English Is a Dialect With an Army - Ta-Nehisi Coates - The Atlantic - 0 views
www.theatlantic.com/...278300
language English African-American culture imperialism bilingualism multiculturalism
![](/images/link.gif)
-
I am getting some small notion of what it feels like to be white in America. What my classmates are telling me is that the Anglophone world is the international power. It dominates. Thus knowledge is tangibly necessary for them in a way that it is not for me
-
Of course the flip-side of this calculus is that power enables ignorance. Black people know this well.
-
I think this is the seed of the "We don't have any white history month!" syndrome. Through conquest the ways of whiteness become the air.
- ...5 more annotations...
-
But once those ways are apprehended by the conquered--as they must be--they are no longer the strict property of the conqueror. On the contrary you find the conquered mixing, cutting, folding, and flipping the ways of the conqueror into something that he barely recognizes and yet finds oddly compelling. And all the while the conquered still enjoys her own private home. She need not be amnesiac, only bilingual
-
. The phrase "code-switching" is overdone, but there is no cultural code from which all white people can "switch" from. It's not even a code. It's just the world.
-
There is no "nigger" for me, no private language, no private way of being all my own. And with that comes a great feeling of weakness and shame.
-
the literature of slavemasters is filled with exasperation over their slaves laughing at invisible jokes.