I have a slight “blaccent”. I speak AAVE very rarely, but I can’t hide the dirty Souf inflections in some of my pronounciations. You can take the girl out of ATL but you can’t take the ATL out of the girl.
However, people frequently remind me that I don’t speak the way they expect me to. Black people rag on me about how “proper” I speak, and white people still congratulate me on “speaking so well”. I wish both would STFU. My speech is neither a put-on nor an achievement. It’s just that my parents do not have apparent “blaccents”. Despite growing up very much poor and working-class. The only explanation I have for this is that they are from Indiana. In Indiana everyone sounds kind of bland. I blame all the corn and flatness.
At least once a year some white person feels obligated to let me know “you’re SO articulate! Your parents must be proud!”
Seriously, the pizza delivery guy who almost cut his hand off with a chain saw said this to me several weeks back. Being a natural born asshole, whenever I get this comment I just can’t help myself from responding “compared to you?”
How do you respond to this? I think my approach might need some adjustment
Moms majored in English and would often do public speaking engagements so she had very little tolerance for improper grammar and modes of speech. I was also educated in the Richmond public school system so I learned lots of AAVE. Add those 2 together and I have found that I can navigate most environments and comfortably switch between different methods of speaking (though I do lean heavily toward the “sounds like a white guy” side of the equation).
I also have a hard time keeping the country out of my accent and I find the more comfortable I am around a person the less I try to hide it.
I try to tell myself their assholishness is unintended and just hand them a very dry “thanks”.
To be honest, I have a harder time with deflecting “you speak so proper!” Because to my own ear, I do not speak THAT proper, if by proper they mean “like a white person”. I have no problem code switching and using some AAVE expressions when I am feeling comfortable with folks. But I still get the “proper” accusation.
Calle Ocho accent (Spanish as primary language, Miami area). There’s no such thing as a Latina accent (it would be a Latino accent anyways), as there are a ton of different Spanish-influenced accents in the US. The specific accent changes depending on the local mix of Spanish dialects, Spanish media available locally, which language is that person’s primary and even by languages at schools (as general-lesson languages I mean, not as second languages).
Ignorance of the existence of AAVE in America is astounding, IMO. I have little doubt it’s tied to the general sort of background racism and disdain that broader culture and society has for people and things that are unapologetically black.
A while back I started a thread about how ignorance of the existence of AAVE as a real dialect (as opposed to it being “improper English” or some other bigoted/ignorant nonsense) is doing real harm to many black children: https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=850747
I recall in the early 1990s when there was general OUTRAGE over the fact that a public school (in Oakland perhaps?) was using “Ebonics” in school. I don’t know exactly what people were upset about, but I suspect it had something to do with recognizing that AAVE is a dialect rather than just “mistakes” or “laziness.”
Every time someone asks me that question their tone is filled with the implication of “I was expecting someone more stereotypical but you’re not like the black people I see on TV! You’re not selling drugs, robbing people, pimping women or anything!”
I guess I have a hard time looking past that.
To quote my man Phonte from Little Brother: “…black folk saying that I’m too intelligent and white folks saying I’m a little too niggerish…”
It’s like we are forever stuck in the middle but I guess that isn’t such a bad place to be.
In my experience a lot mainstream America feels that black people should be forced to assimilate to white culture and there should be zero tolerance for anyone who doesn’t happily march in lock step with their expectations. Allowing black people to speak in a manner that might make us more comfortable with the environment is too much like accepting others despite their differences. And we know those people have zero tolerance for different.
I don’t know if that’s it, necessarily. What I do see a lot is that a lot of the AAVE constructions are, when looked at through the lens of Standard American English, flat out incorrect.
So what you end up with is a dialect with its own rules, etc… and the rest of the country who’s in tune with another, more prevalent dialect making judgments about that dialect and it’s propriety.
This isn’t limited to AAVE and the black community either- I’m sure that people of all sorts of minority dialects run into this same problem. Quebecois French suffers this to some degree. Cajun English definitely does- there’s lots of stuff they say colloquially that’s incorrect in Standard American English. Same with Pennyslvania Dutch English. And I don’t doubt that Texas German sounds weird and more than a little wrong to a modern German speaker.
I think the difference is that what’s really going on here isn’t so much the idea that AAVE is a separate dialect is questionable, it’s that it requires separate instruction when none of the other (mostly white) dialects seem to require that. Maybe they should- it would seem to me that a hillbilly child who speaks only Appalachian English would have the same need for instruction in that dialect as a black child raised speaking AAVE would.
Dan Rather, in his autobiography The Camera Never Blinks, wrote about suppressing his Texas accent. He was told by a network vice-president that he should attempt to sound as if he had grown up in the vice-president’s office.
Ayesha Roscoe came to my mind, too; I was listening to a story of hers on “Morning Edition”, driving into work. (She’s a White House correspondent, but she seems to get very basic “The President said this…” stories, usually. But today, she had a long analysis piece on Trump’s negotiation style.) I admit, when I hear her voice, I think that she doesn’t have enough gravitas to be a reporter, but that’s my lingering racism (and sexism, too – I have the same reaction to Zoe Chace, of “Planet Money”, who has a very strong Cleveland accent). Both are perfectly good reporters.
But as** monstro **pointed out, Roscoe simply has an accent. She doesn’t display any dialectual features of Black English like deleted copula or continuous “be”. I’ve never heard a broadcast journalist use AAVE on air. It’d be interesting to hear – the dialect is expressive and, I think, engaging. I’m not a sneakerhead, but I subscribe to a shoetuber, just because I admire the fluency of his AAVE. Well, that, and he’s a really nice, cheerful guy.
There is no such thing as a white accent in British or American English, and almost the American cable news reporters speak a midwest accent, which is regional, not white. A. Roscoe’s black sounding English (I would guess she is black if I never saw her) is therefore unusual.
