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Apparently all this time I have been misinformed. I thought biology determined your racial makeup, but lo and behold it's your vocabulary, voice tone, and inflection that determine your race. The fact that people say someone "talks white" or "talks black" illustrates that there is still prejudice among us. We all take English classes in school, in fact it's one of the few classes that you have to take all throughout high school and college. So, if I, a black male, start speaking proper English (like I was taught), that makes me less of a black man? That's preposterous. Proper English is the language of the world, if you can't form a sentence without using double negatives "I ain't do nothing", then it doesn't matter if you're black or white.

I think this is an educational issue, that affects race issues. Rappers and other predominantly black figures in the limelight rarely speak in proper English. And what does the radio and television play every ten seconds? Young people idolize rappers and the sort and to be like them, they adopt their speech and mannerisms. The reason the majority of these rappers speak this way, despite their gifts of putting words together, is because they did not finish high school or dropped out of high school. So speaking proper English is deemed "uncool" because Lil Wayne speaks in broken English and because 90% of public school teachers are white, if you talk the way they teach you, you're "talking white". It's this back of the bus mentality that keeps prejudice and ignorance going in our society. The way a person speaks should not be dependent on their races, if that were the case Martin Luther King Jr. would have classified as "talking white". And if that's the case, I'd much rather be "talking white" and compared to MLK than "talking black" and compared with a person who can't put a simple subject-verb sentence together.

There is no such thing as "talking white" or "talking black". Each person speaks differently. I am a black male and I speak proper English, and I know a white person who speaks broken English. Am I less of a black person because I speak proper English? It infuriates me to hear blacks criticize other blacks when they speak proper English. Are we so rebellious and bitter that we need to compete with one another? It's psychological war, we're segregating and discriminating against ourselves when we single each other out.

Learn more about this author, Roderic Williams.
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