Learning for Good

So today, I was on TikTok, as I often am when I'm

trying to reset my brain, when I need a space where my brain can

be itself and expanded and not have to work too hard and

ramping up slowly, and usually I do TikTok in the evenings or the

afternoons when I'm starting to slow down. But today, it was a

morning TikTok day. And so today, I was on TikTok. And I

ran across a piece by someone who is JRC, the SLP, and their

handle is @JRC_theSLP. She's a speech language pathologist. And

she's talking about African American English and why it's

important for everyone to understand African American

English. Not to use it, but to understand, it to be able to

grasp it and listen to it and hear it and interact with it

appropriately. First of all, she clarifies that it's African

American English, not African American Vernacular English,

because it's not slang. It's a whole dialect. And that is true.

And when she said that, I stumbled for a second, then I

was like, of course it is, of course it is. How ridiculous

that we should be trying to marginalize it and how

predictable that we would be trying to marginalize it as a

dominant cultural space. Of course, we're trying to

marginalize everyone else in the dominant paradigm. And I sort of

feel like I should have caught that before because I spend so

much time thinking about what the dominant paradigm is, and

isn't, but I didn't. And now I know, and now I can do better.

African American English. And then she talked about something

that I had not heard, in all the years that we've been talking

about the Trayvon Martin trial, I had not heard that a key piece

of testimony was misunderstood, because the court didn't

understand the African American English that the witness was

using. The court didn't understand the African American

English that the witness was using, didn't understand her

cadence, her accent, her language. And as a result, the

testimony was recorded very differently. And her witness was

basically thrown out. Whooo, I had some feelings about that.

And as soon as I was starting to come down from the wave of

feelings that I was having about that, which were not good,

appropriate, but not good. I started to think about the ways

in which we, as power holders, as business owners, as people in

positions of, of influence of various kinds, are responsible

for educating ourselves; for getting that information and for

using it wherever we need to, and for using it appropriately,

not to appropriate things that don't belong to us, not to

expand our reach into places where we shouldn't be, not to

take work from people who should rightly have that work. But so

we understand what's happening, so we can understand, so we can

communicate. The more privilege we have in various ways, but

especially if we have privilege in an environment like business,

where we have so much power, especially when we have so much

power. It is our responsibility to use that privilege and that

power to acquire the knowledge necessary, so that we can

understand what we need to understand. So that we can do a

better job of leading, of caring for the people who are in our

universe, of setting examples, of changing culture, like we

have more power to do that, because we control a space; when

we control a space, we control the elements of that space. So

we control a lot about the experience of the people who are

in our business, whether they're clients, that kind of

experience, whether they're customers, that kind of

experience, whether they're employees, that kind of

experience, whether they're co-workers, that kind of

experience. We have a lot of control over people's experience

of their lives. And it is our job to make sure that we know as

much as possible to understand and move through and interpret

those experiences. We have more power. It is on us to do more work.

That's all I have to say today. That's that's the message and if

you're someone like a judge, a life could hang in the balance.