It's a Royster thing.

From what I Gathered, Jacqueline Jones Royster’s “When the First Voice You Hear is Not Your Own,” was more about communication than writing. Specifically, she addresses the problems and broken chords that exist between cross cultural discourse; the communities in which we live. She questions the validity of people who do not belong to a particular community writing about others that are within that community, or the community as a whole. This is not only something that exists(or doesn't) between borders of country, but other things that separate people from one another such as race and religion. I found this part of article to be controversial in that she exemplifies being African-American, and goes on to say that she doesn't really consider what Caucasians have to say about her race. She feels their interpretations will be suspect and fallacious because they do not exist with-in her community. Although she has a point, I thought it was ironic because it is exactly this kind of thought which seems to divide us; as it totally ignores the broader perspective. The broader perspective being; that although one may be African American- that person is still American, and belongs too a much larger community. She fails to clarify these kinds of things, I found this part of her article to be less than professional.
She does go on to say that there are possible ways to make discourse universal. She describes how communications styles are all but too specific, and to be generalized for a broader community. She seems occupied with the notion that people are incompetent communicators, that too often people are speaking and not listening. This creates poor understanding between people of different discourse communities and thus is why there exists broken discourse.


I don't know. I didn't really like her article. She made some interesting points, but I thought a lot of them go without saying. The cultural boundaries, invisible borders, and language barriers that divide communities are not the reason for poor communication. Poor communication exists because people in general are too often ignorant and self centralized to understand the realms of foreign communities. It is the same reason why segregations have existed since the dawn of man. This is what I thought she was trying to say many times, but instead, just beat around the bush.