- [Kay] Hi, hope you enjoyed our first episode
on the history of Blaccent.
As a bonus, here's a more personal take on accents
between our chief historian, Danielle Bainbridge,
and the director of Historian's Take, Dolly Li.
- Do you feel like you've ever had to adjust your accent?
- Oh my gosh, that's a loaded question.
So I grew up in sort of, like I said, in New York,
in the intersections of a lot of communities.
My parents are from the Caribbean, they're Jamaican.
So in my house, I hear, you know,
Jamaican Patois, I hear English.
At school, I’m encountering people from
lots of different ethnic and racial backgrounds
and I’m hearing these distinct regional New York accents.
As well as, sort of, typical suburban accents where I grew up.
But I think for me,
my natural way of speaking kind of falls
in the middle of all of those things.
It's partially related to, you know,
speech and debate and theater training.
And it's partially related
to just what makes me feel closest to myself.
I mean, this, you know, this environment,
even though I'm here talking with my friend,
and we're having a conversation,
I am conscious of the way I'm speaking.
And I'm conscious of communicating clearly with people.
And I think, you know, being on camera, being you know,
in a public facing role, even when I lecture,
I want to feel comfortable and confident.
So I speak in the way that makes me feel closest to myself
and makes me feel the most comfortable and confident.
But people have accused me in the past of like,
you're trying to code switch, or you're trying to, you know,
sound white or sound this certain way.
But I think what's harmful in that flattening,
is it doesn't take into account
the multiplicity of Blackness.
There are so many ways to be Black.
There is many ways to be Black as there are Black people.
And I think so often people want to think of it
as this structured, you know, enshrined way of being Black,
and sounding Black and behaving Black,
and you know, what I am Black,
and so if I'm speaking,
this is how Black people speak because I'm evidence of that.
So I think it's really complicated,
because I have, you know a sort of diasporic,
or international perspective of my own, you know,
heritage and upbringing and Blackness,
that is related to speech and is related to, you know,
things like code switching.
But when I'm speaking now,
this is how I would speak to my friends.
But maybe if I speak to my parents,
I speak a little differently.
Or maybe if I'm speaking to my family members,
my grandfather, I'm speaking quite differently.
So, you know, it varies and it changes,
but I wanna throw that question back to you.
Do you think you've ever had to change your accent
because of what people assume you should sound like?
- Yeah, I mean, growing up in Brooklyn,
especially growing up in Coney island,
you are surrounded mostly,
or at least I grew up surrounded by mostly,
Black, Latino and Italian speakers,
and my own parents, they don't really speak English,
and there is no accent that is least desirable,
than the Asian accent.
Nobody wants to sounds like they speak with an Asian accent.
And I would say that was probably the one
that I would avoid the most, right?
Anything but that, but I did grow up in Brooklyn,
and I feel that also as an Asian woman,
there's a certain way that people want you to sound.
And as someone who also worked for so many years
as a journalist, who cultivated my career as a journalist,
I want to be taken seriously and professionally,
and that did mean making a proactive adjustment
of how I sounded to, you know in a lot of ways,
neutralize the accent, right?
Which often neutralizing your accent is aligning more
with what people perceive to be a white accent.
I think it's very hard to have people take me seriously,
or you know, think that I'm credible,
especially if you're trying to like
present information in news.
If, for example, I kept my Brooklyn accent, right?
And I would say maybe in certain,
in certain times, being with certain friends,
especially being back home,
I may let myself feel a little more loose and comfortable,
but the way that I've cultivated the way I speak,
is definitely a reaction to assert myself as a woman,
as someone who needs to be taken seriously,
as a professional.
It's not fair.
I think it's really not fair that in a lot of ways,
there are a lot of Asian people,
who do speak with an Asian accent,
and they will be forever punished for it.
And I see the real benefit of not having that.
I can witness it in the work that I do,
the jobs that I've had, if I had an Asian accent,
how different life might be,
or the way people perceive me might be.
And so accent is definitely something that, you know,
I care so much about.
And of course have also spent so much of my career
investigating, in terms of what makes for an accent.
- Yeah, and I think, you know,
what you're saying at the end there it's really,
it's not fair.
I mean, the rules that we're given,
or the set of circumstances that we're given,
as people of color,
oftentimes are very different rules
than other people are engaging in
and other people are abiding by.
And I think, you know, it doesn't feel fair,
but it's also that we recognize
sort of the real circumstances
and consequences of these actions.
And so we're constantly combating,
both people's perceptions of us, people's expectations,
and also our own internalized racism.
I mean, living in racism is like a cancer sometimes.
It infects the way that you think
and the way that you view yourself in the world.
And so just like those early actors,
who were performing in Blackface,
or just like those early audiences that are rushing out,
Black audiences that are rushing out to see, you know,
Amos ‘n’ Andy on TV, or listen to it on the radio.
Sometimes you get fed this sort of
terrible version of yourself or this sort of, you know,
bottom of the barrel version of yourself so often,
that you think,
oh I have to do anything I can to avoid that.
Or I have to do anything I can to be put into that category.
And it really is a shame,
because I take incredible pride,
like when I'm at home and you know,
my mom is being sassy with my dad or something
and speaking in Patois, like I take pride in that,
but I also know that when my parents migrated here
in the eighties, that having a heavy Caribbean accent,
wasn't considered desirable and wasn't considered something
that would allow them to easily integrate
into the workforce.
And like, again, integration, I'm signaling here,
not as desire for proximity to whiteness,
but desire for equal treatment.
- Absolutely.