"You Speak So Well"
I was in a meeting one day. Nothing unusual, just a regular room full of colleagues. Afterward, a white coworker walked up to me. Not to the group. To me, specifically. And he told me I spoke very well.
I smiled. I said thank you, because that's what you do in the moment, even when something in your spirit doesn't feel quite right. But I knew exactly what that comment was the second it left his mouth. I took it as a jab. Here's why.
"You speak so well" is never really about how well you speak. It's about surprise. It's the polite way of saying, I didn't expect that from you. I didn't expect someone who looks like you to sound like this, to articulate a thought this clearly, to hold a room the way you just did. It's a compliment built on a lowered expectation. Once you've heard it enough times, you stop hearing the compliment part at all. You just hear the assumption underneath it.
This took me back to college, to a film we watched called Blindspotting. There's a scene where the main character, in a tense, high stakes moment, switches completely. His cadence, his vocabulary, his whole way of speaking changes, because he knows, instinctively, that the version of himself he actually is won't be heard the same way in that room.
Code switching isn't a skill Black professionals pick up because we enjoy having two versions of ourselves. It's survival. You learn it early, often before you even have language for what you're doing, that how you speak, how you carry yourself, how much of your natural rhythm you let show, directly affects how you're perceived. Whether you're seen as competent, or as someone people brace themselves for. I've done it my whole professional life. I have a way I talk in meetings, a way I talk with my best friend, a way I talk with my community, and I move between them so fluidly now that most days I don't even catch myself doing it. That ease didn't come naturally though. It came from years of learning what got me taken seriously in rooms that weren't built with me in mind.
That's what made the comment sting. Because the version of me that coworker was praising wasn't actually all of me. It was the edited version, the one I'd already adjusted, unconsciously, to fit the room. He wasn't complimenting my intelligence or my insight. He was complimenting the fact that my performance of professionalism matched a standard he didn't expect me to meet. That's not a compliment. That's a confession about what he expected walking in.
I don't say any of this to make every well-meaning person who's ever said something like that feel like a villain. I don't think most people saying it mean harm. That's actually part of what makes it exhausting. It's rarely malicious. It's just deeply, casually embedded, the kind of comment that reveals more about the assumptions someone's been carrying than about anything they intended to say. But intention isn't the same as impact, and I've had to learn to hold both of those at once. He probably meant it as kind. I still had to sit with what it actually communicated.
Being a Black woman in professional spaces means doing this kind of math constantly, mostly without anyone else in the room even noticing it's happening. Deciding how much of yourself is safe to bring today. Reading a room before you speak in it. Knowing which version of your voice will get you heard instead of dismissed, or worse, labeled difficult before you've said anything difficult at all. It's a tax most will never have to pay, and most of them don't even know it exists.
I don't have a clean, wrapped up ending for this one. I'm still figuring out how much code switching I'm willing to keep doing, versus just letting people meet the real, full version of me and adjust their expectations instead. Some days I have the energy to push back on that. Some days I just smile, say thank you, and save the real reaction for the people who'll actually understand it without me having to explain it first.
The thing is, comments like that reveal a lot more than they're intended to. If you've ever been on the receiving end of one, you already know exactly what I mean. And if you've never had to think about any of this, that's worth sitting with too.
Comments