Why do I Phrase All my Titles as Questions?

Both authors brought up the issue of language as a stumbling block in the participation of non-mainstream groups in the mainstream of intelligentsia. As someone who's grown up surrounded by academics (I'd say a good 1/3 of my family, extended and otherwise, are professors), this is not something that I ever realized was a problem, as academic-speak comes almost more naturally to me than that Spanish I took for four or five years.

As someone who would probably be considered a member of both oppressed groups that we are considering this week (as a woman, and as a "racial minority"), I have to wonder what the solution to the problem of the dominant academic language being sourced from a different "culture" would look like. As Bell Hooks discusses it, it makes perfect sense--black youth choose not (or perhaps cannot) to participate as heavily in what might be considered "high culture" or "academic" cultural pursuits simply because these activities, as we perceive them in the wider Western culture, simply have no bearing on their cultural experience... they are not framed in a "language" or set of conceptual building blocks which they can consider their own, and therefore a language they feel they cannot adequately express themselves in.

Nonetheless, as a member of two such oppressed groups, and as someone who actually identifies with white, hegemonic academia as one of my primary "cultures", I cannot quite imagine how the languages with which people not so culturally privileged as I identify with most readily can be best incorporated into mainstream culture, and respected as forms of expression as valid as that Foucault employs. I wonder whether it might be most expedient (though clearly not an ideal solution) to begin by using those members of culturally oppressed groups, such as myself, who have been actively enculturated in the dominant culture as a mediation point between the dominant group and the non-dominant one, so there is at least some form of common ground on which to tread at least initially.

At the same time though, it seems like an immense burden to lay on such individuals--to expect them to speak for an entire other culture; a culture with which they clearly cannot wholly identify, as they have been actively enculturated in the dominant culture.

Obviously there is no easy solution to the need to mediate the dominant and non-dominant cultures in such a way that everyone gets a fair shake, or else we wouldn't even be debating the problem any more. I suppose I just feel useless as someone placed (generally without choice) in the middle of these cultural leviathans, and not always able (or willing) to speak to full mediative potential. Another half-baked thought.