I have noticed that within a group if an Asian or Hispanic or Black person has the same accents as the group there doesn’t seem to be any other distinctions. Since the Obama era I have also noticed a vast I will call it improvement in this area because it does contribute to social acceptance. This also seems to be having a dual effect that when more of any group are accepted for whatever reason it opens up more towards the ones in that group who still may have the strong cultural accents. How do others view this?
This is absolutely not the case in my experience as a PoC who speaks with a “White” accent. Not in the slightest.
Would you care to describe your experience?
There’s more to difference than just skin colour or accent. I grew up with different cultural experiences from my White friends - different holiday celebrations, different vacation spots, different education, different religious celebrations, different cuisine, different treatment by the law, etc.
Just because I speak like them, doesn’t make any of that go away, and it colours every interaction in some way(no pun intended) even if they’re ignoring physical differences.
I appreciate an honest answer, and I would agree with that.
I’m trying to parse the OP but it’s hard to decipher. Do you mean that there is no longer the distinction whereby, for instance, a “fresh-off-the-boat” Asian person would have a distinct foreigner accent in English compared to a born-in-America Asian, or am I totally misreading this, and you’re saying they don’t dress differently, or…?
I will say far less distinction. I didn’t consider dress in the Op, I was focusing only on language, but I see where dress could certainly have an impact. I think dress would apply to anyone, I have known lots of whites that came from the south with a heavy southern drawl, they seemed to stand out in a group initially but fit in pretty quickly if it was the right group.
I had so little success at that that I abandoned it as not worth the effort.
I’m not exactly sure what the OP is asking. As a white guy, I think I’d be more comfortable with a person of color who impressed me as “well spoken” and intelligent, than a white guy who was trying to come across speaking “gangsta”.
Foreign accents are a challenging issue. Sometimes I just find it very hard to understand people with some heavy accents. So whether I feel I can effectively communicate with them is far more important than their color/ethnicity.
I readily admit that I do not “get” some cultural appearance things. Say long braids/dreads on black men. Or if someone is dressed in a way that impresses me as trying to convey certain images - maybe with pants hanging off their butt and a sideways flatbrim cap. Don’t get me wrong - they are free to dress and present themselves however they wish. But dressing in certain ways suggests to me that I might not be terribly interested in them.
But, as with others - not exactly sure what the OP is asking.
I think the unlikelihood of the OP’s assertion can be gauged by talking to women who have lived from birth in an American group. They virtually unanimously report discriminatory attitudes that men are completely unaware of.
Yeah. In law school I had a buddy who was black, but had been adopted as a baby by a white family. He and I used to comment that he was the whitest back guy imaginable. But, in central Illinois, there is no question that there were plenty of folk who saw no need to look any further than the color of his skin.
Another data point is the number of mixed race folk or folk in mixed marriages who identify as black and/or associate more with the nonwhite side of the family. My understanding, based on several discussions, was that they tended to be accepted more readily among the nonwhite side of the family. But this is nothing i have any personal experience with.
So when I was expressing MY feelings in my prior post, I was offering no opinion as to society in general.