Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

hooks reflects on the history of the English language in America from the perspective of African American slaves. She imagines the terror and confusion they felt when they were brought to America and struggled to understand the foreign tongue of English. She also shows how the English language was a site of rebellion, as slaves began to piece together a language that could resist power: “Enslaved black people […] put together their words in such a way that the colonizer had to rethink the meaning of the English language” (170). She sees an ancestral line from today’s black vernacular English to the language of black slaves. She also sees how society has systematically stigmatized that black speech, particularly in the classroom.

As a remedy, she “encourage[s] student to use their first language and translate it so they do not feel that seeking higher education will necessarily estrange them from that language and culture they know most intimately” (172). However, some of her white students complained about this use of languages and dialects other than Standard English because they couldn’t understand their classmates. She encouraged the students to embrace the feeling of confusion as “a space to learn” what it is like to lose a sense of mastery over language.