RRR: Hendickson, "Talking in Color"

In the personal essay “Talking in Color: Collision of Cultures” (2013), Tiffany Hendrickson explains how your speech is not defined by your ethnicity but by the culture you were raised in. Hendrickson uses personal experiences as well as quotes from different authors to support her claim. Hendrickson tells the story of how it was for her being a white female who spoke with an African-American dialect in order to help people understand that your ethnicity doesn’t define your speech. The attended audience of this essay is for people who often believe that speech is ethnicity specific as well as people who are like the author and may be embarrassed because they feel they should talk a certain way because of their ethnicity.

I agree with the message Hendrickson was trying to teach in this article. I feel like her being a white girl experiencing the same struggle as black people was really different to me. However, I still liked the way she made it her own in a way  to not only appeal to African American people, while still speaking the truth about the struggle. She did a really good job getting her point across about coding.

In the article, "Talking in Color: Collision of Cultures", the author talks about how people used to judge her based off of what she sounded or looked like. So she learned how to code-switch in order to communicate without being judged. For example, "As I wait for the bus, the white faces rushing into school look at me quizzically because I am not walking into their school." (Hendrickson, paragraph 1) This shows that the other white kids used to judge her because she was white but she didn't go to a white school. According to the text, "I tried to hide my black voice or any accent that I might have. I would try to “code-switch” with the group I was talking to." (Hendrickson, paragraph 7)  This explains how she changed her way of speaking when interacting with other white people. This story is a great example of how some people who will be judged, on the way they speak, can change the way they speak to interact with different groups of people without judgement. Code-switching is a necessary skill that people should have no matter what race or ethnicity they are.

Work Cited
  Hendrickson, Tiffany. “First-Year Writers.” Queen City Writers, Queen City Writers, 15 Aug. 2014, qc-writers.com/2013/03/21/storming-the-gate-talking-in-color/.