The theme or message of this poem is that we shouldn't judge people by the way they speak or even have expectations for how they should speak based on their external appearance, such as their skin color. The poem is a plea for accepting people as they are rather than imposing our expectations on them.
The narrator talks about how her Jamaican mother was hit with a ruler as her teacher tried to force her to speak with an upper class British accent. Her mother, however, kept her own lilting accent, which the speaker's friends now appreciate.
The narrator, however, doesn't sound like her mother or like a New Yorker or as what people think of as a stereotypical black speaker, and she wants that to be OK. As she says:
Let us speak. Let us talk
with the sounds of our mothers
and fathers still reverberating
in our minds,...
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wherever our mothers
or fathers come from:
Arkansas, Belize, Alabama,
Brazil, Aruba, Arizona.
This is an idealistic poem, one that celebrates diversity and affirms the worth of people's differences.
The major theme, I think, is that we ought not to make assumptions about individuals based on the way they speak, and we ought not expect people to speak a certain way based on their appearance. Her college friends expect the speaker to speak in a "lazy" way, "dropping syllables" and "not finishing words" or avoiding the use of certain "erudite" or "scholarly" words. They seem to expect her, because she is black, to speak this way, and their assumptions and insinuations are offensive to her. They've learned about "black English" from a text, and they use their limited knowledge of certain facts to generalize about an entire population of individuals, assuming homogeneity where extreme diversity and variance exists. Speech, she realizes, isn't general; in fact, there is "nothing / more personal" than the way one talks, and one should not have to explain or defend their speech to others.
The central idea of this poem is learning to define and take pride in one's own identity. The narrator struggles with how to respond to classmates who say she speaks "wrong" because she does not speak like the black Americans they know. In fact, the narrator does not sound like her Jamaican mother or her father either. She accepts her own unique voice and urges everyone to celebrate theirs as well ("Let us simply speak to one another, listen and prize the inflections, differences"). The characters in the poem who prize their unique accents, like the narrator's mother, are praised, while the characters who change their voices to conform, like the "colonial-minded teachers" or the narrator's father "when he wanted to sell someone something," are mocked.
The poem is not merely about speech patterns, though. The accents and modes of speech used by black people in America carry heavy socioeconomic connotations. The author is angry that classmates assume she speaks in a "lazy" way, "dropping syllables here, there, not finishing words," like a black American. Ironically, while urging the reader to accept all accents, she criticizes a mode of urban black speech. The narrator forms her identity around her accent but still struggles to shape the part of her identity based around her race. While the narrator understandably does not want to be pre-judged based on her appearance, she cannot claim the type of full self-definition and self-acceptance she seeks (and which her mother seems to have retained despite the efforts of the "colonial-minded teachers" to make her conform) until she copes with this part of her identity.