You open your mouth and tell them where you're from. Not the city. The class. The vowel that didn't get ironed out, the word you used that nobody in this room uses, the sentence structure that belongs to a neighborhood not represented in this building. It is over before you knew it started.
Language is how class moves through the body. It is not simply accent—though accent is the most immediate signal. It is vocabulary, register, rhetorical form, the ratio of directness to circumlocution, the baseline assumption about who gets to speak and who is expected to listen. These patterns are absorbed in childhood from the people around you and from the institutions that shaped you. By the time you are an adult, they are not choices. They are you.
Law 1 locates the problem structurally. Language carries class position. The words you use are not neutral descriptions of the world; they are markers of your position in it. Standard professional English—the dialect of education, of the managerial class, of institutional authority—is treated as unmarked, as simply correct. Every other dialect is marked: regional, ethnic, working-class, immigrant. The marking is not linguistic. It is hierarchical. The "standard" is not actually standard in any neutral sense. It is the dialect of people who already have power, raised to the status of a norm from which all others deviate.
This creates a specific tax. People who did not grow up speaking the prestige dialect pay to enter institutions that require it. They pay in code-switching, in monitoring, in deliberate practice, in the sustained effort of performing a register that does not come automatically. Their peers who grew up in the prestige dialect do not pay this tax. The difference is invisible to the people who don't pay it.
The words that mark you are not failures. They are evidence of where you were formed, which is not a failure either. The project of integration—of holding your origin language while acquiring the language of the institution, without losing the first one to perform the second—is one of the more complex personal undertakings of class mobility. It is neither required nor optional. It depends on how much access you want to places where the second dialect is the entry fee.
What changes everything is knowing that the norm is arbitrary. Standard professional English is the prestige dialect because the people who speak it have prestige, not the other way around. The thing being assessed in a job interview, in a client meeting, in a performance review, is not your intelligence or your capability. It is your proximity to a particular class formation. Once you know that, you can decide what to do with the knowledge.