Photo courtesy of Esquire.com
It probably happens to me once a week. I will be talking with someone, and through the course of a conversation, I will say a word where I drag out a long vowel sound, or clip an ending consonant. The person I am speaking with will then latch onto that sound and stop the flow of the conversation in order to point out that my “Texas” was showing. I, like millions of other people, was born in the south, or southwest depending on how puritanical one’s regional definitions are. I grew up in a rural area; my hometown currently has a population of about 6400 people. It’s about 95% white, according to the 2010 census, and its major industry is oil field work.
Suffice it to say, I came by a heavily accented English pronunciation honestly. In truth, my accent gets worse when I spend time with my family because I hear them speak and slip into comfortable patterns. However, like many people, I do not realize that I have an accent. Or, should we be more precise, I am not aware of the content of my accent. So, when I speak I can should as if I am a product of my hometown, and I see nothing wrong with that. I try to use proper grammar, and do not mind if my vocabulary is corrected because to be corrected out of ignorance is a good thing. However, when comments are made to correct the way I pronounce words, I tend to experience it as mocking derision, and not edifying critique.
It is not new information that over the last few years the opinion of someone who carries a “drawl” or “twang” in their speech is often seen as someone of low intellect. It as just a few weeks ago that Stephen Colbert was mockingly imitating former President George W. Bush’s accent. Whatever your opinion of the former president, it struck me as odd to mock the way he speaks. While the video is very difficult to find, Colbert, a product of South Carolina, has spoken before about how he worked to hide his accent so he could be taken seriously as an actor. I love Colbert, personally, but it does chafe on me a bit that he has hidden his accent.
There was a fascinating article today in “New York Magazine” about how the rural-urban divide in America is much more descriptive of social differences than the Republican-Democratic divide. While it would seem that those things are synonymous, but the article does a fantastic work in focusing more on the economic and social conditions influencing this growing divide. Though the article is long, it’s extremely informative in getting a grip on the growing differences between urban and rural America, but it avoids discussing social stereotypes which I believe have an influence on the antipathy felt by these two population groups.
As I was alluding to early in this post, an issue that needs be addressed is how a person is mocked simply for the way they speak. It’s not a stretch to say that our current media culture does not think highly of people with southern inflections. Most often, a southern accent is given to a character in a movie or TV show that is less intelligent than the protagonist, they might be a comedic foil, or perhaps they are the embodiment of racism in the narrative. Rarely is the hero someone with a thick southern accent, unless it is a biopic of course. National newscasters, whether it be on the evening news of broadcast TV or the 24-hour cable networks, they are all lauded for their “Neutral” American English. Late night hosts on any network, save for Comedy Central’s Trevor Noah and “Last Week Tonight” host Jon Oliver, offer neutral American English to their audiences, which also happen to slant more liberal/progressive than the rest of the television audience.
To have any regionalization to your speech is seen as a fault which must be overcome, and until you do, you will be mocked.
The sad part is, even I can’t avoid thinking negatively of people with heavily accented American English.
In my own home, we make jokes which lampoon southern speakers as less intelligent or refined than the rest of the world.
So, think of this piece as part confession as well as part polemic.
If the goal of the coming years is to heal the divides of rural and urban areas, maybe we could start with NOT mocking the sounds that come out of a person’s mouth.
In a sermon at Myers Park Baptist Church, just after the last Presidential election, the Rev. William Barber spoke of how the issues he had with candidates in the race had nothing to do with “tone.” While pundits and reporters continued to speak of the “tone” of the election, Rev. Barber spoke of the “trajectory of policies.” In his reflection, it didn’t matter what tone you used, if the words and policies you were articulating were racist. Racism in a quiet tone is still racist.
In the experiences I have had, the moment a conversation partner diverts the point to adjudicating the accent with which I speak the words, we are no longer discussing a topic. Now we having out how my mouth forms words, and that means we have walked away from the point. We could be talking about anything, but now we are talking about the way I sound. No longer is it the trajectory of our topic, but a conversation about “tone.” Whether it comes from the pulpit, a public policy speech, or a news report, the way someone sounds should fall far down the list of important objectives.
The content of their message should be the focus.
Maybe instead of commenting on the way I stretch a long vowel sound, we could talk about the words and concepts I am actually speaking into existence. Then, we might have something to really talk about.
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