It’s Not Always Racism
Sometimes it’s about genuine interest, but not often enough
Last night I read this important piece by fellow Medium writer Diya, when a particular passage caught my attention:
Here’s the passage:
Yet to this day, I have never heard a white person being told they sounded “articulate”. Why? Because they’re articulate by default, they don’t need to be told that, as that is the norm. It’s not something that you need to be given a compliment for because it is expected of you as a white person.
I’ve wanted to address this for a while, and Diya gave me a lovely opportunity to speak to the subject. Before I do, let me explain: I’m a white chick, with two Moms, one woman the daughter of a plantation slave in Central Florida, so my opinions are deeply skewed by that upbringing. To stay the least, I’m grateful for that oblique angle.
This is not an argument against what Diya says, for she makes excellent points.Nor is what I have to offer here an attempt to undermine or White’splain anything. It is more so some additional insight, for I think sometimes aspects of the topic aren’t quite so clear. My intention is to provide additional context for the sake of discussion only, and only on areas that I’ve not seen presented. None of this makes me right; it’s just a take.
The notion of being articulate is, to my mind at least, ascribed to those with access to a certain kind of education. Local and regional accents — just in America, to say nothing of the patchwork of the UK which is extremely class conscious, is broad, ranging from the horizontally extensive vowels of Maine and Boston to the distinct patois of the ancient French of the Cajuns.
Class consciousness, and the very human compulsion to establish superiority (we all do it, it sucks) have a lot to do with the comment about being “articulate.” It is just as widespread, although unspoken, in the White communities, as my mother demonstrated in her arch way when she commented on the rednecks who lived all around us in Florida. Mother descended from Brit blue blood; her Midwestern accent largely untouched by the broad Chicago vowels and the Canadian “eh.”
My mother had no idea how ignorant her comments were, for she couldn’t conceive of an intelligent, well-educated Southerner. Her Wisconsin blueblood blinders were thick. As they are for most of us.
Dad grew up in Jersey, but because he became an actor and a radio man, he controlled his accent until it became as bland and white bread as the radio reporters of his day. That is my accent. The accent of white bread America, ca. 1965. One of them at least.
Regional accents are, to some folks (and this is in part to Diya’s point) a way to establish someone’s “caste” if you will. Humans are forever categorizing where someone stands in the social pecking order. Back to those Brits: if you watched The Crown, the English spoken at Buckingham Palace is the King’s English. It reeks of privilege and drips money. It’s the language of the aristocracy. Compare that to the street Brit who says “fink” instead of “think” and the mind promptly makes a class judgement.
How we speak, in other words, is a dead giveaway about our origins, our money, the lot. Or not.
My Fair Lady is the perfect example of how people categorize others based on what they choose to hear, making the argument that if a street flower peddler whose English is unintelligible can be taught to speak like the aristocracy, then she will be treated as such. She can fool folks into thinking she comes from English wealth and privilege.
This is just one way people deliberately categorize, judge and assign people intelligence or lack thereof, class or lack thereof, money or lack thereof. You see my meaning. It is also grotesquely unfair, but we do it. Everywhere. Every single country has its rednecks and gentry, and backwater folks, and every single country categorizes and judges and condemns people based on how they sound in addition to skin color (and of course often because of it).
And every single country has its folks who desperately want to be artistocracy and will go to great lengths to buy their way out of being “common.” Please see:
Every country I’ve ever visited- and I’ve been to a lot of them- has some kind of caste system which speaks to perceived education, money, influence, any number of judgements. South American countries treat folks worse the darker the skin. I would imagine, although I don’t know, that some of that judgment was inherited from Spanish colonials. Doesn’t matter. It’s still ugly.
Skin color is a barrier to being able to see, hear and experience excellence, as I have written elsewhere. Again, to Diya’s point, this kind of knee-jerk boxing of human beings into simplistic categories based on color or how they sound to our ear is both racist and classist, and often both.
When I traveled Australia and New Zealand by thumb in the 1980s, by the time I was done I could identify a Brit by her accent as to what part of Wales she hailed from or whether her father was a longshoreman. But that wasn’t to establish superiority. It’s because I am fascinated by people, by speech, by language, and by culture. The way air moves through the mouth and over the lips and how that changes words, and how we hear them. Language is my art, and because of that, how people speak, and what that reveals about who they might be or where they might be from, is endlessly fascinating.
But not necessarily racist. Again, I can only speak to my personal reference points, and nothing I say here takes away from Diya’s comments. I am only providing an angle, and a different way to think about a little of this. I think that the topic deserves more detailed inspection, at least this small piece of it, for I think so often we may not necessarily read people correctly- just as much as we aren’t reading ourselves correctly.
Here’s an example of how this works. Three days ago I was shopping at at TJ Maxx not far from the house I am selling. That TJ’s hires people from all over the world, and on many occasions I’ve been able to connect personally (pre-mask) with folks there. I was taking a cart from a tallish Black woman who was speaking to a co-worker, when I thought I recognized her dialect.
In all sincerity I asked where she was from. It broke my heart when she physically shrank back as though I was going to insult her. I had to offer a few words of calm, then discovered she was from Kenya. I asked if she was Kikuyu, to which she laughed delightedly. I was close but not quite. Another tribe nearby. I had just spend a month in Kenya, near where she is from, and she was beyond pleased that I know her homeland.
Her eyes lit up when she realized that I stood on the soil of her ancestors, and could speak with joy about Mt. Kenya and the rolling plains with their huge cattle herds.This is why I do it: we connected. I have traveled so much that I can say thank you in about 25 languages, and I can also find ways to connect with many, many people because I have seen the lands of their birth. Being able to share that is how I establish commonality. The next time I am in that TJ’s I will take a photo of the rhinos I petted while at Ol Pejeta Conservancy which isn’t far from her tribe.
The unbelievable gift of travel, the familiarity with cultures and language began for me among the two families which sent me on this arc. My mother spoke six languages. My second mother Christine spoke the beautiful and complex patois of the Deep South plantation slave. I can speak that patois when I go back to Florida, just as I can affect the Southern drawl of my youth which is the language of my fellow Florida crackers. I have tried to learn Vietnamese, easily the most difficult of all languages I’ve tried to tackle. The only way I could master some of those sounds was to have my teacher sit across from me and repeat a word so that I could study the movement of his facial muscles and watch where the air went to make the sounds. This simply fascinates me.
How our mouths are formed, the size and shape of our lips, how the throat and tongue and teeth are used to create highly specific air movements are to me an art form. Not a way to establish superiority, or whether or not someone is “articulate.” All these things speak to the intricate and subtle complexities of what it means to be a human in all our rich diversity. Again, my POV isn’t the norm. It’s about appreciating how extraordinary our variety is as people, how we communicate, yet in the same vein, how extraordinarily similar we all are.
Again-to Diya’s specific point, and she’s painfully right on this count: the comment that a Black person is articulate has a very specific message, which is to create a class distinction (people like you don’t have that kind of education, for example). For my part, not only does this kind of comment reveal remarkable ignorance on the part of the commenter- in other words, the idea that Black excellence/education/achievement is some kind of amazing anomaly-but also that their world view doesn’t allow for Black excellence of any kind to be common.
It is common. That is, if your circle of friends and experience isn’t so tightly woven with White folks that the only thing in your world reflects your Whiteness, and whatever minor level of achievement you and I may have.
Which, kindly, may not be much. To this point Medium writer Sharon Hurley Hall wrote recently about what it was like to encounter folks who were not only shocked at her facility with French (you’re so articulate) but a group of women was offended by the fact that she had an advanced degree. In other words, she had better qualifications than the women, which didn’t fit their picture of How Things Are.
So yes of course this exists, this incredibly insulting miasma through which White folks look at people other than themselves, which invariably assumes lesser skills and qualities, and proffers shock of some kind when excellence shows up instead. Then, sadly, tries to excuse away that very excellence by arguing that there were special circumstances. Please don’t get me started.
That is very real. It’s also heartbreaking, for as someone for whom Black excellence is normalized, that kind of radioactive reaction speaks to appalling ignorance.
However, and here is the larger point. This line from Diya is critical:
It’s not something that you need to be given a compliment for because (being articulate) is expected of you as a white person.
I’m not sure I can wholly agree with this, given the extraordinary range of not only education (or lack thereof) social status (or lack thereof) and reference points that we’re assuming on the part of White folks, or anyone else for that matter. I might posit that some of the folks who are attempting to wield the superiority card are themselves not particularly well-educated, which is precisely the point. In situations like that the only trump card (the term is used on purpose) for implied superiority is skin color.
If a group of women is offended because Sharon Hurley Hall shows up exceedingly qualified, the only weapon they have is their Whiteness if their intent is to put Sharon down.
Which is precisely what I see where I travel in the Deep South, where folks of limited education, limited means and evil intent still consider themselves superior to a Black neurosurgeon. A Black President. A Poet Laureate (Rita Dove).
How desperately we humans hang onto any proof of superiority over a fellow human. This isn’t just a White thing, it’s patriarchy, which crushes most White folks, too, or else we wouldn’t be such racist assholes. But that’s just me.
These days, being articulate among Whites isn’t necessarily the norm, at least from what I keep hearing. For example, I listened to two White Millennials, both reporters, being interviewed on NPR on separate programs. They peppered their phrasing with “sort ofs” and “likes” to the point where they sounded like intellectual inepts. Inarticulate. So, perhaps it depends.
My web design program informs me that I have to write for a fifth grade education, and the program shows me an unhappy face if I use ten-dollar words. My Medium friend Rosennab and I like ten-dollar words. She’s got a lot more degrees than I do, too. We paid a lot of money and put in a lot of time to be able to use those ten-dollar words.
What is so often missed, and I am going to again build on Diya’s point here, is that where there is Black excellence (what folks comment on as “articulate”) you can bet that what those people had to go through to achieve those degrees was likely several times the effort that a White person might need to make to get the same qualifications. Exhibit #1: the annual celebration of Black young people who just earned their PhDs, hundreds of them, who take a moment to regale the audience with their journey. The number of times they were told they couldn’t succeed because of skin color. Told to find something else to do other than academia.
If you think it’s hard now, imagine what Dr. Olivia Hooker, one of the last survivors of the Tulsa Massacre, went through as the first Black woman in the Coast Guard. Not the woman wielding the janitorial broom, thank you. Although far too many folks still assume the Black woman in the building is on her way to clean the toilets. Dr. Hooker died in 2018, a great testament to Black excellence, at 103.
I suspect Dr. Hooker was pretty damned “articulate.”
I realize how difficult this topic is. I really do. However by the same token, not every inquiry, not every expression of interest is indicative of racism, nor is it based on the kind of curiosity most people reserve for pangolins. Sometimes someone is genuine, as with my Kenyan friend at the TJ Maxx store. If I ask where someone is from it usually means I heard a familiar accent, and I have a story that will open doors for us.
The challenge is, and Diya is right, that so often White folks end up being rude because they’re not in touch with the assumptions that drive their questions. It comes back to intent. Being able to challenge your why is part of understanding where embedded bias lives, and where work needs to be done.
We have a very, very long way to go. I might note that part of being “articulate” White folks is getting out a bit. Experiencing the world as it is, not as we think it is or has been dictated to us. Learning for yourself. Rewriting the excellence script. Which might stop folks from being so surprised at what is actually awfully damned common, in my experience: Black excellence.
Finally.
If I may, another definition of the word “articulate” is to form a joint.
Which is a nice idea. Rather than cut ourselves off from parts of humanity which are parts of us, we might be wiser to learn how to connect to them.
That has a way, if you will forgive the pun, of expanding our reach.
