Storming the Gate: Talking in Color

      In Tiffany Hendrickson's personal essay "Storming the Gate: Talking in Color" (2013), she argues that the color of your skin should not have anything to do with the way that you speak. Hendrickson developed and supported the thesis by giving many examples where she would be around certain people and they would say that "she sounded black." She told stories about growing up speaking differently in order to help us understand what she went through. The intended audience for this is college students and maybe those who want to major in communication.
     After reading Hendrickson's personal essay, we could understand how some people may believe that the way you speak should reflect your appearance. We appreciated Hendrickson's counter argument as to why this should be debunked. This personal essay delighted us to see Hendrickson take away the norms of how a white girl "should talk", therefore creating a unique look at how we see people and the way they talk. It was also enlightening to learn something new. Code-switching, for example, was a term we never knew about, but is in fact very real and common.

     As a white girl, Hendrickson expressed how she has been discriminated based on her color and sound. She wrote this essay in order to acknowledge that no one should be judged because of the color and sound. She has been so emotionally disturbed because of linguistic gap; for example in her essay where she has always been told "you sound like a black girl.” Since she was attending a predominantly black school and living in a black community, Hendrickson exposes that a person's environment can affect the ability of talking. Even as a white girl, other whites never stop asking her if she was white. Because of anger and embarrassment, she decided to try “code-switching” after she realized that people associated with sound.