As Isabella stated in her blog, I as well never dealt with
different ethnicities in the classroom until I came to college. I went to a
small high school with primarily Caucasian students and teachers. Therefore,
different “ways of speaking” was never necessarily an issue for me.
After reading this article, I decided to take a different
route in discussion- from the perspective of African American women not
necessarily in the classroom, but in the community. An interesting quote I
found within this article was when Foster states that, “ According to
Marcyliena Morgan, studies of African American women’s speech behavior are
central to a complete understanding of how the community expresses its reality
because it is women who have historically been responsible for the language
development of children and consequently the community.” I found this take
interesting because of the large amount that we have discussed “gendered social
norms” in this course.
Different articles we have read over the course of this
semester have discussed women’s speech patterns, and how women are seen as
being less dominant in a group setting than men. However, Foster is emphasizing
the fact that women have been the primary way that children develop language,
not only in the classroom, but also the community, and is referring to African
American women specifically. A movie that came to my mind when thinking from
this perspective was “The Help.” This film deals with differences between black
and white women in the deep south, and I feel that it is a good indication of
the amount of influence that the African American women in this movie had on
the children in the white homes that they were working within.
Because I couldn’t find a sufficient specific example from
the movie, the link for the trailer is below:
This deals not only with racism, but with gendered norms and
African American womens’ influence in a specific community. I feel that this
can be looked at as an extension of Foster’s article.
Liz Ream
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