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Interesting article that mentions bio info on Clarence Thomas [1]
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Date: 2022-07-07
"I didn’t ask questions in college or law school"
In reading the 2016 article, ”African Words in the American English Gullah Dialect,” I was surprised it began with mention of Clarence Thomas. Perhaps this glimpse into Thomas’s early years gives context to his outlook on society:
Last week, I identified some notable African onomastic (onomastics is the science of personal names) influences in Gullah personal names. This week, I highlight a few African lexical influences in the Gullah English dialect. But before I do that, I’d like draw the reader’s attention to the fact that Clarence Thomas, the only black person in the US Supreme Court and the second black person to ever be appointed to the US Supreme Court after Thurgood Marshall, spoke Gullah as a child-and still speaks it whenever he so desires. In 2000, according to the New York Times of December 14, 2000, he told a 16-year-old high school student that his remarkable reticence in the Supreme Court and else has roots that go back to his childhood. As a child, he said, he was taunted by his peers and teachers for speaking his Gullah English dialect (which he said was more popularly known as Geechee in Savanah, Georgia, where he grew up) or for allowing Gullah influences to creep into his standard spoken English.
“When I was 16, I was sitting as the only black kid in my class, and I had grown up speaking a kind of a dialect. It’s called Geechee. Some people call it Gullah now, and people praise it now,” he said.“But they used to make fun of us back then. It’s not standard English. When I transferred to an all-white school at your age, I was self-conscious, like we all are…. And the problem was that I would correct myself midsentence. I was trying to speak standard English. I was thinking in standard English but speaking another language. So I learned that – I just started developing the habit of listening…. I didn’t ask questions in college or law school. And I found that I could learn better just listening.” Perhaps he meant to say he thought in Gullah and tried to translate his thoughts into Standard English and couldn’t help the episodic, involuntary intrusions of Gullah. /SNIP
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