Silencing a group’s native language is more than erasure, it’s cultural geno$ide. Language carries identity, memory, and tradition. When it’s stripped away, generations lose a vital 🧠 connection to who they are.
Often called code-switching, a lot of Black children, especially back in my day and beyond, were taught not to sound "Black" when around white people. It was a matter of saving face, or trying to be respected; they thought it would be better to speak the King's English than to say ain't, finna, and so on. Of course, we know that regardless of our education, intellect, proper speech, if our Blackness is the issue, it's the issue, and no amount of taking on the White man's ways will stop that hate.
This is one of the many reasons Clarence Thomas hates himself and rules against Black people so hard. He hates the way he speaks, and he hates his dark black skin. He only started speaking from the bench and in front of audiences after Justice Antonin Scalia died. Prier to his death, it was like Justice Scalia spoke for him.
As many Black people would say Clarence Thomas is a Geechee
The high court's most controversial justice has offered an explanation just once – but it is a fairly extraordinary one. Progressives routinely dismiss it – or any sort of interpretation of what it means – but it's an interesting answer and shouldn't be dismissed so quickly or easily.
The reason he's silent from the bench – a practice that first began during law school – has to do with his formative years, he told The New York Times 15 years ago.
Until he was 6, Thomas lived in deep poverty in the lowcountry in Pin Point, Georgia. Like nearly every black child who grows up in Gullah-Geechee homes in the lowcountry – which includes communities descended from plantation slaves primarily in Georgia and South Carolina, but with roots in northern Florida and southern North Carolina – he spoke Gullah at home.
For years, Gullah was considered to be "pidgin English" – corrupted or badly spoken English that whites generally dismissed as the language of the uneducated. But Gullah isn't that, scholars have proven.
Gullah is a beautiful language, with a rich heritage. Some of the stories from the Gullah tradition have made their way into popular culture in America, though most people don't realize the origin. Br'er Rabbit and his briar patch is a Gullah story. The next time you sing "Kumbayah" proudly, with emotion and feeling, you can thank Gullah at the end of the song.
"They came with their own language, beliefs and customs — and because they were so isolated in coastal regions that were not connected to the mainland until the 1950s, their Gullah culture flourished and proliferated among the many Africans who came to settle there, and it still endures today," she wrote.
