Javon Rustin – Code Switching

Curated By Ralph

"The Road Not Taken" is a source of inspiration for me, because it encourages me to seize opportunities and chart my own course in life.

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Javon Rustin, performing at IWPS 2019 in San Diego, CA.

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Code switching is when my dialect becomes
more pendulum than flagpole. My first born tongue turned upside down
swinging from someone else's approval, Second guessing what comes natural,
not knowing if today His nature will be more curse than commodity. To be judged or jacked in my jargon
is just hiding, Blending in, camouflage voice
creating a chameleon of my speech, I should be good at this. I codeswitch for a living. I mean I switch code. I mean I use code to write software. Object-oriented programming to be exact. That's encapsulation, polymorphism,
inheritance, abstraction. I'll explain later. My code runs different methods depending on how much access you have. Let's just say, I'm weary of how much access I give people. My codeswitching stops when I feel at home, Get comfortable and inviting,
drop my guard in the drawbridge To the castle that is my culture. My tongue removes a suit and tie,
throws on a fresh pair of sweatpants, Open the roof to my convertible mouth, And before reaching the driveway of my lips, I see you white America,
trying to take my car for a test drive, Ran a shirt from my closet, Grand theft jargon, I say "What's good, Joe?" My coworker says, "What's up, dawg?" And I can tell he don't talk like that. This is a hand-me-down dialect
and those words don't fit him. Suddenly, nothing I own feels safe, My tongue, culture, body, life
are all bugs to be fixed Or features to be fixated upon. I've learned white America to be the base class We're all supposed to encapsulate. But they take pleasure
in plagiarizing my programming, Polymorphing into something
that did not fall into their inheritance.

Now I speak in abstractions, While they wonder why I orient myself so objectively. I know so many coding languages Websites with ASP, JavaScript, C#
Visual, basically one does not correct A man with the other. I know computers to be smarter than humans By the way they practice diversity
while we still get our wires crossed. So I switch code to make it harder
for people to hack computers, But I code switch to make it harder for people to hack my culture. Who knows what they'd steal this time? (cheers and applause)

Hey... I'm Jasper!

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