7 Biggest Risks of Raising Black Children in a White Environment

black boy with plant

They Don’t Learn Code Switching

For Black people, the need and ability to tread between two separate and opposing registers is identified as “code switching.” Though this is often unconscious, it affords Black people the ability to traverse white norms and values in order to “succeed,” while still maintaining a connection with and understanding of the Black community and its central struggles with racism and class inequalities. Black people raised in predominately white homes and communities never develop, or are slow to develop, what sociolinguists call alternate “registers,” specific varieties of informal/formal styles of speech that are racially and ethnically distinct from the white dominant group.

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