MocciaLLN

There I was sitting in a brightly lit classroom with posters covering the walls and whiteboards, posters that told you the seasons, and how to count in Spanish. I was twiddling my thumbs making no use of the free time we had that period. It was senior year and I grew bored, but not bored enough to do my own work. 

In every sense of the word, I am American. Throughout my life, I wanted nothing more than to be American, and here I now sit and ponder how it influenced the way I see the world and how I interact with it. 

The classroom smelled of Lysol wipes and dry erase markers, and it was cool as it was every day in that room. The chatters grew louder and then softer then louder again as the period strung on and on.

“Do you know a synonym for the word gained?” said a voice from behind me. 

“Do you mean increased or obtained?” I replied.

“Obtained! Thank you!” she said back to me. 

“Do you need any other help?”

“Sure, can you take a look at my third paragraph?”

“Of course.”

Before I knew it I was carefully examining the entirety of her essay nitpicking at all the grammatical errors and “correcting” her language and literacy choices. 

There I was correcting “was” to “were” and I thought for the whole time that I was helping. I thought I was saving the day by fixing all of her “mistakes” because standard English was supposedly the correct way to write and speak in all cases. I didn’t think about the situation long enough to realize that I was now making someone else assimilate less voluntarily than I had. 

Every night before I went to bed I would pray and wish to wake up with snow-white translucent skin, big almond eyes, and a slim nose that came to a slight point at the tip. Every morning I would wake up with my tan skin, small eyes, and a rounded nose. I assimilated to western culture faster than you could blink with wonderful ease. If I couldn’t be American I could get pretty damn close. 

I have always spoken in the standard, academically accurate English. It was what I was raised to speak and it was highly enforced in school as well. It became the only dialect I knew and at a certain point, everything besides that was incorrect and should be modified, including Jasmin’s paper. 

“I didn’t know I had so many errors in my writing.” She said to me with a laugh.

“You don’t have that many errors.”

“You’ve corrected almost everything.”

“I’m just nit-picky.” 

Looking back, her writing wasn’t wrong at all. It was simply put, different. Different and completely natural and healthy. I didn’t need to fix anything. But at that moment I didn’t see that and I thought she was lesser than because she couldn’t master the dominant dialect of standard English and I was taught to accept nothing “less than”. This suppression of syntax is the reason many people are forced to engage in ‘code-switching’, a lingering effect of systematic oppression, and sadly without conscious decision, I had now contributed to that institution. However, it is through reflection that we are able to realize these flaws that have been written into us without our consent, and it is through corrections that we are able to make the world around us a more accepting and inclusive place.