Whenever I see black news anchors, they speak entirely without any African-American vernacular English accent. In some cases it sounds natural (e.g. Lester Holt of NBC News), but in other cases it sounds like they are speaking in a very forced way, as though they may be deliberately suppressing a natural AAVE accent.
Are there any black news anchors that speak with a definite AAVE accent? Or is it really not possible for black people to get hired as mainstream, on-air news personalities unless they speak “white”?
Do you know of any non-black news anchors on mainstream, general audience news outlets who regularly speak in strong regional, ethnic, sub-cultural, or other non-prestige accents or dialects?
This was whom I thought of when I read the OP. I realize it’s just my decades of conditioning in how “real” reporters speak, but to me she sounds like a college intern— it’s slightly distracting.
I hear reporters speaking with a slight blaccent all the time…but that may be due to the fact that my ears are quite sensitive to blaccents. It isn’t diction. It is 100% inflection. Ayesha Roscoe does not speak in AAVE when she is reporting, but she does speak with a pronounced blaccent. Michelle Norris and Audie Cornish do not, though.
A couple of years ago, a black announcer on the BBC was criticised for speaking in a “London” accent (“f” instead of “th”), but the BBC had his back. There is also Kathy Clogston with her Northern Irish accent. So it seems safe to say that these days, at the BBC at least, you can get away with a “strong regional, ethnic, sub-cultural, or other non-prestige accents or dialect”. Good for them (as long as they don’t discriminate against people who talk like Charlotte Green!)
ISTM that there’s a bit of diction as well, in particular pronouncing an “e” more similar to an “i”. “imperor”. “attind”. But I agree that it’s mostly inflection.
I’ve never heard Al Sharpton speak in AAVE on his show. He has a voice that is distinctly “black”, but his diction is pretty much SAVE except for maybe some Brooklynisms.
Subcultural Vernacular English is more of a dialect than an accent. When your job is to read the words you’ve been given to read, using dialectal versions of them is not doing your job correctly. The people writing the words are going to be writing in Standard English because they know everyone learns to listen to it, even if they trouble producing it themselves. When I worked with some lower-class people, there were elements to their dialect that I didn’t understand right away, and if they had been using them on TV I would be confused. By using Standard forms, you make sure you’re not scaring away people.
I agree that there definitely is a certain “black” accent apart from vernacular language, and that some black people are able to hide their skin color while only being audible, but there are plenty that cannot. I think most of it has to do with early upbringing; I went to high school with quite a lot of black folks from various socioeconomic classes, and you could tell how rich their parents were by their accent.
