Race and the Senses by Sachi Sekimoto Christopher Brown

Author:Sachi Sekimoto, Christopher Brown [Sachi Sekimoto, Christopher Brown]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Anthropology, General, Political Science, Public Policy, Cultural Policy, Cultural & Social, Discrimination
ISBN: 9781000185485
Google: s0QHEAAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 54218162
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2020-03-05T00:00:00+00:00

The Twisted Tongue: A Phenomenology of Speaking White-While-Black (Chris)

When I was a young college student, I spoke to my white female professor about anxieties I experienced while taking standardized tests. She immediately deduced my experiences had little to do with testing anxieties and more to do with the fact that I was “bi-dialectal.” Knowing I would struggle to maneuver my tongue to pronounce the syllables of this word, I asked, “What does that mean?” She responded, “Many African Americans are bi-dialectal, which means they have the ability to write and speak in two dialects.” Obviously confused, I asked, “What does this have to do with my standardized test-taking abilities?” She responded, “Many educators believe that African Americans score low on aptitude tests because these tests reflect neither their commonly-held cultural experiences nor syntax.” I found it difficult to understand how my cultural upbringing influenced my performance on standardized tests. So I asked, “Are you saying that because I don’t speak good that I can’t pass a test?” She replied, “No! Are you familiar with the term Ebonics?” I responded, “Yes, it’s a derogatory term used to describe African American ways of speaking.” She then said, “Not entirely! Black English Vernacular [BEV] is a creolized version of English based on a pidgin spoken by African slaves who struggled to make sense of the language of their captors.” I was still somewhat confused, so she recommended that I read the works of Geneva Smitherman, Henry Louis Gates, and other scholars who see BEV as having a unique structural lexicon that is prominent in black speech patterns. Upon reading these works, I thought deeply about how I maintained a visceral allegiance to BEV while working to develop speech patterns of white SAE.

The phenomenon of speaking white-while-black enables an understanding of how the politics of race shape the embodied act of speaking, as exemplified in code-switching and styleshifting by black Americans.34 This idea is useful to understand how many black Americans engage race-conscious speaking performances in cross-racial encounters. I recall struggling to manage the contradictory impulse to speak BEV around people of my race and to discipline my body to speak SAE around those who were racially different. However, this embodied linguistic flexibility developed as I moved out of my own cultural linguistic environments and into white social circles. As I moved within these spaces, I became mindful of the physical labor of using my throat, tongue, and lips while alternating between BEV and SAE. I also noticed that regardless of attempts to code-switch and styleshift, I still carried a “blaccent,”35 producing sounds that follow from the styles, cadences, and rhythms rooted in black oral and rhetorical traditions. Nonetheless, speaking white-while-black highlights how racialized encounters dictate the physical act of speaking, illuminating my own bi-dialectal embodiment and the persisting racial ideologies inherent in our symbolic and linguistic systems of racialized interpersonal interactions.

As an undergraduate student, I started to understand how the act of speaking was loaded with racial identifications. While interacting with individuals from

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