Summary of from the Outside in

In the opening paragraph of “From Outside, In,” Barbara Mellix demonstrates her ability to smoothly shift from “standard English” to “black English,” while being aware of grammatically correct English.   In her youth Mellix understood that the dialect spoken at home and the one spoken in public were drastically diverse—the one at home being referred to as “black English” and the other “standard English.”   Her parents, along other black adults, saw the need to teach their children the importance of speaking and writing standard English in order to be respected and considered an equal among white people.
Mellix shows how she   instilled what her parents taught her into her own parenting methods when scolding her daughter, Allie, in black English and mentions how she does not speak in that manner in public, even when speaking to her own daughter.   Mellix’s parents taught her black English and standard English and when and where it was appropriate to speak each of them.   For example, her parents expected Millex to speak standard English when speaking with or around whites, city people, and even certain family members whom they considered to be “proper blacks.”   Those encounters caused she and her family nearly   unconquerable   insecurity, forcing them to formulate their sentences before shyly speaking them.   Millex and her family used Black English when speaking to immediate family members or others who mirrored their dialect.   However, when a Southern white police officer, Toby, spoke to her in black English dialect, Mellix felt it necessary to respond in proper English because she “had something to prove. Toby did not.”   Mellix describes how speaking standard English is like wearing her Sunday best in the middle of the week—it is uncomfortable but necessary in order to prove that she is educated.
Mellix’s parents “never set aside a time to drill [them] in standard English.” When her father was in a particularly good mood, he would tell she and her siblings of the...