Parents — I need you to do something before you read any further.
Go get your student. Pull them away from whatever they are doing. Sit them down next to you.
Because what I am about to talk about is for both of you. And it is one of the most important conversations a Black family can have before a student walks into a predominantly white institution.
Here it is.
Your student is going to be asked — sometimes directly, more often without anyone saying a word — to change how they speak, how they carry themselves, and how they show up. The institution will not call it that. But that is what it is.
The most important thing they can know going in is the difference between adapting and disappearing. One will serve them. The other will cost them.
Both have names. And once you know them, you cannot unsee them.
Code switching is the skill. Assimilation is what happens when the skill becomes a survival requirement.
Code Switching — The Skill
Code switching is something most people do without even realizing it. It is the ability to read a room, understand what that space requires, and adjust how you communicate — without losing yourself in the process.
For Black Americans, this most often means shifting between the way we talk at home — with family, with friends, in community — and the way we communicate in professional or academic spaces. Both are real. Both are valid. The shift between them is not a betrayal. It is a skill.
Politicians do it. Executives do it. Lawyers do it. I do it. The ability to move fluidly between communication styles is professional fluency — and it will serve your student well.
The key is that it is a choice. Your student knows they are doing it. They can turn it on and off. And it does not require them to feel embarrassed about how they talk when they are not doing it.
That is the line. The moment it stops being a choice is the moment something else is happening.
Assimilation — The Harm
Assimilation is what happens when code switching stops being a tool and starts being a requirement for survival.
It looks like this. Your student comes home for Thanksgiving and realizes they are performing at the dinner table. They start feeling vaguely embarrassed by the way their grandmother talks. They cannot fully relax in Black spaces anymore because somewhere along the way they absorbed the idea that those spaces — and those ways of being — are less than.
Nobody told them that directly. The institution does not have to. It happens in a hundred small moments — what gets centered in the classroom, who gets treated as an authority, whose communication style gets called professional and whose gets called unprofessional.
This is a slow harm. And many Black students at PWIs experience it without ever having a name for what is happening to them.
Naming it is the first step to protecting yourself from it.
How to Know Which One Is Happening
Student — I am talking directly to you now.
Ask yourself this. When you shift how you communicate in a professional or academic setting, does it feel like a tool you are using — or does it feel like the only version of yourself that is safe?
If it feels like a tool, that is code switching. You are in control of it.
If it feels like the only safe option — if you are performing even when you do not have to, if you feel embarrassed by your own cultural self, if you are losing track of which version of you is real — that is a signal. Something else is happening and it deserves attention.
You are not going crazy. You are not being too sensitive. You are experiencing something that has a name, that researchers have documented, and that Black students at PWIs navigate every single day.
Naming it is the first step to protecting yourself from it.
Once a week, spend at least an hour somewhere you do not have to code switch at all. A call with family. Time with friends from home. A Black student organization meeting. A playlist that is entirely yours. This is not a break from the work. This is part of the work. You cannot keep giving from a well that never gets refilled.
What the Institution Owes Your Student
Parents — I am back with you now.
Here is something that does not get said enough. The burden of navigating cultural difference at a PWI should not fall entirely on your student. When an institution admits a Black student and then quietly requires them to become unrecognizable to themselves in order to succeed — that institution is taking something it has no right to take.
Professional fluency is worth developing. It will open doors. But it should never come at the cost of your student's relationship with their own culture, their own family, their own sense of who they are.
The goal — the thing we work toward in Arc 2 and Arc 3 of the NEP model — is a student who can move between worlds and come back to themselves every single time. Not a student who traded one identity for another to get a degree.
Know who you are. Move strategically. Come back to yourself.
Help has arrived.
