of her interactions in college, she felt the need to speak a certain way. During her time in college, she uses code-switching to get along with her peers until she took her communications class and met her mentor, Jessica. Jessica helped her gain confidence and made her realizes that her voice is unique and that she should not be ashamed of her black accent, that she worked to get a degree in Communications and use her skills to influence other that no matter what linguistic knowledge you have, all that matters is your intellectual and how you show yourself in this world.

Work Cited

Hendrickson, T. (2014, August 16). Talking in Colors: Collision of Cultures. Queen city writers. Retrieved February 3, 2022, from https://qc-writers.com/2013/03/21/storming-the-gate-talking-in-color/