Trackbacks & Pings

1. Monday Roundup | Real Political on 14 Jul 2008 at 6:50 am

   [...] Racialious directs our attention to this post by Maria Niles, “Is Black The New Bitch” explores intersections of racism and sexism, or racialized sexism, during this year’s election campaign.  Niles uses Jesses Jackson’s recent comments about Obama as an entry point for her examination.  Jump Here [...]

Comments

1. Blog Envy Is The New wrote:

   I read the Freakonomics article and they reached some interesting conculsions without leading the reader or loading statements.

   As I think one of their commenters pointed out, we should not focus on the negative, but on the fact that an educated Black person, who sounds educated, will be paid the same as a White colleague of equal standing.

   Posted 14 Jul 2008 at 7:42 am ¶

2. Lyonside wrote:

   >on the fact that an educated Black person, who sounds educated, will be paid the same as a White colleague

   Oh please. Here we go.

   First Problem: There is a double standard in play, and we shouldn’t give in to it. If someone is using casual current slang in a professional environment, it can be a detriment no matter who it is. But some slang is more acceptable than others, and some is really minor vocabulary changes, nothing grammatical. And who gets to say what is or isn’t acceptable? Dollars to donuts, “white” casual speech is deemed by the workplace as “normal,” while other types are perceived as “other” and “abnormal”.

   The article also talks about NAMES. Names have cultural and historical ties, and are important to identity. Can’t a highly educated person be named a non-Western-European-derived name?

   Second Problem: there is an American English accent that is stereotypically “black” – it’s in the vowels, it’s in how long the ends of a word are held, it’s in how consonents are pronounced. I’m sure a linguist say it better than I can in technical language. It’s not genetic by any means, but it is a sub-cultural, non-absolute trend. My sense is that this accent is historically rooted in the South (southeastern US), and it remains in many black communities. It also may be temporal. I hear it in the speech of my older relatives and family friends, most of whom use a higher level of the English language than I do. I hear it in my father’s speech patterns, even when he is using his most formal business persona.

   There are other US accents too – but mainstream (white) culture doesn’t really recognize them, or when they do, they accurately describe them geographically as SoCal, or Midwestern, or Minnesota/northern tier, etc. Yet somehow, shockingly, other accents get labeled as “black” or “urban.”

   So, someone can speak perfectly ” educated” English, and still be perceived as black, or at least non-white, depending on the listener’s experiences and, yep, biases.

   A good friend and I are both only children, and our college-educated moms were both single parents. We both attended 95-99% white private schools in the Philadelphia area in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. Her mom is black, my mom is white; ouside of immediately family, though, neither of us have strong ties to a predominantly black social network. We have a standard “joke” among ourselves that we both lack “blaccents” and speak “fluent Caucasian.”

   To the point where she has actually faced job discrimination when going in for a face-to-face after multiple phone interviews. Even when she’s the ONLY ONE in the room in professional dress without kids (she’s a teacher), this one place called her name multiple times, because her face didn’t seem to match her phone voice.

   To the less extreme, we’re both used to getting double takes, and to having to clarify exactly when we’d called and who we’d talked to, because we will not always be taken at “face” value.

   Posted 14 Jul 2008 at 8:44 am ¶

3. DEAF FEMINIST PUNK!! wrote:

   that article about whites getting paid higher than non-blacks doesn’t surprise me.

   It’s sad

   Posted 14 Jul 2008 at 10:49 am ¶

4. DEAF FEMINIST PUNK!! wrote:

   sorry. I mean NON-whites, not non-blacks, lol.

   Posted 14 Jul 2008 at 10:50 am ¶

5. Angel H. wrote:

   re: “sounding black”

   Trix4Kids nailed for me when s/he said,

   If sounding black is that bad for your wages, how bad must it be to look black?

   Posted 14 Jul 2008 at 12:49 pm ¶

6. RobynT wrote:

   I often question Tila Tequila’s motives but that blurb is hilarious.

   Posted 14 Jul 2008 at 4:30 pm ¶

7. Big Man wrote:

   That Freakeconomics story was more troubling than the actual study. I expect there to be that kind of bias, what I don’t expect is for a NY Times article to advocate wholesale assimilation as a way to deal with those problems. That’s what they author of the article did. He said people should try harder to sound white and change their names to be more white if they want a job. I wrote about it over at my blog, but that was the big problem for me with the whole issue.

   Posted 14 Jul 2008 at 4:38 pm ¶

8. Lea wrote:

   Tila Tequila and her ignorance of all matters queer generally fill me with a deep and visceral disgust, but I gotta salute that answer.

   Posted 20 Jul 2008 at 9:33 am ¶