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No, Growing Up Being Told to Talk Right is Not the Same as Racism
I come from a faded mill town in the British East Midlands. I was one of those weird in betweeners when it came to class; my mother was a teacher, so not technically working class. My father did factory work, installed satellite dishes, and finally settled into his own lawn and garden maintenance business. My mother’s father was a union man to the day he died.
So, yeah. I’m working class. Just because I’m now a “knowledge worker” doesn’t change those roots.
Which are audible every time I open my mouth.
Sort of.
See, I code switch. I have no choice but to code switch. When I’m in England talking to my family, I talk in the rough dialect of my youth, in which the word “ain’t” is a form of punctuation, h’s get in the way, and words like “twitchell” and “row” (doesn’t have anything to do with boats) are normal.
When I’m in America, I talk in a toned down Midlantic version. Why? Because if I talked in my birth dialect nobody here would understand a word that came out of my gob. Gob, there’s another fun word. I code switch for the benefit of those around me so they don’t have to learn my dialect.
When I grew up, though, I was pressured to get rid of my dialect. To learn to speak in received pronunciation. I was…