People get offended when they’re accused of talking white.
“Talking white” refers to mimicking white American speech patterns or defaulting to strictly standardized English as a primary mode of expression.
What people call “proper English” is really standard English, and Black Americans often code-switch between Standard English and BAE, which in origin was a fully developed creole language that existed alongside and overlapped with standardized English. It was decreolized and the remnants are spoken by BAs today.
Talking white signals alignment basically who you’re adjacent to, who you were socialized around, and often whether you were in the culture or not. It could be a marker of where you were from or who you were aligned to. Talking White has a history
We like to pretend there were never Black people who were anti-Black who hated being Black and looked down on Blackness while aspiring toward whiteness and being white. This was the source of internalized racism. The conditions that produced those attitudes in the past still and the people absolutely existed and still exist to this day.
White Americans also have a distinct and identifiable way of using English.
The racism comes in when this is framed as “education” or “wanting better.”
Those are BS arguments that reinforce racist stereotypes implying Black Americans don’t value improvement or intelligence.
As if Black Americans can’t point out that someone is mimicking white people’s linguistic patterns especially when we openly joke about and acknowledge code-switching ourselves.
“Proper English” doesn’t exist in practice because English is a lingua franca, and everyone uses it differently. A person from the UK, the USA, BA (🦹🏾♂️), India, Australia, or Nigeria can all understand the same sentence, even though they would naturally say it differently.
For example, the sentence “Go to the store”:
White American (Standard US English): “Go to the store.”
Black American English (BAE): “Go on to the store.” / “Go to the store real quick.”
UK English: “Go to the shop.”
Indian English: “Go to the shop once.”
Nigerian English: “Go and buy from the store.”
Australian English: “Go to the shop, yeah?”
Same meaning. Different usage.
So when Black Americans say “talking white,” that’s simply the BA version of saying “talking standard” or “talking proper.”
Proper implies something else is improper. This is a subjective rationalization
Remind them always that English itself is “improper” derivatives and borderline Creole of Germanic and Latin languages. Latin Vulgars don’t get this same treatment either. English is three different languages standing in a trench coat
