I've been thinking about this thread since it was posted - one of the most interesting links of the year - a fascinating debate/discussion between mcwhorter & loury.
They talk about the perception of the "blaccent" in the larger community and the judgements that people make regarding intellect, prestige, capability, suitability, employability etc. I agree that the negative perceptions they discuss - around 10 minute mark - arise...
Why though? It is possible that "blaccent" functions just as a marker to identify someone that a prejudiced listener is predisposed to treat badly. Yes. But both professors also talk about constructing and maintaining a linguistic identity that is well-perceived within a given milieu, including even their own first-hand experience of this phenomenon.
This construction of linguistic identity would be something done by academics (or any professional) of any background as they seek to maximise their authority in their peer setting: a gift with the lingua franca of any profession is an obvious advantage. So I'm not sure that "code switching" and "minimising the blaccent" are really anything more than aspiring to a certain kind of language that is well-received by whatever sub-community one is attempting to sway. Definitely there is such a thing as "prestige English" which speakers of any background may aspire to if they think it will serve their desire for advancement, black, white, asian, aboriginal, "working class," you name it.
However, different speakers probably have to make longer journeys, linguistically speaking, to speak the variety of English that will suit them.
As Lowry and McWhorter point out, the "blaccent" is not the same as a southern US accent, but in many ways it faces the same up-hill battle for recognition as a prestigious form of speech. This put me in mind of James Carville. Growing up on the Canadian prairies, I had never met someone with a southern US accent. My strongest impressions of what it was to be a southern US speaker came from seeing Sherrif JW Pepper in a James Bond movie, and of course watching the Dukes of Hazzard on TV. That was it.
So, from that I "learned" the following "facts" about the southern US: every second person had a job as a "sherriff," and people who spoke like that didn't seem very capable, or educated, or pleasant. On Dukes of Hazzard, even the degree of villainy seemed to correspond with the degree of southern accent.
The only "real" southern US person I had ever met was a kid from Texas who moved to our school, and was held back a year because the Texas school system was so far behind ours. He had to do Grade 10 over again when Texas would have passed him to Grade 11. (That's "Grade 10," not "Tenth Grade," btw.)
So even though intellectually I understood that someone's accent didn't limit his intelligence, it was a convenient stereotype for Hollywood to shove in my face, and I had never had any real-world basis to contradict it. If you had asked me "Is a southern accent indicative of someone who would be intrinsically unfit or incapable of handling major responsibility as long as they continue to talk that way" of course not. But it did seem as good an indicator as any that they would have come from a background that was probably poor, rural, undeveloped, religiously stifling and corrupt, etc. It wasn't until I was actually 18 or 19 and heard James Carville talking about politics during the run-up to Clinton's presidency that I first heard someone with an indisputably southern-US accent sounding very intellectual.
What about the "blaccent?" I never heard it, growing up, except on TV. There were people of colour in my neighbourhood of the day, few in number, and they talked, walked, gestured, aspired, studied, socialised, debated & related just like the rest of us. We were each others' community. "Blaccent" was something I heard for the first time probably on "Sesame Street" from some of the characters, and then not again until the Jeffersons were in reruns. It seemed like another Hollywood creation. Indeed when I went to University in Alberta I met someone for the first time who spoke that way, and I almost did a double-take because the first impression was "Are you putting us on?"
I should add, this was my impression despite growing familiarity with a wide variety of people from every cultural background imaginable, including recent immigrants who struggled to speak comprehensible English. Despite my ability to understand and engage people in conversation whose English was not only audibly farther from my own than someone speaking in a "blaccent" but also by any objective criteria laden with errors and mistranslations, and yet, this is the astonishing part, broken foreign English seemed more natural.
Anyway, really long-winded ramble, but it brings me to the main thesis I'd like to throw out there for discussion. I'm not debating the intellect of people who don't speak with a "prestige accent" (which is a technical term BTW, not my own value judgement). I'm not debating whether racism or classism are real (clearly Hollywood was happy to use racist or classist shorthand to portray their characters to the audience) However it is striking to me that I could accept speech like my own (from people of any background), and I could accept foreign-sounding speech (from people of any background) as natural, and expected, and credible. But speech that lies somewhere in the middle seemed really jarring.
Which brings me to
The Uncanny Valley. This is a postulate from robotics that something increasingly familiar is met with increasing acceptance, up to a certain point. There is a transition point past which acceptance plummets - when it is so familiar that it can't be thought of as "other" any more, but where it becomes so comparable to the "self" that the differences are magnified out of all proportion. Then as familiarity increases even more, acceptance begins to increase again. There is a spot at which something is only just sufficiently different enough to creep people out, at least in robotics. Maybe a twist on Freud's "Narcissism of Small Differences?" And maybe applicable to other fields such as linguistics.
Perhaps the perception problem faced by southern US English and blaccented-speach is not how different it is from general English, but how similar it is?
Anybody care to comment? Or maybe do a thesis on it or something?
