Royster

"What is gained or lost when participating in an academic discourse community" was the question Dr. O'Rourke posed to us to think about when reading Royster. My own opinion was that, wth ideas such as templates being advocated for, and scholars looking down on writing which doesn't fit into certain established conventions the voice/style of individual authors might be taken away by participation in an academic community.

I think that the Jacqueline Jones Royster and I have a similar idea about losing one's voice in an academic setting but she attributes the loss to different reasons that I would.

In Scene 1 Royster discusses how she finds herself as an African American woman forced to listen while colleagues, most likely white colleagues, discuss things about the African American race. Royster seams to yearn to scold her colleagues for talking authortatively about something than they haven't truely experienced but being a member of the discourse community makes her hold back.
- I'm not 100% sure what point Royster is trying to make when she discusses home training. are there situations when she would feel comfortable speaking up about the discomfort she feels? Is home training in some way the training of how to reign one's self in when participating in academic discourse?
In an interesting way I think Scene 3 can be linked to Scene 1. Royster doesn't seem to want to specifically say it but she seems to be suggesting that there are times where she allows what people would consider more traditional African American dialect to work together with traditional academic discourse language. She's upset when a colleague suggests that when she does this she is sounding more "natural". Royster suggests that it is natural for her to be able to speak both as an academic and an African American. She seems to be pointing to an underlying racist attitude of her friend. Her main point in Scene 3 is that a person can have multiple "natural" or "authentic" voices.
Royster's idea of natural voice and mine are different. It seems to her that if you've been in a discourse community for a certain period of time that the conventions of that community are as natural to you as the conventions of the community you grew up in. I limited my thoughts on what is a natural voice to the conventions one grew up speaking. I suppose I can understand why if a person has for a long period of time been a participated in a community with different conventions they might eventually consider those natural too. I'd question Royster as to when she felt that academic discourse conventions became a natural way of speaking for her.

Scene 2 I'm not 100% sure how to fit scene two into my argument. Royster is saying that when she attempts to speak about her history as an African American, and as a result digs deeper than some of her colleagues might, she finds that people at first don't believe everything she presents to them. Royster says she is trying to straddle the line between participating in the African American discourse community where she her ideas will likely be accepted and the academic community where she must prove herself. It seems like she's possibly responding to scene 1 and trying to suggest if she speaks about the same topics she isn't granted the same authority as her white colleagues are. I have a hard time making sense of why this might happen. Is there some reason other than that she's African American that people are waiting for her to prove herself? She's either not telling us the entire story or she's accusing the entire academic community of being racist.