By Millicent Jefferson

“Yo wassup”

“Hey wassup”

That’s what I heard as I walked past the library at the 29^th Technical Junior High School in Naco, Sonora, Mexico. I located where the voices were coming from and as I squinted across the yard I noticed two boys. Once they noticed they had my attention they began throwing up peace signs and tapping them against their chest. Then others around them joined in and started saying “wassup” and giving me a head nod (a head nod is a non-verbal way of saying hello where you tilt you chin up a little bit and acknowledge the other person).

Instead of being offended -because these kids were making gross generalizations about how black Americans communicate- I started laughing. I started laughing because they don’t know that I grew up in a middle class Los Angeles suburb and that I constantly get criticized, in America for “sounding white.” After I stopped giggling I eventually gave them a head nod back and said “wassup.”

I was still thinking about my encounter even as we moved on to getting interviews. I began to think about the impact of the American culture we export. Those kids were wrong about me. But, they were right if all of their examples of how black people act come from typical American music videos, movies and television shows. I have no idea how much they know about black Americans but I know what they have seen.

At the conclusion of my pondering (which didn’t last long because it was 105 degrees, I hadn’t eaten and I was very, very thirsty), I smiled. I had to give it to those boys for trying. Instead of being scared to say “hi” or terrified to even try to communicate, they took their best shot at bridging one very obvious gap. They don’t speak English, but I am sure they knew how to say “hello.” But, instead of saying hello, which would be sufficient for anyone, who speaks English, they tried to say hi to me in a way they thought I (as a black person) would understand, and I did. I also understood that they, like me, were trying to understand a culture that they were not familiar with. In that short exchange they acknowledged the fact that they knew I was American and that they knew American blacks have a culture all their own in which slang greetings are a big part. I have to give them credit because I don’t know if at 14 I would have had the courage to make the first move.

When you have experiences like this, where someone’s genuine effort makes you laugh inside just a little bit because you truly understand where they are coming from, it lets you know that, regardless of geography, politics or anything else, we really are all the same underneath.