So one thing that's pretty cool that my friend introduced me to is the idea of AAVE, (African-American Vernacular English), which refers to the idea that what most (read: white) people would think of as "uneducated" slang is actually a dialect of English. ie "He don’t have no choice." This sentence is not legitimate in academic, standard English. However, the idea that people who would speak like that are uneducated or stupid is tribal. It's really a subconscious racism, since you hear someone who talks like that and you associate that with being black and poor and uneducated. In reality, that sentence works perfectly fine in the context of AAVE, which is just a different dialect of English. AAVE has grammar rules which are a combination of French, Spanish (?) and various African Languages. For example, the phrase "I don't think he married," omits the verb "to be", something that you cannot do in Standard English. However, AAVE has adopted grammar rules from other languages, in particular the idea that "to be" is implied in many sentences. As such, the "is" that would normally belong in that sentence does not need to be there, per the grammar of AAVE.
As such, we as a society have this idea that people who talk that way are stupid or that they are crude, which is rooted in a subconscious racism. This also accounts for when a black person is told, "You're the whitest black person I know!", which is essentially using white as a synonym for educated and well spoken, which is absurd. A black person who uses Standard English as opposed to AAVE will inevitably be seen as smarter and better educated, regardless of whether or not that is true. The way that this connects back to white privilege is that people who have grown up speaking AAVE will be required to learn an entirely new system of linguistics in order to get a job. This is predicated on the idea that people see AAVE as lesser to Standard English, just because it is unfamiliar. It's like if people in America had the impression that anyone speaking with a very roosterney accent was stupid. This suggests that because people speak in an unfamiliar way, they are worse than you. This is again related to racism, the idea that black people speak this way and therefor it is indicative of inferiority.
You said to mention your race and I'm like the whitest of whitey white people. Not to get all social justice up in here, but I've spent my entire life thinking (I mean, it is totally subconscious, but I recognize it now) that people who speak in AAVE are uneducated or stupid, that they are inherently different. So it was pretty striking when I learned that this is a real linguistic thing, that it's a legit dialect of the English language.
