In sociology there is a term called code switching. It is defined as changing how you talk and behave around different groups of people. For example you might act differently with your coworkers and friends as opposed to family, like the usage of slang or body language. In my experience, I have always tried to keep all of my code switching as strict as possible: act one way with friends, another with family, and another with similar academic backgrounds. I was always under the impression to keep all of the worlds separate, because I should treat my elders with respect, I should not be uptight with my friends, and that speaking like an academic to people outside of the field is boring. However this means that I never spoke academically with family or friends, and casually with academics. I never learned how to blend these worlds together, being able to talk about difficult issues in my fields of studies casually.
Over the past week at CAUSE, I have met and heard from speakers who knew how to blend these worlds together, hearing speakers like Dan Schnur who spoke about how campaign messaging worked, as well as the conversation between Nancy Yap and James Choi who have extensive community engagement in Little Tokyo. What I found amazing is that they were able to talk about important topics like how to engage with their communities in a casual way. They joked around and broke down difficult issues into easily understandable snippets and themes.
Dan Schnur liked to break down messaging into a series of threes: three parts of a biography, a message, and an audience. While how he spoke about messaging was in depth, it was at the same time very easy to understand. What really stood out to me was what he said at the beginning of the talk, “Call me Dan.” It brought a sense of familiarity that made it much easier to understand what he was speaking on. For example, Dan broke down campaign messaging into three points: how your own experiences inspired you to run for office, how those experiences can be applied to a broader audience, and how those experiences applied to policy. By creating a through-line of how one’s life can be widely understood on a personal level and in policy, it helped me understand how people can speak so fluently on complex issues by finding the common thread and seeing how it can be seen everywhere.
In stark contrast, when talking about my field of study in sociology, I often get so in the weeds that it becomes difficult to look at the big points. When practicing breaking down problems into threes, I came to a realization that if you understand the topic very deeply you should be able to explain it to a five year old. For the past week, I have been practicing this to try to see if I could apply this to my own studies. For example, I thought about how I could break down gentrification into a socioeconomic issue, a racial issue, and a historical one. Housing prices increase over time in LA, pricing out the people living there. Gentrification usually falls under racial lines, where black and brown communities face the negative effects. The people who recently move in do not know the history of where they live, decimating rich local histories.
Joining CAUSE has put me on the right direction into condensing difficult issues into component parts, especially when being eloquent in these kinds of conversations feels like performing magic. It has also helped me understand that we do not have to code switch all the time and that I can blend how I speak to be more true to myself. Communicating what I believe and what I understand is important and vital to being a leader in the community, where the people I advocate for may not be able to read the news or understand how they relate to larger systems.