dianavan, I've also just re-read your 25 Jun 08 - 02:35 PM post on this thread and feel the need to clarify what I was saying about formal and informal communication styles.

You wrote that "As a teacher, I had to monitor the use of my own language on a daily basis because I worked with children and because I had to use standard English as a professional. Now I can talk any way I want to and the more I speak my own language, the more I feel more like my own self. Language is the expression of who you are and when you come from a mixed cultural background, you learn to monitor your speech according to your audience".
-snip-

If I understood you correctly,dianavan, you are saying that people of mixed race {or of any other "minority" culture} are being less authentically themselves when they speak or write formally than when they speak or write informally. If I understood you correctly, this is your experience, but it's not mine.

I feel that I'm being authentically me when I speak and when I write more formally and when I write informally. Although I hasten to say that I'm not talking about writing in a research article mode when I refer to writing formally. That I don't like to do, because I'm still learning how to do it.

I'd agree with you more if you presented this in terms of the style of communicating that an individual prefers. However, I still don't think that every member of any cultural, racial, ethnic, religious group would agree. I personally love writing and speaking in public to small or to "largish" groups [not to crowds]. I love to sprinkle my conversation with slang and "street sayings". And I love using witty word plays. However, I still feel authentically me if I don't do any of that.

I definitely don't think that I'm talking White if I don't use any African American slang or if I don't use African American speaking & writing styles, such as repetition and culmination. Furthermore, I definitely am not talking about the use of grammatical constructs such as "I ain't got no" which is one part of AAVE {African American Vernacular English}. That said, I {and other African Americans who don't speak like that} have been known to occassionally purposely use non-Standard American grammatical sayings that are associated with AAVE. For example, I've been known to say "It bes that way sometime". I say what I wanna say in this way to give my writing a "Black flavor" {in "hip-hopese" that word is "flava"}. And when I do this, I'm still being authentically me, that is to say, this is just another facet of me...

I believe that every person is multi-faceted and can be "for real" in many different ways. That's not to say that a person can't be fake. But being fake is against my nature {I'm alluding to astrological info but I won't go there right now}.

dianavan, I hope this clarifies the points that I made in my first post to this thread, and I hope that you still agree with me 100%. If not, "it's all good."*

*loosely interpreted in this context as "either way, it'll be alright".

:o)