“You sound white.”
Well, what does “You sound white,” mean, ladies & gentlemen? Because, in all honesty, it seems to me like you are saying, “You seem like one of those surfer dudes” or “Like the girls from White Chicks singing ‘Making my way downtown…’”
When did Caucasian become a way of speaking... When did the way that one speaks defines their whole being?
When you start to think about such questions, you realize that in the United States, to certain people, there are three different ways of speaking. You either sound white, black or like an immigrant. So sounding white means that you act like the girls in White Chicks and listen to pop music, you speak properly and are obsessed with Justin Bieber or some other Caucasian singer. Sounding black means you LOVE hip hop (and I’m exaggerating people, so calm down), you’re obsessed with Beyonce, you’re pro-black and probably went to a bad school with many other people who speak the same twang as you and maybe lived in a neighborhood that had some bad influences, like drugs or whatnot. Last but not least, if you sound like an immigrant, well then you’re not from here and you probably can’t speak English well…
That to some people, seems like the three most prominent ways of speaking, excluding the people who come from Britain, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, because those accents are idolized.
To give you a more personal story, hello! My name is Nicola and I am black. That’s a very strange introduction but trust me, it is essential to my explanation. I was at my friend’s house, and, she too, also happened to be black, and she was on the phone with someone from Baltimore. Once he heard me speaking to her from the opposite side of the room, he asked my friend, “Why do you have a white girl in your room?” Mind you, although I grew up in Baltimore for a short period of time, I don’t, as people would say, sound like a Baltimorean. But to hear that I sound “white” is totally different. People have associated races to the specific way that someone talks and after they have made that connection, they tend to associate that person with the stereotypes that comes with that race.
So, if you can only sound white, black or like an immigrant, where does that leave the Asian-americans? Well, they are, again, separated into the three categories and they are either classified as a twinkie, an Asian that acts “white”, as a chigger, a more derogative term for an Asian person who acts “black” or a “F.O.B.”, meaning Fresh off the boat, so technically, an immigrant.
Ladies and Gentlemen, let’s stop with the, “…you sound white” or “…you sound black” nonsense, because to be honest, anyone, regardless of race, can speak or sound like anything they want and everyone from specific races are not going to speak alike at all times.
So from now on, I choose to sound like a unicorn. I hope that statement, makes some of you rethink about your choice to tell people that they “sound white” or that they “…sound black”, because that it is impossible to sound like a race.
