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.