Reflection:

During this project I learnt many new things and skills. I leaned that garage band is a awesome application that can be useful for more projects. While editing it was hard to know when to stop so for future reference I know that in order for your final product not to sound so chopped up, you have to spend more time editing then interviewing. What was unexpected was that I could turn my garage band work into iTunes songs. That helped me understand better because I deal with music files a lot. Also the project taught me that crossing boundaries doesn’t just mean to cross boundaries that decide the world. When I heard some of the other projects one was about hair. While others were about race, so the range of boundaries that people could cross was a wide one. From this project I think crossing boundaries means to go past the normal’s of society and try to stay there. By doing this it can cause the person much pain or discrimination from peers but the effects can lead to a new social normal for society. It would cost the person many things for example, it could cost a person their job or family support but to reap the benefits of it can be beneficial for everybody. If a person were to not move from their seats when told because they are colored, they are setting new criteria that not everybody has to move. That person crossed the boundaries of race. From doing this project I learnt that not everything is important as I thought. If you don’t go to something it doesn’t mean you will not live your life or that the world will destroy itself. Even though from the project I also learned that I will be attending my prom because I cannot have the thought that something happened and I wasn’t there. Learning that I realized I’m nosier than I thought. All around this project was fun and new because I never used garage band before.

In this interview I'll be talking to my grandpop about his job. He worked there for 37 years but recently retired. I'm interviewing about how was it working at a job that long, what type of things he keep across. And since he was working there for so long, what type of people did he come across, so here's our interview.

Crossing boundaries means that you may upset others because they don't necessarily agree with what you're doing. They feel as though you're doing something that you're not supposed to be doing. They feel as though that you shouldn't be at the level you're at because of your race, the way you look, or the way you act. There always going to be people who feel as though you're stepping into the wrong territory.

While doing this podcast I learned so many things, things that I never even think was important turned out to be very important. I knew that my grandpop working at his job for those many years that he came across some problems even though when he used to come home he wouldn't really complain about it. I also knew that some of the people working at his job had racism because it was only a few blacks working there. While I was interviewing my grand pop I started to feel bad about not wanting to listen to him, like my grandma was the always the one talking about how she grew up and the people she had to deal with. Like if would want for my grandpop to tell me how he feels. So after doing this interview I will start to ask my grandpop about how he feels.

I think what my peers told me really helped because I like taking advice. I think getting advice from others is a really good thing because they pick up on things that you didn't notice. And sometimes it can be bad getting advice from your peers because they might not give you anything at all. I felt like I did really good with getting my interview done but not with the editing. The editing is like the hardest thing for me to do.

Code switching is necessary. At least, that’s what’s gotten me this far. Is it a skill? Probably. Something to acquire and become good at. I’ve always been pretty good with words – a silver tongue it’s called.

“Ay ma, what’s for eat up in here?”

“I already ate. You betta find somethin in here for you starve. You better not go to bed hungry, boy, It aint good for you.”

“Aight mom, I won’t”

“We got some fries you can whip up right quick”

“Aint that what we had yesterday?”

“I don’t even want to hear complaints. It be people in Africa that would eat fries every night.”

“Ugh. I know mom. Fine I will.”

It’s an interesting thing, slang. One can’t be bad at it. The simpler it gets, the easier it is to get the main point across. That is of course, if the person in the conversation is a patron of partial English too. It’s picked up easy, and it’s unique because a deliberate effort is needed to abolish it completely unless one was never influenced by it in the first place. Its staying power is offset by its lack of compulsion. What I mean is, it’s hard for a person that speaks “proper” English (i.e White people) to demote to slang. When talking “proper” it feels irreverently inconvenient. Most words that are effectively condensed in slang feel too deliberate and imposing, almost arrogant to be used in intimate or casual talk.

Unless of course, one is adept at code switching. It’s no longer about “acting white” or “being black”. It’s about getting what, (and who) you want using the right language. As James Baldwin said in his essay “If black English isn’t a language, then tell me, what is?”, …”The price for this is the acceptance, and achievement, of one's temporal identity”. It doesn’t feel natural- to code switch I mean. Or rather it is much more comfortable to stick to one dialect, tone, language, theme, even status quo. For the price of leaving my inner comfort I can excel much better than I ever could restraining to my “Black English”. Not to say Black English is restricting, although, due to specific reasons it should not be used outside of intimate conversation.

When I was young, 5 or 6, everyone spoke it- Black English I mean. I was home within my comfort zone. I had not been exposed to anything else. Back then It was fine to have one mindset, one code, and to be ignorant of any other was not only acceptable, but sadly widespread within my community. At that age, of course, my community did not consist of many people outside of my family. Then there was school. School is a place where solitude was only obtainable through great effort. There was always a curious boy or girl who wanted to know what another name. To my credit, I wasn’t the least bit shy. If I was I most likely would not have the skills I do. I probably wouldn’t even attend the school I do now.

When I got a little older, I started to realize just how important code switching was. I was about 9 or 10 when I saw just how “clicks” formed. Similar people grouping together to for stable community inside one dysfunctional one. I noticed how different they were. Separated by music choice, neighborhoods, earlier childhood relations, even as general as gender. Usually one would blend into one that fit his or her category. Not me. Now 12 and 13 I watched, observed the wildlife in their artificial habitat.

“Ey yo jojo come ovea here.”

“Yeah pop?”

“I need to carry dis box indo tha ay whats it called ay, store.”

“O.k”

What is presented is conversation with my grandfather, the convection always starts out with me talking with right words until we get into a deeper conversation, and then I just start to pick up his accent. I start talking the same way he does, and sometimes I don’t realize I am but most of the time I do realize that I’m talking like him, and I don’t know why I do. Sometimes the accent stays with me for a couple of hours. I don’t realize that I still have the accent. When I still have the accent, people sometimes don’t take me seriously, and it gets annoying. At those points I know how my grandfather feels when we laugh at him, but it’s not his fault, because he never really went to school because he grew up poor, and that’s another reason that people don’t take him seriously.

There are also situations where he would say a whole sentence wrong. he would say something about a door like “Because of dah wood bottom.” when he really means “the bottom of the door is made out of wood that is the problem.” He would also curse a lot, which is a form of his personality not really a part of his accent. He would say “Joe can you stop fuckin aroun all the time, anded lisin to what I’m tryin to say?”

“Ay Joe, pass me them screws?”

“Yeah, sure gimmie a minute ight?”

“ight”

This is the point where I start to talk like him sometimes. I would switch on purpose, but there are times where I switch totally by accident, and I can be stuck in that accent for hours. I would do it to make fun of him but then I can’t control they way I talk after. It’s almost like karma because I to have the accent to make fun, and then I’m stuck with it for a couple hours and it usually gets annoying.

One time I was stuck in the accent in school, and the teacher called on me, and I got in trouble for using the accent, and I said it wasn’t my fault, the teacher said I was be obnoxious, but I wasn’t. It also is obnoxious  when someone calls my granddad annoying and dumb just because he doesn’t have proper grammar. I understand why people might think that but it doesn’t make it right to say it out loud, I only have the accent for a little while he’s stuck with it. All I can assume is that he makes fun of himself also, because all of his friends talk like that too.

“Ay yo Jo Jo.”

“Yeah?”

“Ahh when are goin to the uhh the, gym?”

“Tomorrow why?”

“I just wanted to know.”

The are also times where he would not know what to say or forget how to say something or not be able to spit it out, and sometimes I do that to, It’s not about the accent it’s that some words he doesn’t know too well and, he kind of get stressed over it, and sometimes it pisses me off knowing that he’s not able to talk a well as others but at least he tries and the fact that people don’t take him seriously is a big deal.

I guess it’s just a family curse.

"No, you’re wrong it's New Jersey and New York, now you say it"

"Ard, I got chu new jewsey and new ywok"

"Sigh… pero por que tu segi desiendolo haci?"

“what chu been por que? Haci es como yo hablo?”

“sigh”

People nowadays are just so quick to fix someone else up when really there's nothing that's broken. People want others to speak what they consider and accept as "normal" when really it's just one of millions of ways to talk. For an example, when I'm talking with my brother he says that I sound like I'm from Brooklyn or if I'm Italian when honestly I don't It's just the way I talk. It's kind of stupid that people want everyone to talk like how they talk. Everyone is different in everyway. But, then there are some people that take it to a whole other level even though it's not that deep. Just because one say certain words how the majority of people say them doesn’t mean the whole world need to say it the same way. When I'm having a full conversation with different people they all say that I talk weird because I speak both Spanish and English at the same time and I be pronounce things differently than others. For an example some words that people say that I always say wrong when I know that im saying that they are right are, “Inevitable”, “Congratulations”, “talk”, “New York”, and “New Jersey.”

When I'm speaking to my close friends I also switch back and forth using both Spanish and English to talk to them. When I'm talking to my friends when we go to the corner store and we all are making fun of each other or something we always switch from Spanish to English. So when I talk people say that I talk really weirdly because I apparently talk “Ghetto”, like an Italian, and Spanglish. Im always having somebody correct me and I get annoyed because I know that im right and it’s just the way that I want to pronounce them.

“Ayo, por que tu siempre esta hablando haci. You saying that the way that I tolk is wrong when u can’t even pronounce have of the words you is saying.”

“Si pero like you say New York and New Jersey like a whole italian boul or if u from Brooklyn when u is not and u talking like one of the drugies around here.”

“I know im not cambron pero that’s the way I talk and I don’t get it, why is it wrong like how is it wrong”

“Porque tu nunca oyo los gentes aqui talking like that, you talk like a whole nut daawg”

“o.”

The conversations would be full of argument about how we both talk and the pronunciation of words ect. Also, I think that I am the only person that talks the way I do because I haven’t seen anyone else talk the same way. Like, the combination of English, Spanish and the Italian accent and Brooklyn accent. When im having a long conversation with someone they realize it imitaly and the point it out. Then that’s were it starts the argument of how Im just talking normal and they say that it is not normal and they begin to correct me and talk slow for me and they just cant because I don’t know how else to say them. So, I have im guessing a few accents mixed into one.

Now another example is when im talking on the phone to a company and I start talking how I always do my mom would get mad because I sound like im talking “ghetto” or “dumb” when really it’s just the way I talk. Why is it that when we talk there is a “smart” way to talk and a “dumb way” to talk. Shouldn’t talking just be Basic English everywhere we go and not be judge by how we pronounce words or the accents that we have. So I think that I could relate to “Tonge Tied” a lot because in the story there was a quote that said “She didn’t understand black language. I stood their nervous and sweating I did not know how to react or what to do. I couldn’t run away, I couldn’t breath, I could not even swallow.” This quote explains how I feel when people give me a weird look, or ask me about what I just said.

Another quote that I could relate to from the same story is when it say’s “there are different Spanish’s. “Every Spanish speaker waits and wants to hear what kind of Spanish you use. If u mess up a lot of words or the pronunciation of a word you are look down at and they will think that you weren’t raised right or you grew up in a bad neighborhood”. I have this feeling all the time when talking to my mom friends or when talking to my friends because I don’t want to make a mistake I want to speak as perfect as they do but it’s hard when I talk the way I do. If I were to pick a thesis for this story it would have to be “Everyone’s a critic, always ready to judge one’s language and style.” Why I decided to pick this thesis was because I think that it’s true how no matter what race, age or sex one can be are there’s always someone ready to judge the way you talk and will look at you differently once you open your mouth and that reputation will always follow you because of the first time you talked to someone they will always have some kind of word to describe you.

  “May I the have the turkey club without bacon?”
“Sssr Hun. Would you like some wooder?”
“Yes please with lemon.”
I did not know it then, but the way I speak has a big impact on how the world views me. Some people might think I’m rich or something because I speak “proper”. Some people think I’m sucking up or trying to act superior.
“Why you talk that way? Are you White?” I usually ignore them because I don’t really talk all that differently then they do. In fact I talk the same way they do in a language called English. You would think people with an accent would have a hard time fitting in But for me its the opposite. My lack of accent is what makes me standout for better or worst. When in the “hood” some people think it’s uncool. When out in the street some people look at me like “ I didn't know black people could talk” I think I have always talked well, but never in a dry NPR kind of way. I have an accent apart from my “white” or Philly ones. It is my accent picked up from living with a crazy family, and hours of watching Star Trek.

When I was little I loved using big words because if you did people would listen. Strangers would upon meeting me exclaim how smart I was, telling my mom I should get tested as if she did not know me. My big vocab at a young age also got me into trouble. For example in kindergarten a fellow classmate was talking to me about animals.

“ My favorite animals are cats and dogs and fish and...”

I knew a lot on the subject and chimed in.

“ You know you’re a animal”

“No I’m not,” she said loudly

“ Yes you are, you’re a mammal”.

At this point she had enough of my blasphemous tongue, so she ran off to the teachers. “Khari called me a mammal” It took the teachers a while to calm the child. Then they want me to say sorry to her, for what I thought, but gave a half hearted one anyway. Now I know this is taking it a bit too far but people seem to be insulted with certain language when the meaning is unknown to them. It holds some weight over their heads. One must first take in account the place where people come from in order to communicate.

I used to feel that in order to be understood I had to change the way I talked depending on where I was. I didn’t want them to judge me by the way I spoke. So I try to sound less like me and more like the people I was trying to fit in with. This reminds me of a quote in James Baldwin If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me What Is. He says, “What joins all languages, and all men, is the necessity to confront life”. This fear of being left out or being seen as an outsider brings to mind “the necessity to confront life”. For that is all a language is, a way to describe life. So that being said the language of others I used to fit in, was not reflecting my life. I want to not lie to people with my voice, I started to talk normally and use “big words”. The dreaded insults came back, for a little while anyway, but over time they got bored with the teasing and got used to my voice.

Looking back, it feels rather silly to try to sound like someone am not. However the reasoning behind the action was sound. With so many people in the world trying to fit into social boxes, it is hard to say true to yourself. I might have stopped trying to sound like other, but there is still pressure to be like them. So keeping in mind “the necessity to confront life” I must make sure I’m true to mine.  

            All throughout my life people have told me that I’m very well spoken. I take it as a compliment. Even though most of the people telling me that are friends of my parents, who say stuff like,

“Oh you’ve grown so much since the last time I’ve seen you.”

Or,

“Oh, you’ve gotten so much taller since last time.”

I think of myself as being pretty impressionable and easily influenced. If I see someone that I look up to doing something, I tend to mimic their actions because I look up to them and want to do things similarly to them. I think that both what I’ve been told and what I’ve assumed go hand in hand for me. I think it is because I tend to spend a lot of time around people who have wide vocabularies and are very articulate. According to my mom I’ve been that way from a very young age.

            I heard the phone ringing. I was only four years old and I loved answering the phone.

“Who could it be?” I thought to myself. “Is it for me? Is it about me?”

I picked up the phone.

“Hello.”

“Hello, am I speaking with um Karen?” the man behind the phone asked.

“No, this is her son, I’ll put her on.” “MOMMMM! Someone is on the phone calling for you.”

“Okay, thank you, Isaac.”

I walk into the other room to hand my mom the phone.  My mom put the phone to her ear.

“Hello… No thank you, bye!” said my mom as she violently hung up the phone.

“Who was that?” I asked.

“Oh it was just some annoying person trying to sell me something.”

“Oh okay.”

I kept wondering why my mom would be angry with someone for calling and trying to sell her something? It didn’t seem so horrible to me.

“Why were you so angry with the person calling?” I asked.

“I’m on a list called the “Do not call list” and I get really annoyed when those people continue to call me when I’m on a list that states I don’t want to hear from them.”

 Finding out that my mom didn’t like when people called our phone trying to sell something to her gave me something new to look out for while being at home.

            A few days later I was sitting at home one night with my mom. The phone rang. I jumped up to go answer it.

            “Hello.”

            “Hi, is this Karen?”

             “No, it’s her son.”

            “Oh okay my name is…”  

            “Are you her friend or are you just trying to sell her something?” I asked.

I heard laughter come from the other end of the line.

            “No, no, no I’m her friend. It’s her friend Susan.”

            “Oh, okay. She’s here. I’ll go get her.”

I handed my mom the phone. I listened to what she was saying just in case the caller had tricked me.

            “Hello… Oh hi Susan.” My mom said.

All of a sudden she started to laugh.

            “He really said that? No, no, no. He is only four years old.”

A few minutes later my mom got off the phone with her friend.

            “Isaac…”

            I interrupted her mid sentence.

            “Who was that mommy? What were you…?”

            My mom interrupted me.

            “She is a new friend of mine.”

            “Oh okay. What were you laughing at?”

            “Isaac, she thought you were a teenager because of the way you answered the phone.”

            How did I sound like a teenager? I thought to my self. Is that supposed to be a good thing or… I wasn’t sure what to make of it. Was my voice deeper than the average four year old? Did I have a wide vocabulary? I had no idea what could have led my mom’s friend to jump to that conclusion, but I guess I took it as a compliment.

             “Why did she think I sounded like a teenager?”

            “I don’t know but I heard you ask if she was either my friend or trying to sell me something so I guess it might’ve been the manner in which you talked to her.”            

How could asking such a simple sounding question make people think I’m more grown up than I actually am? On the outside I felt overjoyed and excited but on the inside I wasn’t sure how to feel.  It surprised the heck out of me that someone just, would assume that I was a teenager all because of a few things that I said.

            Before that, I never really had thought about how people’s ways of speaking can tell other people a story about them and their identity. James Baldwin who wrote the essay If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is? Wrote,

             “Language, incontestably, reveals, the speaker. Language also, far more dubiously, is meant to define the other- and, in this case, the other is refusing to be defined by a language that has never been able to recognize him.”

            This quote is relevant to my story because it says that language can reveal a lot about a speaker.  Since the person had not ever met me or heard me speak, she couldn’t have known how old I was. Yet she thought I was much older. This occurrence really made me think about how powerful language can be. I guess now that I am sixteen years and in fact a teenager; maybe my language on the phone makes people assume that I am twenty-six. I’d love to find out how I can use it to my advantage, but I have no idea how that could occur. 

Aaron VanBuren                   1/13/12

“Quan, Come here”

“Here I come, Popup”

“Pick that up”

“Okay, wait what is this?”

What I saw was a book with the cover reading “The Brooks Family Heritage”. I started to flip through the book looking for pictures, as a little kid would do. I saw my relatives dressed in business suits and nice clothes. I came to the thought that my relatives weren’t slaves, so I asked and found out that my family were free Africans when they came to America. I started to wonder what did they do when they came to America and how did they get free? My grandfather and his sisters and brothers all had nice houses and were wealth, when my grandfather got sick I came over his house all the time to help out and I learned a lot of how to build and fix a house, learned how cook and also how to flirt with girls.

A couple years earlier when my grandmother alive, my mom, dad, sister and I visited her and my great-grandmother in Virginia.  It was like we were going through a jungle going to see my family in Heathsville. We came to a road named Brooks and I asked “Mommy is that street named after Grandfather’s family?”

“She said yes and she said do you see that old house right there?”

“Yes”

“Well that house belongs to our family”

“Really”

“We ring the doorbell”

“Who is it?”

“Hey Mama Daye, Its Tannie and the family”

“Hey baby’s come on in”

“Mama Daye what is that smell?

“Its fish, eggs, pork chops”

 “Mhmmm…”

“Mama Daye where did you learn how to cook like that?”

“There is a long line of skills passed through our family and cooking is one.”

Thinking back to the book I found back in Philadelphia at my Grandfather’s house, I thought this was different because my Great Grandfather on my mother’s side was Native America and Irish. My Great Grandmother are African American and Italian. The thought of my family never being slaves on my mother side was shocking because I thought everyone was slaves, Not being slaves, my family had opportunities to do more as free Africans who adapted into African Americans. One thing that came from not being slaves was education that led to wealth with in my family. From the wealth my family has or had I was taught how to invest, how to be a salesman and how to build a house and how to reconstruct a house.

Visiting my father’s side of the family and knowing where they are from, they are from an area where slavery was high in numbers. I was curious what roots ran through my father’s side and I found out that there is some Polish but mostly African American descent. I know I have similarities as my dad but not a lot. He is a hard worker and he can fix anything given to him. I think that’s where the roots of slavery fall into play.

I have seen how being a different descent or race can cause problems. People look at me differently because of my skin color, which is black. Although, within my bloodline I have Native American, Polish, Italian, Irish and African American mixed to form who I am today. “It goes without saying, then, that language is also a political instrument, means, and proof of power. It is the most vivid and crucial key to identify: It reveals the private identity, and connects one with, or divorces one from, the large, public, or communal identity.” My language is set up from my ancestors who went through hard times and made the best of them. My history defines my language. When I think about how differently I get treated I think about how worst some else has it and deal with the situation at hand. If my history is speaking then it is speaking through experience that will help form the next generation of my family and prepared them for all the drama and life loving experiences.

My history defines my language because over the years my language of being simple and needy has evolved into me being a definition of my heritage and the future legacy of the Brooks and VanBuren Family.  The roots of my Native American, Polish, Italian, Irish and African American ancestors show through the way I learn about new things and or just learning new things about my family and how I teach people about who I am as a person and how my history defines my language. Overall the language of my ancestors is my history of my language, which my language is define by my history in the present and past.