Not Talking Black: African American Vernacular English and Dialect Based Smothering

Edilia Y. Foster

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Prerequisite for Honors in the Department of Philosophy under the advisement of Professor Mary Kate McGowan

MAY 2020

© 2020 EDILIA FOSTER

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank Professor Mary Kate McGowan for her feedback and infinite and unfailing patience, support and kindness.

I would like to thank the Levitt Fellowship for funding and supporting my thesis project.

I would like to the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship not only for funding my research but also for providing or the opportunity to meet my mentors and cohort, all of whom have provided support and given me perspective.

I would like to thank Professor Gartner and my PHIL 108 seminar for introducing me to philosophy.

Lastly, I would like to thank my mother, Yvonne Foster, without whom I could not have achieved anything at Wellesley. You’re not here to read this, but I hope I made you proud.

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Table of Contents

Acknowlegements……………………………………..2

Introduction …………………………………………. 4

Chapter 1 ……………………………………...…….. 9

Chapter 2 ………………………………………...….. 13

Chapter 3 ……………………………………………. 30

Chapter 4 ……………………………………….…… 39

Chapter 5 ……………………………………………. 48

Chapter 6 ………………………………………….… 55

Conclusion ……………………………………..……. 61

Bibliography ……………………………………...…. 62

3 Introduction

In the U.S. there are many markers of social groups including dialect and income. I argue that one particular marker —dialect — is used by ignorant audiences to come to false conclusions. Although this is the case for many dialects, I focus on the dangers of believing

African American Vernacular English is Standard American English. Because AAVE speakers are aware of this danger, they choose not to speak and silence themselves in order to avoid harms like reinforcing negative stereotypes. I posit that this is different from a different type of silencing, called testimonial smothering, because it does not rely on any specific topic. In separating the two, we can see how speakers are consistently affected in environments like courtrooms where their dialect as opposed to any single topic affects the conclusions their audiences come to. In silencing themselves, they experience separate harms including hermeneutical injustice and the weight their awareness of the phenomena causes.

In Chapter 1, I quickly present the history and distinguishing features of African

American Vernacular English. Although many believe it to simply be an uneducated extension of

Standard American English, it has in fact, developed alongside SAE. Though there is no consensus about how the dialect emerged, it is clear that its complexities and differences are a result of a mixture of English and African cultures and languages. Because of this history,

AAVE possesses unique grammatical structures that allow speakers to further express continuity and habituality amongst other abilities. Although AAVE was originally thought to be the language of poor and working-class Black people, its complexities and influence make it a primary dialect in the U.S.

4 In Chapter 2, I provide a brief overview of how speech and speech acts work. J.L. Austin provided a framework in which we can view speech. When we speak, we also perform actions, speech acts that can be broken down into their conventional meaning (locutionary force), intended use (illocutionary force), and impact (perlocutionary force). In ideal situations, what we intend to say is interpreted correctly and has the correct impact, but speech can go wrong in many ways.

Speech acts can fail to be recognized as the speaker intends. One reason this failure occurs is because the speaker’s audience mistakes the speech act the speaker intends for another type. For instance, an audience might mistake a dare for an order and believe they cannot choose to object. If might dare my audience to eat a worm and they do it even if they wouldn’t have otherwise. Recognition failure can also occur when speakers do not think that speakers sincerely mean what they say. For example, I might leave doughnuts on a counter at home and tell everyone not to eat them. While they understand I intend to prevent them from eating the doughnuts, they might fail to think I’m sincere because I left them out. Recognition failure can also occur when audience falsely believe that a speaker does not have the authority to commit the speech act they intend. It might be the case that a babysitter is ignored when he orders the children he is babysitting to bed because they believe that only their parents can do that.

Speech acts can also fail because speakers experience inflated and deflated credibility.

Amongst other things, speaker with inflated credibility might be taken as representing their entire social group. Audiences often believe that social groups have monolithic experiences and as a result, any one person can make statements for the entire culture. This is a carrier for stereotypes and can lead to tokenism and disadvantaged social groups are limited in their ability to communicate. Conversely, speakers may experience a credibility deficit. We don’t give speakers

5 the credibility they deserve and often ignore parts of what they have to say. They are considered to be less competent or less reliable possessors of knowledge and it requires more effort to be heard.

Another way speech can fail are pre-communicative forms of silencing. Two such forms are hermeneutical injustice and testimonial silencing. Speakers may lack the ability and vocabulary to describe their experience. For example, a person who has given birth might not be able to communicate the pain they experience during labor. Although there are scales to describe pain, labor pains are unique in intensity. As a result, others might down grade their experiences and not provide the proper care they need. Testimonial injustice describes what happens when a person decides not to speak because they know their audience will come to false conclusions about the topic they want to discuss. Because they cannot discuss it they might be thought as unfamiliar with the topic amongst other things.

In Chapter 3, I discuss how AAVE’s legitimacy has historically been undermined in U.S. public schools. Students have been punished for speaking AAVE in classrooms thereby discouraging them from speaking AAVE and learning to communicate their culture publicly.

AAVE speaking students scored lower as they struggled to learn another dialect while also learning core subjects. Ignorant people interpreted their results to mean they were naturally unintelligent and reinforced negative stereotypes about Black people’s cognitive abilities that already existed. AAVE speakers were and are forced to code-switch, fluently changing between

AAVE and SAE, in order to succeed. Although code-switching is not formally taught, AAVE speakers still faced criticism within and outside of their communities when they failed to properly code-switch.

6 In Chapter 4, I present a case study of Rachel Jeantel’s testimony in George

Zimmerman’s trial. Jeantel’s experience and testimony were corrupted by the judge’s, jurors’, attorneys’, and court reporter’s (in)ability to understand AAVE. Her use of AAVE was used to argue that she didn’t know what she actually experienced and what was occurring in the courtroom. Her attempts at clarifying were also seen as changes in her testimony. After the first day of trial, Jeantel becomes aware of the negative impact of her dialect on her testimony and limits what she says to the bare minimum.

In Chapter 5, I argue for a new kind of dialect-based silencing that can describe experiences like Jeantel’s. I revisit testimonial smothering to provide a framework with which we can examine dialect-based smothering. Although both are pre-communicative forms of silencing, the difference between the effects of the topics of testimony and the dialect in which it is expressed distinguish the two. While a singular topic might be ignored, a dialect affects all things speaker might think about saying in front of an ignorant audience. This difference also serves an important reminder that the experiences of speakers are not just communicated in single topics, but also in how we transmit our experiences.

In Chapter 6, I introduce three harms that result from dialect-based smothering. In smothering one’s self, we once again experience hermeneutical injustice. One way this happens is when vocabulary fails to communicate different meanings. When a speaker uses a dialect similar to their audience’s, their audience might think that shared words share meaning. Because

AAVE words don’t necessarily explain the separate meaning at the time, AAVE speakers cannot use the vocabulary of their dialect to explain their experiences. Additionally, the self-silencing that occurs further perpetuates the myth that AAVE is simply SAE with errors. Because speakers are afraid to use their dialect, deviation from SAE is perceived as increasingly rare and a result of

7 mistakes. AAVE speakers are aware of how their words are perceived and this forces them to make a stressful decision between speaking AAVE, code-switching, or remaining silent. As we will see, AACE speakers do not have any good choices.

There are many reasons why AAVE speakers decide against speaking. Aware of the harm resulting from the false inferences incompetent audience members make, AAVE speakers sometimes choose not to speak. Such self-silencing is also harmful.

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Chapter 1: African American Vernacular English

The English language is made up of many different forms or dialects, each corresponding with a region or social group. In the United States, Standard American English (SAE) is considered the primary, or only, dialect even though many other varieties are commonly used.

One such dialect is African American Vernacular English (AAVE), spoken by working and middle-class black people. AAVE has many names because of disagreements about its origins and use. Some linguists include a wide range of more formal versions of the dialect in AAVE.

But they choose to call it African American English to acknowledge the fact that it can blend with other dialects including SAE. Others choose to simply call it Black English because its influence and presence can be found outside of the U.S. Regardless of its name, it is often mistakenly thought to be SAE riddled with errors. AAVE is a genuine dialect, but it is not acknowledged as a legitimate dialect by many SAE speakers, especially in formal environments like courtrooms.

There are many theories about how AAVE developed, spread, and came to be considered the common dialect of Black people in the United States. While there is no consensus on which theory is correct, the Transformationalist, English Origins Hypothesis and Creole theories are the most popular amongst linguists. The Transformationalist theory hypothesizes that AAVE is really just SAE with surface-level changes made by slaves. It supports modern perceptions of

AAVE, however, it fails to account for the unique aspects of AAVE’s grammatical structure or answer how slaves would have learned SAE fluently without formally being taught (Rickford

9 52). The English Origins Hypothesis Theory contends that AAVE came from a few early

British dialects, possibly brought to America by immigrants and indentured servants. According to the EOH theory, it was adopted by and eventually solidified into a single dialect by the

African American community and later differentiated with use. However, the English Origins

Hypothesis Theory struggles to explain why many of AAVE’s features are consistent with those of creole languages. The Creole Theory argues that AAVE was the result of an English creole language that might have developed at an African slave port or on plantations in the pre-civil war

South, similar to the Jamaican Creole, Patois (AAL Facts). It best explains AAVE’s grammatical structure; however, it cannot guarantee AAVE was another creole dialect. Early theorists struggled to account for how one creole language could become consistent across the entire southeastern U.S. when slaves had limited contact with each other, but discussion now focuses on disproving that AAVE could have resulted from English dialects alone (Rickford 2015). The only thing we can be certain of is that it is rooted in English and that there is some influence from African languages on AAVE’s formation. However, this may be relatively insignificant to

AAVE’s current format.

Putting aside its origins, let’s now focus on its characteristics. AAVE has many features that distinguish it from Standard American English. The most unique feature of AAVE is its use of ‘be’ and ‘BIN’ to signal continuity, habituality, and duration. For example, ‘He be singing in church on Sunday’ can communicate a future act (He’ll be singing in church on Sunday) or a habit (He sings in church on Sundays). While ‘She BIN married’ means both she is currently married, and she has been married for a long time.’1 Some other noticeable differences include the simplification of diphthongs (e.g. sigh pronounced ‘sah’ instead of ‘sah-ee’), the metathetic

1 This should not be confused with a similar SAE phrase ‘She’s been married’, taken to mean that a person was married at some point but isn’t any longer.

10 use of ask (pronounced like aks or ax, the weapon) in which the letters s and k change positions, and the reduction or deletion of sounds at the end of words (past, pronounced pass and hand, pronounced han).

Other features include negative concord (multiple negations); the absence of -s and regularization of possessives; and the absence of third-person singular -s. Multiple negations are used like many other American dialects, the most popular one being ‘ain’t’. Amongst other things, it can replace “I’ve never” and “isn’t anything” and has the added ability to replace

‘didn’t’ in AAVE specifically. Possessives often drop ending -s, so the house that belongs to

Grandma is ‘Grandma house’, likewise, a car that belongs to a teacher is ‘teacher car’.

Additionally, the first-person singular possessive, ‘mines’, has an s in order to concur with other possessive pronouns (his, hers, theirs, etc.). S is commonly also removed from third-person singular verbs (e.g. ‘He walk to school’ instead of ‘He walks to school’).

AAVE is often mistakenly thought to only be spoken by poor black people, despite its wide usage by speakers of different races and socioeconomic backgrounds. This misconception is largely due to the fact that the linguist who first studied AAVE originally focused her work on specific impoverished black communities. In those urban areas, black people lived in tight communities and openly embraced their oral/aural traditions (Kochman 1969; Lippi-Green

2012). And as a result, researches assumed that the open and enthusiastic use of AAVE was a marker of those spoke the dialect. At the time, the ‘street culture’ which Black people created was linked to lively conversations and competitions (Tarone 1973). AAVE speakers also differ in their enthusiastic use of intonation. In that environment, participating in such conversations broached on competition. Those who speak the loudest and fastest are heard, show their wit, and win tacit competitions. This culture brought attention to distinctive qualities like tone. The range

11 of pitch is larger and often more animated in AAVE. Falsetto is more common in AAVE because of its piercing nature. AAVE speakers often speak in a higher register, enabling them to be heard in loud conversations. For this same reason, AAVE is also fast paced. AAVE’s reliance on oral tradition (as opposed to the written tradition of SAE) encouraged black speakers to talk over each other more so than speakers of SAE.

In summary, AAVE is a dialect that is often not acknowledged as a legitimate dialect, even though it is used by many people in the U.S. SAE is often assumed to be the only English dialect in America and as a result any variations from SAE are considered errors. This is partially due to the fact that as dialects of American English, AAVE and SAE share many characteristics.

Still, AAVE has unique grammatical structure and vocabulary. This chapter summarizes some of the characteristics of AAVE. This information will be helpful in understanding different ways that utterances in AAVE can go wrong. In the next chapter, I explore how speech works and I identify several different ways that a use of language can go wrong.

12 Chapter 2: How does speech work?

For a long time, the purpose of words was a controversial philosophical and linguistic topic. In academic philosophy, language was assumed to mainly describe the world accurately or inaccurately. Linguists and philosophers now acknowledge that words do more than make true or false statements. Limiting them to this binary underestimates their impact.

2.1 Speech Acts

Often, we make statements and describe things, but we also carry out distinct actions like accusing, promising, and ordering. For instance, when I say, “There’s traffic on the 405”, my words might accurately describe the state of the 405 freeway, but stating the truth is not their only function. They might also serve to warn someone (i.e. Taking the freeway will make you arrive late.) or function as an excuse (Taking the free affected my ability to arrive on time). The different functions that words might have are called speech acts. However, simply acknowledging speech acts is not enough to explain how they work.

To do this, we need to introduce three terms due to the work of J.L. Austin (1975) to describe the qualities speech can have: locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary force.

Locutionary force is the meaning and references attached to an utterance. If someone says,

“Grace went to class.”, the locutionary force tells me that a person named Grace has gone to some type of classroom or lesson. Each of these words follow a meaning convention. When I want to refer to refer to someone, I can use their name to identify them. When I want to

13 communicate an action they performed, I use the past tense of a verb. The words used refer to specific things and actions. Utterances also follow a convention. So, for instance, if that sentence was in response to the question “What happened to Grace?”, the other person’s response is referring to the Grace I asked for. We know all of this because what I have said follows a convention. When I want to know Grace’s status, I ask in a certain way and someone uses the conventions to interpret that I want a certain type and amount of information.

The illocutionary force is what kind of action a speaker is committing when they say those words. When we speak, we perform more actions than simply saying words. In addition to making factual claims, we also perform actions when we speak; actions like apologizing, requesting, and ordering. For example, when two people who have met all the appropriate legal requirements say, ‘I do’ in front of a minister, they perform the act of marrying in addition to stating ‘I do’. The illocutionary force behind words is sometimes conditional. This includes acts like marrying and commanding. Marrying, for instance, requires that the speaker is of age, unmarried, possess a marriage license, etc. Without these, even though the words still refer to

(have the locutionary force of) the act of marrying, you have not married another person when you say them.

Convention plays an important role here. I have to meet certain conventional conditions in order to count as having married someone with an utterance of ‘I do”. The hearer’s recognition of the speaker’s intention also matters. It is called uptake. There is some controversy about whether uptake is necessary for illocution. One the one hand, it seems that it is not necessary because I can rant, rejoice, and curse when no one is there, and they still count as being done. However, speech acts like apologizing or warning do seem to require an audience to be present and to understand what action is being performed or attempted. On this line of

14 thinking, if I say, “I am sorry,” with the intention to apologize but the hearer does not recognize that I intend to be apologizing by saying that, then my utterance fails to be an apology.

Lastly, words have a perlocutionary force, which is the causal effect words have on the hearers. For example, if as Vice President of the Wellesley College Choir, I demand that a choir member turn in some paperwork and I say “Julia, please fill out the form.” My intention is to tell

Julia that she has not filled out the form and I am ordering her to do so. As a member of the executive board, I have the power to and am actually ordering her to turn in her forms. When she recognizes my order, this can cause a variety of different effects. Perhaps, my order makes her angry (because she is a jealous fool); perhaps it motivates her to fill out the form (because she enjoys filling out forms on Tuesdays). The causal effect that the speech act has on the hearer is the perlocutionary effect.

2.2 Ways Speech Acts Go Wrong

There are many ways to think about and classify how language can fail to do what we want it to. A simple way to categorize these failures is in chronological order. That is to say, failures that happen before we attempt to perform a speech act, during a speech act, and after we attempt or perform a speech act (McGowan 2017). I will first consider ways that speech acts can go wrong when they are performed or attempted.

2.2.1 Recognition Failure

15 One-way speech can go wrong is recognition failure. Recognition failure happens during a speech act when an audience fails to recognize some crucial aspects like the illocutionary force, sincerity, or authority required to commit a speech act.

Let’s focus first on the recognition of illocutionary force (Hornsby 1993; Langton 1993).

A speech act can fail to take place if the audience does not recognize my illocutionary intention.

This is uptake. For instance, we could imagine ourselves apologizing. Perhaps we took cookies from a coworker’s secret stash or we dinged a relative’s car. We might say ‘I’m sorry’ to a person we’ve wronged with the intention to apologize. But if they did not think I meant to apologize in saying those words, they might fail to receive my words as an apology. This is called uptake failure. If uptake is necessary for illocution, then my saying ‘I’m sorry’ fails to be an apology. But it might be that uptake is not necessary. In that case, my utterance is an apology, but it is undermined by the hearer’s failure to recognize that I intended to apologize.

This is a low-stakes example, but the same kind of recognition failure could have serious consequences when, for example, someone is requesting help. If my requests for help failed to be recognized, I could be denied resources I am owed or even be put in danger.

For instance, in 2017, while in custody, Warren Demesme asked the arresting officers to

“just give [him] a lawyer dog” (Stern 2017). He intended to invoke his right to counsel.

However, the detectives took him to be requesting a nonexistent canine at law and not a human attorney. The detectives’ failure to recognize Demesme’s intention to invoke his right to counsel was influenced by their ignorance of AAVE (spoken by Demesme). In this case, they heard his words but mistook them for a request, no different than asking to go to the bathroom. Such requests can be denied and in the mind of the police officers, ridiculous requests like asking for a lawyer dog must be. As a result, not only did they continue to question him, they also prevented

16 him from accessing legal counsel. (Tiersma and Solan 2005), It was brought to the Louisiana

Supreme Court, but they did not rule in his favor. The court reasoned that his invocation should have been clearly indicative of an invocation of the right to counsel as opposed to a request.

Another type of recognition failure occurs when hearers believe speakers to be lacking sincerity (McGowan 2017). Audiences recognize the speech act the speaker intends but believe that they do not mean whatever speech act they committed. This often happens to women when they try to refuse sex. When women are taken to be lacking sincerity, their sexual refusals are acknowledged as (intended) refusals but falsely considered insincere.

Imagine that I decided to throw a party in my room. My RA hears about my party and she comes to tell me that I cannot throw a party in the dorm. I understand her. That is, I realize that she is prohibiting me from having the party, but I think that she is being insincere. As a fellow college student, I expect her to respect my attempt at having fun even though I know she is in a position of authority. So while I recognize her order and attempt to enforce a rule, I do not think she is sincerely forbidding me from having my party. I think she is merely saying it to avoid responsibility later. In this case, something has gone wrong with the RA’s speech act, but it is a different recognition.

A third type of recognition failure occurs when hearers do not believe speakers have the authority to perform the speech act they are performing (McGowan 2017). This often happens when speakers are issuing commands. With this kind of recognition failure, both the intention to order and the sincerity of the order are recognized by the hearer but the speaker’s ability to perform the order is not. The audience doesn’t think the speaker has the power to order. For example, a substitute teacher enters a high school classroom. The students are loud and show they do not respect the substitute. The substitute might order the students to open their books to a

17 certain page and begin reading, but the students only believe their regular teacher to have that power and ignore her. As a teacher, however, she does have the authority to order that. The inability of her words to be taken as a successful order means she cannot control the students and in the event of an emergency, she might not be able to organize them or help bring them to safety.

2.2.2 Post-Speech Act Ways Things Can Go Wrong

There are ways that speech acts can go wrong after they are performed. One way that this can happen concerns the amount of credibility a speaker is given. That is, a speaker might not be given the appropriate amount of credibility for their speech act (Fricker 2007). They may get too much or too little. Imagine that you are attempting to put a toddler to bed. Trying to avoid going to sleep, they give you excuse after excuse, including that they need to pee. You believe that kids like to stay up all night and as a result, they will give any excuse to stay up. In other words, when it comes to bedtimes, all kids are liars. As a result, their requests are often insincere. Their request for the bathroom doesn’t appear to be a sincere request to go to the restroom. Rather, it is probably just an excuse for them to leave their room. Although you understand and recognize that the child is requesting to go to the bathroom, you don’t think they truly want to go to the bathroom. You put your foot down and you say good night. However, you are back five minutes later when you hear crying. It turns out they really did need to pee and have wet the bed. They were trying to communicate something to you and though you understood them, your prejudice about children at bedtime prevented you from believing them.

18 There are different ways to understand what is going on here. Not believing the children could be the result of a failure to recognize their sincerity. If that is what leads to the credibility deficit, then it is a sincerity recognition failure. A second thing that could be going on is a failure to recognize that the children are reliable knowers; I did not believe them because, although I took them to be sincere, I did not think that their sincere beliefs gave me reason to believe what they said. So, we can understand a case like this as a failure to recognize the children’s (epistemic) authority. On this account, the credibility deficit is once again a recognition failure but distinct from sincerity. Finally, we might analyze a case like this as not involving recognition failures but as just not giving the speech act the epistemic weight it ought to be given.

In fiction, we often associate credibility deficit with underdogs or characters who are underestimated. Children take on this role in books and movies. An adult mistakes young age for low intelligence or a small body of knowledge. The child becomes offended or inspired to prove the adult wrong. They accomplish some tasks, eventually prove the adult wrong, and the child’s experience with ageism makes their accomplishment seem even more impressive. Adults underestimating such characters leads to their success. Such stories are great so far as they go but in the real-world credibility deficit often has much more serious consequences. Black women receiving medical care during pregnancy in America are often victims of credibility deficit. A study by the CDC found that their concerns and pain are often overlooked by doctors who consider them to be making exaggerated claims or the doctors expect Black women’s’ tolerance to be higher than that of men or white women (Petersen et. al 2019). As a result, they receive substandard care. They are 3.3 times more likely to die from complications of pregnancy than white women.

19 Credibility deficit can result from an honest mistake (Fricker 2007), but these instances are not usually considered an injustice. It could be that the audience has never met the speaker before, did not know who they were or had no reason to believe they possessed the knowledge.

Consider this example. You are the captain of a trivia team with your friends. A question comes up about an obscure fact of California history. All except one of your teammates is clueless. The one friend who does know tells you the correct answer, but you think it’s a guess. You decide to go with your gut and submit a different, wrong answer. Your team loses a point and perhaps your friend is a little mad, but this is not an injustice. This is not just because the stakes were low, but because there wasn’t any clear prejudice towards your friend. These are what Fricker calls

“unlucky mistakes” (22). It wasn’t a reflection of your thoughts about her. You valued her choice slightly lower than yours because you were unaware it was informed by fact and as a result had no reason to believe it was better than yours. Such mistakes may cause harm, but to call them injustices inflates them to beyond what they are and ignores the prejudice that powers true group-based injustices.

The opposite may also occur. Speakers may also be given inflated credibility. Take the following low-stakes situation as an example. You’re at a family dinner where your parents have told everyone you’re a philosophy major. Your uncle approaches you. He congratulates you and then begins a soliloquy about the article he once read that referenced Friedrich Nietzsche once.

At the end, he asks you to evaluate the article’s argument and tell him if it is actually in line with

Nietzsche’s thinking. The problem is that you’re only in your sophomore year and you haven’t had any classes on Nietzsche yet. The positive stereotype your uncle is employing in this conversation creates false expectations. He thinks you have more expertise than you do, and usually having more expertise is a good thing. However, you’ve failed to meet his expectations

20 and you must do extra work to meet or correct them. This is low stakes because philosophy majors are not a marginalized social group.

True injustices are often based on membership in marginalized social groups. The injustice Black women who received substandard care face, for example, does not occur because each physician has decided that their individual patient isn’t reliable. The lack of care is due to the practice of racial discrimination in the medical system. Practitioners are taught that Black women as a group are unreliable and treat all of them as such. This practice of injustice brings another consequence to light. In the failure to treat Black women, practitioners dehumanize their patients. When dehumanized, instead of being viewed as an individual person, those experiencing injustice lose their identities. They become a representation of a stereotype and nothing more. Their individual symptoms and circumstances are ignored. Instead, practitioners treat the stereotypical symptoms of Black women. A woman with a thyroid problem might be misdiagnosed with diabetes instead because diabetes occurs more in Black communities.

One-way credibility excess happens is hearers assuming speakers to have a certain type of knowledge because of their social group identity. It erases the possibility of individuality within a social group and pushes the myth of a monolithic experience. This eventually leads to objectification and the same dehumanization Fricker was concerned with credibility deficit.

Fricker does not believe credibility excess to do any real epistemic harm. In her opinion, inflating a speaker's credibility generally does them good. It may alter the public perception of them and lead to arrogance or increased pressure to meet standards. But as it’s boosting their status, it can be considered a good thing for them.

Others like Emmalon Davis, Jose Medina, and Gaile Polhaus argue that the effects of credibility excess are more widespread and significant than Fricker describes. Speakers’

21 capacities as knowers are limited to that of the stereotypes hearers believe speakers meet. For instance, audience might expect people from low-income neighborhoods to know about gang culture or Asian students to know about advanced math. When audiences inflate a speaker’s credibility for reasons like this, it is because of prejudice, like in credibility deficit. Even in cases where audiences link speakers to a positive stereotype, it’s still harmful. This is because that stereotype becomes the entirety of the speakers’ identity. A Black athlete might excel academically but never get recognition for his intellect because he plays basketball well. This is because they value the specific trait, they view the marginalized speaker to have. However, in doing this, they effectively erase the rest of a speaker’s personality. In this way, speakers are dehumanized. They become encyclopedias, a tool for members of the dominant group to acquire knowledge about the dominated group. Speakers take part in the compulsory representation of their social group –their actions are taken to represent their social kind. Speakers become tokens.

The inflated status means they are “rewarded” with a seat at the table. Regardless of whether they are qualified, speakers are proudly displayed for the public. They are present not because their individual knowledge, experiences or skills are valued, but because someone wants their social group to be visible though not actually included.

2.2.3 Pre-Speech Act Ways Things Can Go Wrong

Things can go wrong even before a speaker attempts to perform a speech act. Sometimes this involves speaker’s deciding to remain silent. As I shall be arguing, there are different sorts of cases of this. Many types of these failures have been identified by Black feminist theorists like Patricia Hill-Collins. Kristie Dotson has brought attention to one important type; she calls it

22 testimonial smothering. Testimonial smothering occurs when a speaker decides not to speak because they believe their audience will warp what they are trying to say and infer false, harmful beliefs as a result.

Three conditions must generally be met for Dotson’s notion of testimonial smothering to occur. First, the speaker must want to say something that they fear might be used by their audience to infer unwarranted (false and even harmful) conclusions. Dotson refers to this as unsafe testimony. Testimony is considered unsafe when the audience is likely to infer false beliefs as a result of what is said. For instance, it could be something that seems straightforward, like talking about my friends. Perhaps my friends happen to be from Boston, and they want to talk about the where they grew up. However, they know that many people believe people from

Boston are racist. As a result, these people might assume that talking about Boston would be taken by this audience as evidence of the fact that they are racist. That topic, with that audience for my friends might be unsafe if it could end in said person wrongly believing them to be racist and then shun them as a result. Whether a topic is unsafe is relative to a context and an audience.

If they think that’s a possibility, they are going to avoid talking about it in order to limit the risk of the creation of that false belief. Unsafe topics can lead to a decision not to speak.

Dotson borrows Kimberlé Crenshaw’s example of the under reporting of women of color and their domestic violence and sexual assault experiences (Crenshaw 1991). Black women, in particular, are likely to refrain from reporting to the police after they experience these acts of violence. While they might believe that the police will properly understand what they are trying to say, they often worry that the police will also make false inferences from their testimony. For instance, they might be worried that the police believe that this incident is proof that Black men are inherently violent. They limit their interactions with the police because they do not want to

23 contribute to existing negative stereotypes about the violent nature of Black men and the race as a whole.

There is another reason Black women are inclined to remain silent on this issue; they are also afraid of being blamed for the violence against them. Black women are hypersexualized and for many, their primary identity is that of a sinful seductress. Another, she is often seen as both inviting and deserving of the harm inflicted on her. Because they are aware of this, Black women underreport instances of domestic and sexual violence and are wary of discussing the topics as a whole.

Dotson’s second condition of testimonial smothering is an incompetent audience. The presence of unsafe testimony is not enough by itself. We also need an audience who is disposed to make false inferences based on what is said. Dotson introduces two terms to evaluate audiences: accurate intelligibility and testimonial competence.

Accurate intelligibility points to an audience’s ability to correctly identify the information provided by the speaker as understandable. So, as a choir member, if another musician wanted to talk about the voicing of a choral piece, I would know what she was talking about and I am aware of my knowledge. Accurate intelligibility does not, however, require an audience to fully comprehend the information given. An audience who does not understand the testimony the speaker is giving but knows and acknowledges that they lack the relevant experience has also correctly identified his ability to understand. For example, consider a man in a French restaurant who speaks no French. Ideally, if he was going to eat there, he should be able to communicate with the waiters and order in French. But since that is not an option, his best bet at getting food is to communicate that he does not understand and have someone try and explain or carefully guess. He orders carefully and is less likely to get something unexpected and unwanted. When

24 the speakers are aware of their limitations, they are careful with what conclusions they form.

Audiences that do not understand can still participate if they and their speakers are aware of their limitations.

In contrast, Dotson seeks to call attention to two different types of audiences: people who are unaware of what they do not know, and people who are competent, but cannot, do not, or will not signal that to the speaker. In other words, the audiences we care about are those who are meta-ignorant (ignorant of their ignorance) and those who understand perfectly what the speaker is trying to say but play dumb. Dotson wants to draw attention to people who validate smothered speakers’ fears of misunderstanding by looking incapable of understanding what they have to say

(or failing to signal that they are competent to do so).

If I want to tell my family about my school day, I will only do so if I think they are listening to me2. My grandfather from Jamaica might not understand what I want to tell him. He is used to a different school system and does not know about the big differences between the two. Meta-ignorant audiences will not take the necessary precautions to carefully engage with what their speaker is saying. Everyone has things they are ignorant of. But, when we learn about them, the best behavior isn’t to toss the new information aside or assume it’s no different from what we already know. Instead, we should be accepting but cautious of the conclusions we draw from it.

Similarly, my father who does know the difference but is unsure of what to say may seem to be as ignorant as my grandfather. His awkwardness around the topic makes me assume that there is something wrong with the topic I want to discuss. Ideally, my father would signal to me that he understood even though his communication skills were underdeveloped. Audiences who

2 What’s the point otherwise?

25 fail to do that even though they correctly find the speaker’s testimony intelligible are grouped with those who cannot.

This is because the end result is the same. I do not feel comfortable talking to them because I either know that they are incompetent (as with my meta-ignorant grandfather) or I do not know that they are competent (as with my father). Unless an audience member makes it clear to a speaker that he or she is competent, a speaker might well decide against speaking in anticipation of the harms that might well result from their ignorance. Dotson calls these two types of audiences testimonial incompetent. Speakers cannot trust that such audience will be competent and so cannot know that they will not infer false things from what they would say.

Third, Dotson requires that an audience’s ignorance is pernicious. In other words, the audience’s ignorance must reliably cause harm. In a way, any instance of ignorance could be considered harmful. A lack of knowledge could mean someone walks into a dangerous situation or eats something they’re allergic to. However, an instance of ignorance could also be harmless.

For example, it’s not harmful that I do not know how to drive if I am never called upon to get behind the wheel or operate a car in some way. The ignorance must, therefore, be relevant.

Furthermore, incompetent audiences must be reliably ignorant and therefore reliably dangerous.

If as a Black woman, I know that my police department has come to wrong conclusions of other

Black women, I have reason to believe that will be the case if I try to speak. Speakers know that their audience is incompetent and make their decisions knowing that if given the opportunity, their audience would harm them. The potential harm speakers face will vary based on the situation, but as long as it is real harm that could result from the false beliefs of an audience, it is pertinent.

26 2.3.4 Hermeneutical Injustice and Ways it Can Make Speech Acts Go Wrong

When we use language to communicate, we rely on the conventional meaning of the words we use. We rely on a shared understanding of what words mean. This shared understanding can be the site of injustice. Less powerful people have less influence on concept formation. Members of a social group may also be prevented from using language that accurately depicts their experiences. Sometimes this is a result of a lack of vocabulary and other times it results from inability of other social groups to understand our experiences or audiences who aren’t able to interpret what others say even if they are able to portray their experiences.

Miranda Fricker (2007) calls this hermeneutical injustice. For instance, consider what might happen if a young girl gets her period for the first time. If no one has told her what menstruating means and what to do when she gets her period, she might be scared and embarrassed. Her lack of knowledge of menstruating probably mean she doesn’t have the words to describe what is happening to her, she might never ask for help. Her lack of vocabulary prevents her from even trying to communicate.

We can also think about the other end of the spectrum of hermeneutical injustice. For example, imagine a situation in which someone who menstruates is discussing their period with someone who doesn’t. Perhaps they’re asking someone to buy them tampons at the grocery stores or just talking to someone about the impact menstruating has on their life in general. The non-menstruating potential tampon buyer might think the letters s, m, and l refer to size (small, medium large) instead of absorbency (light, super, and maxi). As a result, they buy the wrong product. This communication failure might just be a small inconvenience; its low stakes.

27 Additionally, their audience might not understand how much and why they need to budget for tampons and other products.

A more serious example exists in trans people’s ability to communicate the difference before and after their transition. In an interview, Talia Mae Bettcher answers that “there is no to explain the desire to feel like a woman”. For her, the best way to describe it is feeling “a piano lifted from her chest”. When trans people cannot describe their experiences, they are blocked from discussions. It can appear that because they lack the language to communicate their experiences to other social groups that they don’t have a different experience at all or that that experience is not of consequence. They are not given the opportunity to communicate and eventually they might think that this is because of them, that what they have to say isn’t valuable.

Hermeneutical injustice means that the experiences of disadvantage social groups are not considered when we think about our societies and the world at large. This is because they are undermined as speakers. The experiences of transgendered people are not taken to be worthy of consideration and they are shut out from decisions being made that affect them. Although they are speakers, their testimony is ignored. Disadvantaged groups are further left out of conversations, impairing their ability to communicate their experiences. Their attempts at creating language that communicates their experiences is also undermined. For instance, even if the transgender people had the platform to share their thoughts, they might not have the words to describe their experience to another group.

Lastly, silenced speakers are also undermined as knowers. Because they are impeded as holders of knowledge both audience and speaker might think them incapable of producing valuable thought. Trans people might think that their experiences are not representative of the world. They might think that their inability to be heard is a reflection of their abilities. Audiences

28 might also put too much weight in the speaker’s ability to communicate. Like the speaker, they assume that the failure to communicate is because the speaker has nothing valuable to say. As a result, further attempt at communicating will not just be related to the ability to communicate, but also building the confidences of speakers and educating them in the value of their testimony.

Next, I will discuss the misinformation associated with AAVE and how that has impacted

AAVE speaking students’ ability to learn in public schools. Ignorant audiences teach AAVE speakers that they are less then because of their use of AAVE. Although the only way for them to avoid this is to code-switch, AAVE speakers are expected to learn this on their own and are criticized by both SAE speakers and AAVE speakers when they fail.

29 Chapter 3: On AAVE, Associated Harms, and Reasons Against Speaking

AAVE speakers are disadvantaged in many ways. They are disadvantaged in public school where they are taught in SAE and their AAVE is treated as incorrect SAE. AAVE speakers are required to know a second dialect (SAE) and they face complex and stressful decisions about which dialect to speak when. AAVE speakers are most likely to face difficulties when their audiences think that they are speaking SAE, and that the differences in their speech are actually errors. As a result, when they speak, they are not understood, and they are often seen as uneducated or unintelligent. There are many reasons why an AAVE speaker would decide against speaking AAVE.

3.1 In Public Education

This begins with young AAVE speakers in schools where the language of instruction is

SAE. These children struggle in the American education system. It was very clear by 1970, if not earlier, that speaking AAVE obstructed the education of Black children (citation). And the

Oakland School District was the first to create a policy to address it.

Many Black students struggled when they went to school and were expected to speak

SAE even though the only dialect, they ever learned was AAVE. They had the lowest average

GPA and made up 80 percent of suspended students. Before the Oakland School Board’s proposal, Black third graders scored in the sixteenth percentile and would drop to the third percentile by the sixth grade. Their white counterparts began at the 96th and rose to the 99th

(Rickford 1999). AAVE speakers started out at a disadvantage and only further declined

30 academically at school. Educational material written in SAE made it difficult for students to easily grasp written instructions. This was worsened by the constant discouragement students received from teachers when they spoke, creating a habit of silence instead of learning (Haskins

1973; Rickford 1999). What’s more, these students were expected to excel at tests designed for white middle-class children, while also learning another dialect in addition to traditional academic subjects. This led to their academic failure.

In 1996, the Oakland School Board attempted to solve this problem with a proposal to treat AAVE as if it were a first language, in line with California’s existing Standard English

Proficiency program. There was no funding available for AAVE speakers at the time, as it was not considered its own language, so the school board took inspiration from the Federal Bilingual

Education Act already in place. They decided to declare AAVE a home language and encouraged teaching with special consideration for AAVE speakers. At the time, approximately

70 percent of Oakland’s school-age population was Black and/or Latino. 30 percent of these students were learning English as their second language and an additional 30 percent were

AAVE speakers. This was exacerbated by the fact that White families made the decision not to enroll their students in Oakland schools. White students made up 37% of the residential population, but only 6% of the students in Oakland school district were white (Lippi-Green 308).

They moved their children to private schools and other school districts and took their support and funding with them.

The Oakland school district intended to have classes that were taught in AAVE where students could receive information in a language they understood and participate without being penalized for their use of their own dialect. Then, SAE would be gradually reintroduced, and students would get the opportunity to learn the new SAE dialect and eventually be able to attend

31 regular classes. Funding would be used to increase the salaries of teachers proficient in both and provide others the opportunity to learn AAVE.

Their decision immediately created controversy. Across the country, people were outraged because they thought Oakland schools would be intentionally teaching kids an incorrect form of English. Some thought that it was a declaration of failure and resignation on their attempts to school Black children. Many critics linked AAVE to its stereotypical users and thus saw AAVE’s recognition as a glorification of Black ghettos. It promoted the idea that its use was responsible for poor academic performance, and that SAE was the official English language that everyone needed to know.

This was not helped by the fact that the district played into existing stereotypes about the nature of AAVE and unfortunately, they presented it that way. The low-point occurred when, in their statement, the school district said AAVE was “genetically-based and not a dialect of

English”, 3making it appear like a virus that African American people passed on to each other that needed to be exterminated (310). Instead of legitimizing their program, the district further stigmatized the use of AAVE. The federal government refused to provide any additional funding for the program. The Oakland School Board reversed their decision within a month, and the new program for AAVE speakers never went into effect.

Linguists eventually stepped in to adjust the language used to describe the program and clarify that both SAE and AAVE were legitimate English dialects with their own grammatical rules, but the damage was already done. To many, its existence said that the way Black people spoke was wrong and that they were unable to learn SAE. Others could not get over the naming of AAVE as an actual dialect and refused to teach what they saw as an incorrect form of English.

3 Genetic and genealogical relationship are linguistic —as opposed to biological— terms that refer to dialect and language relation.

32 These views are still widely believed in spite of an increase in scholarship that explores AAVE’s complexity and legitimacy. Although no similar programs were proposed anywhere else in the nation, other states went out of their way to pass laws prohibiting teaching any dialects besides

SAE, and attempts were also made to strip the Oakland School District of much of its federal funding.

3.2 Ignorant and Incompetent Audiences

Thinking that AAVE is SAE with errors is not always obviously seriously harmful. It might seem low stakes. We might reason that everyone makes mistakes when they speak, and for the most part, we do not take it seriously as long as they do not prevent us from understanding each other. Even failing to understand someone does not always seem to result in serious harm. For instance, I might think that someone told me a meeting has been moved to the

10th floor when really it has been canceled. The only harm might be that I wasted 10 minutes of my time. But it might also be more serious than that. We could also imagine another example.

Speaking a different language can also stop us from understanding someone. Once again this can seem annoying and require extra work but can be low-stakes and often no significant harm is done.

Speaking AAVE is harmful when you are in front of an audience that believes the differences or errors are a reflection of a speaker’s intelligence, education, or personality, and – importantly - racial group. Ignorant audiences will choose to accept the negative stereotypes associated with AAVE speakers as truth. Thus, because of errors by the audience, unwarranted negative stereotypes about Blacks are taken to be confirmed. They will often use the dialect as

33 sufficient proof of lower worth. In schools, this means that children who speak AAVE are not seen as intelligent or as worthy of educating as their counterparts. Audiences show themselves to be incompetent listeners when they mistreat AAVE speakers solely because they are AAVE speakers, mock the dialect, or attack it in some way. As we already know, Black children receive an inferior education and are often put in remedial or special education classes for speaking

AAVE. In the minds of ignorant audiences, AAVE speakers are linking themselves to crime, a lack of education or intelligence, and poverty.

This bias against AAVE speakers is instilled at a very young age. By the ages of 4 or 5, children learn to effectively distinguish between races based on voice alone (Lippi-Green pp.?).

It acts as a starting point for voice-based racial profiling, linking its speakers to lives of poverty and poor education. They learn to associate AAVE with evil, and Black people with AAVE, and therefore conclude that Black people are evil.

In fact, many movies link all characters not speaking SAE to evil. Movies like The Lion

King teach children to demonize people of color at an early age. The hyenas voiced by Whoopi

Goldberg and Cheech Martin used exaggerated and stereotypical dialects associated with Black and Latino communities (Lippi-Green 2012). These characters are stupid, parasitic, and morally deficient. Scar, voiced by Jeremy Irons, has a British voice, but this is partially because

Americans often associate upper-class British accents with intelligence. His foreign accent marks him as an outsider in the lion pride but still above the Black and Latino characters.

3.3 Consequences of Audience Errors

34 AAVE speakers aware of these sorts of audience errors and sometimes decide against speaking because of them. AAVE speakers are very aware of the negative associations of

AAVE. This struggle is built into a lot of fictional Black character’s narratives the same way bullies are written into children’s narratives. We can look at Will Smith in Season 1, Episode 3 of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air for a low-stakes example. The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, a 90s sitcom revolves around Will Smith, a teenager from West Philadelphia. As the show’s theme song explains, after getting into a fight in his inner-city neighborhood, he was sent to live with his rich aunt and uncle in Bel-Air, in an attempt to prevent him from starting a life of crime.

Although the show is comedic, he struggles because of his dialect and refusal to abandon his culture for the largely white, upper-class life that surrounds him. In this episode, at his uncle’s request, Will goes to a country club for the first time where he sees the beautiful but aloof Mimi

Mumford. After he finds out that he needs the permission of her father, “Dr. No” to date her, he decides to use SAE and fake knowledge of polo and other subjects to impress Dr. No. He succeeds and is allowed to talk to Mimi only to find out that she has no interest in the men her father likes.

Instead, Mimi is attracted to “real men” who are “from the streets”, whose way of speaking and knowledge of culture is limited to crime-filled, Black ghettos. Her acceptance of his character largely revolves around him speaking a version of AAVE farthest away from SAE.

As soon as he starts talking in this exaggerated manner, she accepts him. Once he begins to use a fake personality, he cannot stop. He pretends to fulfill every negative stereotype associated with speakers of AAVE. In front of Mimi, he is a dangerous felon just released from jail and on the run, a chauvinistic rapper ready to fight anyone. However, at the end of the episode, unable and unwilling to perpetuate the negative stereotypes, he stops attempting to fill either persona or

35 speak either dialect in the end. Instead, he chooses to return his original dialect somewhere between SAE and the form of AAVE farthest apart from SAE.

AAVE speakers have to worry about the way they speak because it is seen as a reflection of their character and racial group. It brings biases to the forefront of every conversation. No matter what they might say, they risk perpetuating negative stereotypes. Since AAVE speakers are aware of these stereotypes and wary of validating them, they often prefer not to speak. They are afraid it will not only reflect on them but also on their social group.

Will and Mimi’s interactions ironically follow this pattern. Mimi judges Will from the start. Will relies on Mimi to make negative assumptions based on his use of AAVE. These assumptions benefit Will romantically because Mimi is trying to rebel against her father by dating the worst man she could find. This reinforces the negative stereotype about Black men because she believes that real Black men are all those things Will pretends to be. For her, Black people can only be ignorant, poor criminals in the end. Will’s heart is broken. He has also confirmed for himself that at his uncle’s country club, AAVE speakers are not welcome.

3.4 Further Burdens

AAVE speakers face a perilous journey when they speak. They are expected to know and communicate in two different dialects; they need to be able to switch between them without hesitation and to figure when and how to do so at the right times.

AAVE speakers face the same abuse from each other that they face from SAE speakers.

When in the presence of other AAVE speakers, speaking AAVE functions as a signal of identification, marking a shared culture. It tells audiences that they understand each other.

36 However, this is a double-edged sword. Speakers are expected to show one side to their community and another to outsiders. AAVE speakers are expected to change to SAE when in the presence of SAE speakers in order to appear educated and acceptable to the dominant culture.

The pressure not to trigger stereotypes creates mounting pressure. Black communities are so afraid of triggering these stereotypes that they create additional pressure on one another to refrain from speaking. Such self-silencing is common.

In the presence of such dangerous beliefs about AAVE, its speakers can feel pressure to code-switch and abandon AAVE for SAE. The fear of triggering stereotypes is not only well known but openly talked about. It often becomes woven into the stories of Black characters attempting to become successful in white-dominated fields. For example, take the career of Dre

(Andre) Johnson, the main character in Black-ish. Dre is an advertising executive in charge of

‘urban’ populations (i.e. Black consumers) at Steven & Lido. His job and the focus of the show is explaining Black culture to his boss and peers by mixing vocabulary and metaphors. He code- meshes. With one foot in both worlds, he is considered to speak both dialects or some dialect between the two at the same time. Still, both social groups regularly question his membership. In spite of his experience in avoiding the negative stereotypes, he has trouble proving to either group that he is fluent.

Code-switching is the ability to fluently switch between dialects or language. However, very few speakers can actually code-switch as it requires removing all hints of AAVE. A person cannot be considered to speak both at the same time. We can return to the earlier example from

The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. The distinct ways Will talks to Dr. No and Mimi is code-switching.

The grammatical structure, intonation, vocabulary, etc. are completely different. Will must switch his entire persona at rapid speed to converse with Dr. No and Mimi.

37 Code-meshing, by contrast, is more subtle and allows for SAE and AAVE to mix, allowing code-meshing speakers to pick which parts of which culture to show. Often, their grammar and vocabulary are consistent with SAE, but they borrow cues like tone to signal group membership. A person can be speaking AAVE “even when no grammatical, phonological, or lexical features of AAVE are used” (Lippi-Green 2012,185). Still, there are no clear-cut rules about when to code-switch or code-mesh. Even when AAVE speakers are required to speak (e.g. when they are witnesses in court), they are fervently encouraged not to by the Black community.

It is better for them to go with norms and keep silent even if what they have to say is important.

As we have seen, in a context where SAE is falsely believed to be the only proper way to speak English, speakers of AAVE have many reasons to remain silent. If they speak, ignorant audiences will falsely believe that they are making errors when they are not. Their ignorant audience might well fail to properly understand what they are saying and is likely to falsely infer that they are ignorant, lazy, poor, and criminal. The happened to Demesme in his request for an attorney (“lawyer dawg”). They took him to be ignorant of his rights and the criminal justice system. As a result his rights were violated. Speaking AAVE will be taken to reinforce negative stereotypes about Black people. In light of all this and in addition to it, speakers of AAVE face pressure from the Black community to refrain from speaking at all.

In the next chapter, we will investigate a case study of an AAVE speaker in a court of law. Rachel Jeantel’s experiences in court demonstrates the present dangers AAVE speakers face.

38 Chapter 4: Case Study - Rachel Jeantel

In February of 2012, Trayvon Martin was fatally shot by George Zimmerman on his way home from visiting family. The Twin Lakes region where Martin's family lived had recently seen an uptick in burglaries and break-ins and created a neighborhood watch group. Zimmerman, the head of the neighborhood watch, became overly aggressive in his role, calling the police more than anyone else in the neighborhood. He began focusing on suspicious people, mostly Black males. While driving around Twin Lakes, Zimmerman called the police, reporting Martin as a suspicious character. Martin was walking back from a corner store with snacks, on the phone with Rachel Jeantel, a friend. He notices Zimmerman but dismisses him until Jeantel reminds him that the man following him could be a rapist at which point Martin begins paying closer attention to Zimmerman. Zimmerman had begun following Martin, even after being told not to by a police dispatcher. Martin tries to lose Zimmerman on his way back home, but this only convinces Zimmerman that he is a criminal. Zimmerman began chasing him and had a violent physical encounter with Martin, though it is unclear who began the fight. Trayvon manages to escape but is shot and killed while trying to return to the safety of his family's house.

The many dangers of speaking AAVE are visible in the failure of the court to properly receive Rachel Jeantel’s testimony in the trial of George Zimmerman. Jeantel’s testimony is important to study not just because she is insulted and discredited as a witness simply because of the way she spoke, but also because it was a very public example of what happens when AAVE speakers participate in trials. The way Jeantel was treated would make any AAVE speaker afraid to participate in the legal system, let alone defend themselves or a loved one.

39 Rachel Jeantel, the last person to speak to Martin, was supposed to be the star witness for the prosecution. She was on the phone with Martin when he noticed Zimmerman following him and tried to shake Zimmerman. She could also hear Martin and Zimmerman’s voices as they argued and fought.

As a result, she is the only person who could relay Martin’s thoughts and the interaction between the two before his death. For this reason, Rachel Jeantel’s testimony ought to have been of the upmost importance. As it actually turned out, however, her testimony is a confusing back and forth between herself, the prosecution, defense, judge, and court reporter in which no one truly seems to understand what’s being said.

As I will show, the defense utilized her use of AAVE to destroy her credibility. Her testimony was believed to be unreliable as soon as she spoke. It was filled with dozens of interruptions, references to inaccurate transcripts, and excessive requests for clarification ending in confusion as to which words were actually Jeantel’s and which were supplied by the other parties in the court.

Initially charged with murder, Zimmerman claimed self-defense and was acquitted.

Rachel Jeantel’s time on the stand began with numerous requests to repeat most of her answers as she described her life and connection to Trayvon Martin. The court reporter started a series of interruptions for clarity that would continue both days Jeantel was on the witness stand and changed Jeantel’s testimony. In spite of the many interruptions, lead prosecutor Bernie de la

Rionda, questioned Jeantel on the stand for a mere 30 minutes. During that time, he went through the events of Martin’s last day and the aftermath of his death. Then, Zimmerman’s defense attorney, Don West uses the next five and a half hours with Jeantel on the stand.

40 In the YouTube video of her time on the witness stand4, her attempts to speak are vlocked. Jeantel would say something in AAVE, the court reporter (or the attorneys or judge) would repeat back what they thought she said in SAE after which Jeantel would slightly alter her words until she thought her audience understood. For example, when Jeantel began recounting her conversation with Martin when he realized Zimmerman was actually following him, she started with “He followin’ me”. The court reporter asks her to repeat and Jeantel changes to “He still followin’ me.” Then one of the attorneys ask her to repeat and she said, “Now he followin’ me”. For Jeantel, each of these sentences mean the same thing: Martin acknowledging

Zimmerman’s actively pursuing him. Jeantel recognized the misunderstanding and restated in a way she thought would clarify the matter, but this led to her being accused of changed her testimony and being called unreliable. Others’ failure to realize that Jeantel speaks AAVE causes them to misunderstand the meaning of what she is actually saying. This is a kind of recognition failure silencing. These sorts of misunderstandings would continue the entire time she took the stand, culminating in the defense having her repeat back a large amount of her testimony from the day before, claiming that he needed to set the stage for the jury again. By falsely inferring that she is contradicting herself, Jeantel is taken to be less credible than she actually is. Such a credibility deficit is a post-speech act kind of silencing.

Another problem with her testimony occurred when Jeantel relayed Martin’s description of Zimmerman. While attempting to relay the conversation between herself and Martin, she uses the phrases ‘crazy-ass cracker’ and ’nigga’ to describe Zimmerman. Here are excerpts from the

YouTube of video. of trial:

Jeantel: The nigga is still following me now.

4 George Zimmerman Trial - Day 3 - Part 3, approximately 1:05:00,

41 ****

De la Rionda: Pardon my language, did he use the word, pardon my language, use the word nigga to describe the man now?

J: Yes, that’s slang.

DR: That’s slang?

J: Ok.

****

DR: He also said the words “creepy ass cracker”. Is that used to describe white people?

J: Yeah, we use that word for white dudes.

The defense argued that Jeantel's testimony that Martin used the words 'nigga' and

'cracker' to describe Zimmerman were evidence that Martin committed a racially motivated hate crime against Zimmerman. Ironically, initially West argued that Martin had not used those words. Jeantel had written a letter to Trayvon Martin’s mother soon after his death and did not use either the word ‘nigga’ or ‘creepy-ass cracker’ when describing Martin’s last words. West accused Jeantel of altering Martin's words after the fact, in order to play into the media coverage of the case.

Then the defense changed their tactic; they then question why Martin would have used those words in particular. According to the defense, if Martin did use those words, then it was because he was racist. This reasoning relies on false assumptions about AAVE. In AAVE, the term ‘cracker’, originally used to describe white slave owners, evolved to describe poor or low- class white people. It now describes white people in general. Although it carries a distinctly negative connotation, in this context, it is the equivalent of calling Zimmerman a creepy white guy in SAE. But the defense reasoned that using this expression was evidence of racism and

42 Martin’s alleged racist ideas led him to taunt and start a fight with Zimmerman. Once again, we see how ignorance of AAVE leads to mistaken inferences based on what AAVE speakers say.

The defense also claimed that, by using the term ‘nigga’ in reference to

Zimmerman (or in reference to Martin’s reference to Zimmerman) Jeantel was using slurs to insult the defendant. Again, this reasoning relies on ignorance about AAVE. It is wrong to assume that because the N-word (the SAE word ‘nigger’) used by other races to describe Black people is a slur, that the same (or really a different but similar sounding word in AAVE ‘nigga’) word used by Black people (usually to describe men in general) is also a slur. They were wrong to assume that the words have the same exact meaning in both dialects. The defense strategy was clear. West tried to exploit ignorance of AAVE to try to create the image that Jeantel and Martin were using SAE where nigga and cracker are slurs. To an audience ignorant of AAVE, Martin and Jeantel’s use of the vernacular was taken as a sign of hatred of white people. It increased the racial bias attached to her testimony. It made it seem as though she had it out for Zimmerman not because he murdered her friend, but because he was a white person who shot her Black friend

The last attack on Jeantel’s testimony 5 that I will discuss in this chapter involved a blitz of transcripts. Zimmerman’s lawyer, West, produced several supplementary pieces of evidence, including the letter she sent to Martin’s mother, a transcript of her interview with the local news and police department, and her deposition. West aimed to establish inconsistencies between these various pieces of her testimony.

Regarding the TV interview, it is worth pointing out that Jeantel was pressured into it by

Martin’s family and she did not prepare for it. As a result, the details were not complete, clear, or necessarily accurate. She gave all the details she could remember to the police, but she did not

5 George Zimmerman Trial - Day 3 - Part 4, approximately 00:40:00

43 fully remember what she had said in her deposition. Next, her letter to Trayvon’s mother was presented but this was problematic for two reasons. It was written with someone’s help; she wasn’t sure how accurate it was. This was worsened by the fact that it was written in cursive

(which she cannot read), meaning she couldn’t, while on the stand, confirm the contents of the letter. He asked her to read them all aloud and verify her words and she admitted that she couldn’t say if her words are accurately reflected in any of them. She did remember her deposition well, but the prosecution and defense’s transcripts do not match.

Official transcriptions of AAVE speakers are highly inaccurate. SAE speakers are notoriously bad at interpreting AAVE. SAE speaking court reporters can only correctly transcribe and paraphrase ~63% of testimony given in AAVE with great difficulty (Jones et. al).

The texts Jeantel was asked to read were written down by SAE speakers and they have made mistakes similar to those of the court reporter in attempts to make it fit SAE. Predictably, though,

West blamed Jeantel for the mistakes made by others; others who are ignorant of AAVE. Here is an excerpt from the cross examination:

West: Are you claiming in any way that you don’t understand English?

Jeantel: I don’t understand you; I do understand English.

West: When someone speaks to you in English, do you believe you have any difficulty understanding it because it wasn’t your first language?

Jeantel: I understand English really well.6

Here, West goes so far as to say that Jeantel is not speaking and cannot comprehend

English - even as she defends herself in English! He painted her as illiterate and Jeantel then had to actively defend her intelligence in addition to presenting her testimony. The defense asks

6 McWhohter 2013

44 Jeantel if English is her first language in an attempt to hide the racist motives behind their critique of the way she spoke.

Jelani Cobb's article "Rachel Jeantel on Trial" points out that the prosecutors in

Zimmerman's trial do try to combat this by pointing out that Jeantel not only speaks AAVE, but

Spanish and Haitian Creole as well, but this fails to defend Jeantel where it matters. When people of color speak more than one language, it’s not treated as an accomplishment or sign of intelligence, it’s taken as evidence that they are not as American as they could be. Their identity spans more than one culture and it is to their detriment. On this way of thinking, whatever she spoke was not SAE and that was all that mattered. Thus, in this particular moment of the trial,

Zimmerman’s lawyer seems to vaguely acknowledge that AAVE is a dialect, but only under the pretense of making her seem more un-American and unintelligent.

Overnight, before the second day of giving her testimony, Jeantel seems to realize that her speaking is working against her. At the end of her first day on the witness stand, Jeantel tells

Zimmerman's attorney that she won’t come back to be questioned by him if he treats her like that. She declared she is going home, and West immediately demanded a subpoena. The judge denied his request at first, declaring that all scheduling matters are at her discretion. It seems that the way she was treated caused her to decide against participating at all. This is a form of self-silencing.

The next day, however, Jeantel does return to the witness stand but her testimony is different; she is serious and withdrawn. The defense notices this, asking her if something had happened overnight which changed her demeanor. Her answers are limited to “Yes, sir.” and

“No, sir” when not required to give full explanations. Evidently, Jeantel realized the dangers of speaking AAVE in a court of law and curtailed her speech in response. Curtailing speech is a

45 form of self-silencing. Jeantel decided to say less. She did so however too late to protect herself from the censure she endured.

Now, I will discuss some evidence about how her testimony was interpreted by the jury.

Two jurors made themselves available for interviews after the trial: B37, a white female juror sympathetic with Zimmerman and B29, a Puerto Rican mom of 8 from Chicago upset with the decision. The other four jurors 7issued a statement asking to be left out of the public discussion.

In an interview with Anderson Cooper (2013), Juror B37 thought that trial had come down to the fact that Zimmerman’s lawyers made him seem like a nice guy who made a mistake. For her the best witness was the defense’s medical examiner. Why?

“He was awe inspiring, the experiences that he had had over in the war, and I just never thought of anybody that could recognize somebody's voice yelling, in like a terrible terror voice when he was just previously a half hour ago playing cards with him.”8

The medical examiner was charismatic. While being interviewed by Cooper, B37 makes no mention of what he contributed to the trial. Juror B37 remembers feeling sorry for Jeantel because of her “inadequate communication skills”. She was hard to hear. She gently implied that she did not believe her. Even though the call records matched Jeantel’s account of events, her testimony was still unreliable. She believed that if Jeantel had really been on the phone with

Martin and heard the altercation correctly, the other 9-1-1 calls would have recorded it. Another memorable thing for B37 was one of her fellow jurors who believed it was Trayvon calling for help on the 9-1-1 call, felt Zimmerman had committed second-degree murder and wanted to find him guilty but couldn’t under Florida law. For B29, the trial went differently. She was the holdout, feeling the other jurors were wrong to acquit Zimmerman. Although she was the only

7 Florida only requires 6 jurors for criminal cases unless the death penalty is being sought in which case 12 jurors would be required. 8 Cooper 2013.

46 person in the world capable of first-hand testimony condemning, Jeantel’s testimony wasn’t enough. Clearly, Jeantel was not given the credibility that she deserved.

Before concluding this chapter, I would like to discuss the way Jeantel’s testimony was received in the Black community. There, Jeantel also faced extreme and immediate backlash.

The way she spoke and the fact that she was overweight led some to view her as lazy. Others took her nervousness and inability to read the transcripts as a sign of cognitive disabilities. On

Twitter, many Black people attacked Jeantel because she could not code-switch. They took to calling Jeantel, Precious, likening her to the main character in Push, an overweight, underage mother who struggled to educate herself and care for her children while being abused (Belton).

They wanted her to drop the dialect in order to be taken seriously by her SAE speaking audience during the trial, but she couldn’t. They mimicked the same outrage the Oakland Board of

Education faced. They believed that Black people should speak SAE. It is the speakers’ responsibility to know SAE and should anything bad happen to speakers who fail to meet this responsibility, it is their own fault.

47 Chapter 5: A New Kind of Self-Silencing

Earlier I introduced testimonial smothering as a way that things can go wrong even before a speech act is attempted. When a speaker decides against speaking, we called it self- silencing. The term ‘testimonial smothering’ was first identified by Kristie Dotson in her paper

“Tracking Epistemic Violence, Tracking Practices of Silencing”. The phenomenon has a long history in Black Feminist scholarship (Collins 1990).

In this paper, Dotson brought attention to the reasons why someone might decide to self- silence, as opposed to deciding not to speak on a whim, because the speaker felt that the audience would come to false conclusions based on the subject and start to believe false ideas in a way that would cause harm.

For instance, imagine that you are in a work meeting and you would like to talk about the fact that the wording of the project is sexist. Maybe there is a joke about women belonging at home. You want to bring it up until you remember that your boss and some of your colleagues have made sexist jokes in the past and have made it clear that nothing will change how they view women. You realize that saying something will only reinforce the negative view they have of women. Additionally, if you speak up, they might create a hostile work environment, or they might decide to increase the sexist language of the project. Knowing all this, you decide not to speak. This is an instance of testimonial smothering.

According to Dotson, there are three key characteristics of testimonial smothering. The first requirement is unsafe topics that Dotson calls unsafe testimony. Although testimony in the context of legal cases is used to refer to official statements made by people in court, in this context, it simply refers to topics of conversation and content of speech in a more general way.

48 Speakers face unsafe testimony when their audience is disposed to make unwanted inferences about something when talking about certain topics. If I was a teenage girl, the topic of birth control might be unsafe. I might want to go on birth control to regulate hormonal changes or reduce my chances of getting ovarian cysts. However, using birth control is often taken to be a sign of sexual activity. As a result, I might be hesitant to tell someone I am considering going on birth control if I believe that that person would conclude that I am sexually active and that I am sexually promiscuous.

It might be the case that the person I am talking to is sex-positive or believes that abstinence is the only acceptable form of birth control. If the audience infers anything about my sexual activity, then the audience assumes something I do not intend them to. When it comes to testimonial smothering, it does not actually matter whether or not I am sexually active. In either case, they would incorrectly infer information from what I am trying to say. My discussing birth control is thought to be me admitting that I am sexually active or plan to be. Because of this, speakers must be wary of the topics they choose to discuss with their audience. Testimony is unsafe because we recognize that our audience is likely to come to false conclusions because of what we say.

Dotson’s second requirement is that the audience is ignorant, more specifically, meta- ignorant. She requires that audiences be ignorant enough to make unwanted inferences from unsafe testimony. We all have blind spots in our knowledge, subjects we do not know about; we are ignorant, but often that does not matter. I do not know how to milk a cow, but it is highly unlikely that I will be asked to milk a cow. As a result, my ignorance of cow milking is probably going to be an unimportant matter that no one is going to test me on and that I’ll never think about.

49 However, occasionally, we are expected to know things that we are ignorant of. Perhaps I am at a state fair and a friend volunteers me for a milking demonstration as a prank. When I get on stage, they expect me to milk the cow, but I cannot. This example is low-stakes and perhaps the only consequence is that I am embarrassed, but we can easily imagine higher stakes.

If I were on a plane, for example, I could lie about understanding the flight attendant’s instructions so that I could have more legroom in the exit row. If the plane needed to do an emergency landing, my ignorance of using the emergency exits could mean that someone dies.

The subject of my ignorance comes up and there are grave consequences.

When it comes to testimonial smothering, similar risks exist. A speaker might try to talk to a sick person about the side effects of medication. If the audience is ignorant about the likelihood of those side effects, they might refuse essential medication because they wrongly believe it to be more dangerous than it is. This example highlights the most dangerous aspect of audience ignorance - meta-ignorance. When someone is meta-ignorant, they do not know what they do not know. The sick person in this example doesn’t know that they are not capable of assessing the risk of medication. If they were capable of understanding the risk, they might assess it as low-risk and decide to take the medication. Additionally, if they were just ignorant, they might take steps to either educate themselves or perhaps ask someone who was not ignorant of the topic to help them. But, when an audience is meta-ignorant, they are unlikely to take the steps necessary to prevent them from adopting inaccurate beliefs. Their ignorance exists in a true blind spot. The audience has no reason to believe that it is not correctly inferring information and therefore has no reason to question their judgment.

Dotson’s last requirement is that the false beliefs that are generated from the interpretation do harm or pose a threat. Imagine that you are walking down the street by yourself.

50 You do not know anything about emergency exits on planes, but you are not in the position to open an emergency exit. You might not have correctly inferred how to open an emergency exit on a plane on your last flight, but walking on the street, your ignorance of this does not pose a threat. If, however, you are seated in the emergency exit row of a plane during an emergency landing, then your ignorance does pose a threat. This shows that the harmfulness of ignorance is relative to the situation.

Testimonial smothering covers a wide range of instances of self-silencing. It explains why a college student who develops a political identity different from their family might hide it at home because their family might see it as betrayal and shun them. It also explains why a woman who faces abuse decides not to talk about it with her family if they have misogynist views on marriage. If she were to talk about it, they might interpret her testimony as an admission of failure in her marriage and verbally abuse her because of it.

When we communicate, our audience takes more than what we wish to say into account.

We have already seen many ways in which things can go wrong based on what we say. But we use more than the content of what is said to form beliefs about speakers when they speak. Often audiences are influenced by other aspects of speech acts. They make inferences based on a speaker’s body language or dialect.

Think of the way that we might mistrust what a person with a New York accent has to say about farming. We might think that New Yorkers are proud and from an urban environment and are unwilling to learn about lifestyles outside of their own. Consequently, though their advice might be sound, we could ignore it. As a result, we must consider how audiences take other things like a speaker’s dialect into account.

51 There is a myriad of other types of smothering which are not covered under Dotson’s definition. For example, imagine that a lawyer who speaks AAVE is about to go into a meeting with a client. Before she enters the room, her SAE speaking co-worker stops her and tells her to let them do the talking and that they speak the client’s language. They imply that AAVE will negatively impact the way the lawyer is perceived. From then on, the lawyer chooses not to speak in front of clients. She is always aware that her co-workers and clients are judging her for the way she speaks and becomes less active in her parts of her job that require her to talk to clients.

This example does not fall under testimonial smothering because it is not content based.

It doesn’t include any specifics about what is being discussed because what is said doesn’t matter. While the conversation could have been about a new movie or what it costs to hire a lawyer, the speaker was excluded from the conversation because of the way she spoke. In this instance, her use of AAVE had negative repercussions, specifically being informally barred from client interaction, and that is what influenced her decision to refrain from speaking in the future.

The chief reason that this form of self-silencing is different from Dotson’s testimonial smothering is that testimonial smothering depends on what is said but my kind does not. My dialect-based smothering is different from Dotson’s content-based smothering.

Another important difference is that dialects are often linked to our identities in a way that we cannot avoid as is often not the case with content-based smothering. With dialect-based smothering, when front of ignorant audiences, everything can be infected with bias regardless of what the speaker is talking about. With testimonial smothering, a speaker can choose to speak on a safe topic.

52 Another specific way that testimonial and dialect-based smothering are different is that audiences believe that those who speak other dialects are always affected by the stereotypes of their identity. If I am trying to give directions to someone and they recognize that I am speaking a different dialect but do not understand me, they might equate this to me saying nothing worth listening to. To them, there isn’t anything to form a belief on. My directions, accurate or not, are not even evaluated. We might think that this is really an instance of an ignorant audience unable to recognize that testimony makes sense. However, this doesn’t account for the extent to which the smothering is happening. It’s not just directions, but also opinions on local politics and explaining how plumbing works. Every topic of conversation can be deemed unintelligible.

An ignorant audience like we see in testimonial smothering would be ignorant of specific topics even if it was a wide range. They incorrectly believe they are interpreting the speaker correctly, but they still believe the speaker to be saying something and whatever they are saying makes some sense even if it is not sound. This leads me to another way that the two types of smothering are different: audiences often use dialects to undermine speakers as reputable sources. They believe their dialect indicates their experience and knowledge pool.

Both dialect-based smothering and testimony-based smothering happen before one has spoken. With content-based smothering, speakers fear their testimony on a specific topic will be corrupted. When it is dialect based, audiences use the speaker’s dialect to corrupt everything they say. For example, we can return to the example of the teenage girl seeking birth control. Her audience might think that she is not a reliable source when it comes to her sexual life. But this is because of what she told them.

In a similar example in which the girl speaks AAVE, her audience might believe that

Black people have certain traits (promiscuity, lazy, etc.) such that talking about anything might

53 lead them to false beliefs about her sexual life. She knows that if she spoke, her dialect would be used to paint a picture before she even says anything. Her talking about birth control would only confirms stereotypes. While both situations result in false beliefs about the speaker’s sex life, there was no way for the speaker to avoid triggering bias in that way. Although this won’t be the case with all audiences, speakers must be wary of everything they say.

In my last chapter, I discuss the specific harms associated with dialect-based smothering including hermeneutical injustice, appropriation, and emotional burden of knowing dialect-based suffering exists.

54 Chapter 6: Harms of Dialect-Based Smothering

In this chapter, I argue that there are at least three different harms of dialect-based smothering. I have argued that speaking AAVE in a context where it is mistaken for SAE is harmful in a variety of ways. And, when speakers are aware of these harms, as speakers of

AAVE are, they decide not to speak. In this chapter I explore the harms of the self-silencing

(that results from the anticipation of the harms of speaking AAVE).

6.1 Hermeneutical Injustice

When speakers do not speak another dialect, there might be no way for them to fully communicate. I first mentioned hermeneutical injustice in reference to testimonial smothering.

Because people were not allowed to talk about certain topics in their life, they were unable to fully describe their experience. The inability to describe their experience then led to a lack of vocabulary and eventual cessation of transmitting aspects of their lives. Oppressed people do not have the words to describe their oppression.

Hermeneutical injustice also results from dialect-based smothering but the mechanism behind it is different. One important aspect of dialects is their unique vocabulary. Often it functions as the partition. If you cannot convey meaning in the secondary dialect, you are not able to discuss your experiences in a different way.

Dialect-Based Smothering highlights a different aspect of hermeneutical smothering. It might very well be that speakers have the words to describe what they are speaking in their native dialect but are not able to do so in a foreign dialect. Consider the following example.

55 When Black women get their hair chemically straightened, it is said to be relaxed. The term

‘relaxed’ refers to the process in which the curl pattern of curly or kinky hair is loosened or undone, resulting in wavy or straight hair. The closest term in SAE is ‘permed’. Similar chemicals are used, but the result is completely different. When hair is permed, it gets curlier.

When it’s relaxed, it gets straighter.

The terms are used because the processes are similar. The curl pattern of hair is altered.

But getting your hair relaxed comes with different meanings and connotations. Relaxed hair can only get straighter and relaxing your hair can be painful and do a lot of damage. This concept does not exist in SAE because the life experiences of Black people are marginalized. The shared concepts in SAE do not reflect the fact that the hair routines of Black people are different and require different types of care. Replacing ‘relaxed’ with ‘permed’ doesn’t actually tell you about my experience. If I cannot use AAVE, then I cannot talk about getting my hair relaxed or any other experiences related to it. The fact that meaning can’t be extended to terms that already exist in SAE further silences speakers.

Using a term that exists in both dialects can be similarly lacking in meaning. When Black women describe their hair as natural, it has one meaning — their hair is not relaxed. However, in

SAE it is used to describe things naturally occurring in nature, often grown organically. In using the word ‘natural’ in front of SAE speakers, the history of the entanglement of black and

Eurocentric beauty standards is obscured. In AAVE, being natural is often a statement rejecting

Eurocentric beauty standards. If someone wanted to discuss natural hair in SAE as it relates to

Black people, they often cannot use the word ‘natural’ because the term as it is used in AAVE does not exist in SAE.

56 6.2 Perpetuating the Myth that SAE is the only English dialect

One thing unique to AAVE is that it is often used as a vehicle for cultural appropriation.

Parts of AAVE are absorbed by SAE and the dialect becomes increasingly less distinct. For example, think about two people at a laundromat. One arrives before the other and is able to put their clothes in the only available dryer. For all intents and purposes, it is Person A’s dryer.

Person A leaves for a brief moment and when they return, they find their clothes removed and replaced with Person B’s clothes. Although the dryer belongs to A, because B chose not to recognize or respect that, the dryer appears to be theirs. Dialect features like vocabulary and pronunciation are stolen and with them, parts of culture. When AAVE speakers are silenced, they are unable to stop the exploitation of the dialect. It falsely gives the impression that the only parts of Black culture that are valuable are those highlighted by SAE speakers.

One popular example of this is a 2018 WorldStar video9 where an SAE speaker asks a

Black man how to pronounce “whew chile”10. In an attempt to appropriate the word, she mispronounces it “woo chee-lay”. There is no way to recover stolen words or unique meanings.

Eventually taken to be SAE, AAVE ,as a mode of communication, is stolen from Black people.

When AAVE speakers self-silence, their silence helps to perpetuate the myth that SAE is the only dialect of English. There is no way to advocate for AAVE. There is really no way to win if one speaks AAVE. As we have seen, the false belief that SAE is the only legitimate dialect of

English drives many of the harms associated with speaking AAVE. This is also true of a number of other dialects of English (e.g., Patois).

9 Facepalm Moment: White Girl Asks Black Guy How You Say "Whew Chile!"

10 Urban Dictionary defines it as a black version of OMG!

57

6.3 The Weight of Cognizance

One final harm AAVE speakers might face is the burden of feeling they are betraying fellow AAVE speakers, if not their entire race, when they choose to self-silence. If we take the harms we’ve already discussed into account, it might seem that allowing these harms to happen is an endorsement of silencing at its worst and an act of submission at its best. We expect active resistance in the face of oppression from the dominant culture. Many think that if speakers know that silencing themselves is required for injustice to occur, they should speak up. But speaking up also brings harms. For speakers of AAVE, harm seems unavoidable. Facing such a double bind and doing it so often is very stressful.

Even though the AAVE speaker’s decision to self-silence causes harms, that does not make the AAVE speaker morally responsible for those harms. Speakers are not allowed to accept the fact that being present when injustice occurs does not make one complicit in the damage done. Take the following example. Suppose that you are a bank teller. One day two people come in with guns and tell you to hand over all the money in the safe. You take them into the back room and give them the money they ask for. You do not struggle or try to stop them even though you know what they are doing is wrong. They leave and the police come to take your statement. You have been causally involved in bad behavior. In general, you should not give people money that is not theirs. It’s very clear here though, that bodily harm is imminent.

As such, you are allowed and even encouraged to give the robbers the money they ask for.

Circumstances force you to do something harmful.

58 It seems that dialect-based smothering should follow a similar sequence. Something wrong is happening. SAE speakers have a bias against AAVE speakers, and it consistently leads them to misinterpret AAVE speakers. I am aware that it is wrong and do not want to participate.

The negative consequences are well-known in the Black community, but I do not want to police my own speech. But my position means that I must participate in some way. As a speaker, I must choose a dialect in which to speak. Something is at risk, so I must choose the safest option. I could choose AAVE or SAE. My speech will have bias attached to it, so I want the one that does the least amount of harm. In this case, the safest option is not to choose anything at all. The safest option is to remain silent and not give any material to interpret. Even though speaking up and speaking AAVE is their norm, when speakers are put in danger, they should be allowed to opt-out of speaking with no negative feelings or blame.

But AAVE speakers cognizant of this struggle cannot absolve themselves of guilt. This is because part of what it means to participate in Black culture is to fight for and represent Black people. Speaking AAVE is an act of resistance. It undermines the dominant culture and the threats it poses. It unites a community and culture. Perhaps most importantly, it allows Black people to speak. The expectation is that because we are made to represent our community when we speak, we should say what our community expects us to say. If we knowingly say the opposite or nothing at all, we are held to be culpable for what happens as a result. In Chapter 5, I talked about Black people policing each other, but self-policing is just as prevalent.

Suppose we are in the same situation but this time, as a bank teller, you have the opportunity to put dye packs in with the money. Even though you are no more liable for the bank robbers’ actions and no more able to prevent them, you now are stuck with the knowledge that if you had, maybe you could have prevented the robbers from getting away. The result is no

59 different and you did nothing wrong and yet you feel guilty. The negative reactions of the Black community to Rachel Jeantel’s testimony made it seem that she had happily made the choice to speak when in fact she fought speaking up at every turn. She admitted that she avoided speaking with Trayvon Martin’s mother, being interviewed on television, and giving her statement to the police. But she did not want to be a part of the trial. Her guilt led her to participate. Whereas

Jeantel’s choice to speak was criticized, she might have easily been criticized for choosing not to speak.

This is only further magnified when a community makes speakers feel that they are responsible for the entire social group. There is no individual finger-pointing or identification, but it worsens any guilt speakers might feel because of the inability to speak in their dialect.

When it comes to oppressed social groups, there is often a push to create a front. When group- wide resistance is not possible, individuals are challenged. It works in the same way that asking someone to call an ambulance does during an emergency (citation). People are less likely to call because they think someone else might and if everyone thinks that, no one will call in the end.

And so to prevent this, you should point at one person to make clear who’s responsible. But as a practice, they wear down speakers emotionally and add to the burden of deciding whether or not to speak.

60 CONCLUSION

I conclude that there is a distinct type of pre-communicative silencing that occurs when a speaker decides not to speak because they know their audience is predisposed to come to false beliefs because of the speaker’s dialect. Speakers who use AAVE are very aware that the way they speak is considered to be incorrect by SAE speakers and choose not to speak. There are many types of pre-communicative silencing and while testimonial smothering can describe many instances of pre-communicative types of silencing, it doesn’t cover instances of silencing based on the speaker’s dialect. A speaker experiencing dialect-based smothering does not speak because anything they say will lead to false conclusions in front of an ignorant audience. When they don’t speak, their experiences aren’t apart a part of perception of experiences, AAVE speakers are more susceptible to appropriation, and they face the emotional burden of knowing such injustices exist and are unfortunately further by their actions.

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