Analysis Of Allison Joseph's On Being Told I Don T Speak Like A Black Person

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An accent, according to www.dictionary.com, is defined as “Vocal prominence or emphasis given to a particular syllable, word, or phrase.” Around the world, different cultures have different accents because of their language and the way they say words. In Allison Joseph’s “On Being Told I Don’t Speak Like a Black Person”, this description is shown. Joseph uses her mother as an example of having an accent and her mother was from Jamaica. In World War I, 250,000 workers from the Caribbean were recruited and 90,000 of them were Jamaican. In addition, after WWI, there were many waves of Jamaican peoples that would come to America. This poem gives background information about the author’s mother and then moves into the authors opinion on …show more content…

Allison Joseph asks many questions in this poem bring a black American and how someone of the black community is expected to speak. Some of these questions include, “Was [she] supposed to sound lazy, / dropping syllables here and there/ not finishing words but/ slurring their final letters/ so each sentence joined/ the next, sliding past the listener?”(34-39), and “Were certain words off limits, / too erudite for someone whose skin/ came with a natural tan?” (40-42). Joseph is showing her opinion in her poem. She, most likely, has had experience with people expecting her to speak like her mother and this is shown in the quote “Why don’t you sound like her, / they’d ask. [She] didn’t sound/ like anyone or anything” (22-24). There are so many questions that the “black” community has that may never be able to be answered and so many conversations that are just waiting to happen that never will happen. Every time one person looks at another person, they make a judgment call whether they mean to or not. There are many stereotypes out there that cause certain people to think a specific way about different people. If someone has a different skin color, they may have a stereotype

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