June Jordan

I actually really liked this reading because sociolinguistics has been one of my favorite classes and it was centered around the idea of whether or not standard English should be the academic norm. What was great is that it included personal anecdotes and honestly that is what made me care to read it. A lot of the readings can be dense or repetitive but this one stood out to me as meaningful and relevant to my own interests. I specifically remember a line discussing how thy would hang on to aspects of their dialects that their "parents had beaten out of them" (162), because the parents did not want to set up their children for an unnecessarily tied failure. It is a reminder of the structural violence associated with language as identity and the negative side that comes with it.