BP #1- BC_The way I talk

Business Comunications

9/14/11



    I have gone through different stages in my life mostly because of the neighborhoods I had to grow up in and attitudes that came with it to survive. Growing up I moved around a lot and at a young age it was all about being you, as I was taught. In pre-school/kinder garden I went to the Christian Academy Private School in a more middle class neighborhood that consist mostly people of color. I never had to worry about changing how I spoke with peers to fit in. That experience didn’t take place until I moved to a more upper class neighborhood where kids described your lingo and as ghetto. I used to always have parent/teacher conferences because the instructors felt the way I spoke was too opinionated and spoke out. The elementary school I went to consist of three African American kids, including myself. I had to change the way I spoke just to have the other kids to talk to me, who knows if they ever accepted me. This lingo of speaking proper, to their liking, stuck with me until around seventh grade when I became friends with more kids of color who would travel from East Palo Alto. When they got a hold of me, questions and comments of “why do you talk like that”, “you talk too white washed, you need to talk more black”, and my all time favorite, “O don’t mind her, she hasn’t been around enough black people In her life.” Words like “hella”, for me was just like another word in the dictionary. I never thought of it as a bad word and was never told not to say it. When I would go to other states or Los Angeles people have their own lingo for describing things n “hella” was just a Bay Area term that we used.