Archive for August 16th, 2004

Unlike Ambra, I have never been accused of talking “white.” Never. When I was 14, I called a rental car place and the agent thought I was a woman, but that was about all the vocal mistaking I’ve ever had to deal with. To my knowledge, nobody has ever heard me speak and then turned around and been surprised when they saw me. And in my case, it’s by choice.

Ambra does a good job of separating the components of “talking white” into elements of linguistic strucure and vocal intonation. That’s an important distinction to make. When I hear some knucklehead talking about standard English synonomously with talking white, I have to check him real quick. Those two are not the same.

Now, right up front, I’ll tell you that I don’t use the phrase “proper English” or “talking proper” or any construction that suggests rightness or wrongness. Language, like water, is shaped by its container. What’s right and wrong or good and bad depends almost solely on the context. When I wrote about cussin a couple months ago, I used the shoe analogy. Just like I can’t wear sneakers (or gym shoes if you grew up in the Midwest like I did) when I go to the club on Saturday night, I can’t jump out talkin any which-a-way in certain situations. It’s just improper. At the same time, I can’t rock my Stacy Adams wing-tips when I get ready to shoot some ball. That’s just not the way it’s done. Likewise, when I hafta do a presentation, there’s a certain manner of speaking that I must appropriate in order for my ideas to be received. Same thing goes on the corner, though. Or if you remember Airplane, that brother would’a died if that old white chick hadn’a known how to talk Jive. So as far as I’m concerned, there is no such thing as proper English. The English language is a hodge-podge amalgam of countless sources. There is almost no universal consistency. (I have two homes with rodents, so I have houses with mice. What? House -> houses but mouse -> mice? And that’s just the first one that popped into my head. Everybody who reads this and everybody they talk to can come up with at least 5 examples of their own.) I know the rules of English because I grew up speaking it, but that don’t mean the rules make sense. If it’s arbitrary, then there can no good or bad, only appropriate or inappropriate. Recognize.

Vocal intonation, on the other hand, more closely approximates my concept of what talking white means, if it actaually has any meaning. Ambra uses the example of Alan Keyes as one of those brothers who would shock you to death if you heard him before you saw him. She’s correct in saying that there is no genetic pronunciation. There is, however, regional dialect. You can take the word “region” however you want, because at every level there are some linguistic distinctions, whether you wanna talk about national, groups of states, individual states, counties, metropolitan areas, cities, neighborhoods, blocks, or households. People talk like the people who surround them. Period. As anybody who’s studied linguistic formation in children can tell you, babies babble in all languages. That is, they make the sounds necessary to speak in any language. It’s only as they are spoken to by their parents and the people around them that they repeat certain sounds and drop off the others, which gives them their native tongue. For a long time, I wanted to adopt an Asian child so he could grow up talking with the same rubber band tongue as me. In that respect, then, he might be said to be “talking Black,” although he really wouldn’t, because that would be his natural speech pattern. To say that someone is “talking [insert race]” insinuates a certain degree of performance; “he don’t really talk like that, he just tryin’a front for those people.”

But when I said it’s regional dialect, I meant more than just the way certain words sound. The other element of dialect is vocabulary. Vocabulary is a subject that’s near and dear to my heart. I’m a word nerd. I read Zora Neale Hurston and Mark Twain with highlighters, so I can jump on hot expressions when I come across them. Now most Black folks are at best 3-4 generations from the South, so that Southern dialect is still a major influence. I think it was Hurston who described Southern speech as coming from the land and being particularly picturesque and thick with simile. I don’t feel like getting up and finding the exact quote, but it’s out there somewhere. And it’s the truth. That, I think is one of the great limitations of that New York-Washington axis of Standard English. There’s no real creativity in it, no room for delicious new variety of speech to tickle the tongue. I think that’s partially why hip-hop has taken hold the way it has, because in addition to all the other elements, sometimes it’s just nice to say things because they’re fun to say or because it’s a creative way to express a common thought. Nobody tried to holler at me when I brought it up before, but truth be told, talkin’ fly part of what makes people think it’s cool to be a pimp. You gotta have game to be a pimp; your verbal dexterity gotta be stronger than Bluto. And this is not to make some binary pair out of the issue, like black talk is creative while white talk is rigid and inflexible, because it doesn’t break down along racial lines like that. However, there’s a reason I liken Standard English to a Stacy Adams shoe while SBV (or just about any non-mainstream dialect, for that matter) is a sneaker. The latter is much more flexible and much, much more playful. That’s why there aren’t that many white cats who can do the dozens.

My own use of language is informed by the fact I just like words. Some proper, some vulgar, some long and very literate-sounding, some monosyllabic grunts. I just like the way some words taste in my mouth. Once in a poetry class, I made, in haiku form, Doritos a metaphor for the word “motherfuker.” Other people may not like the residue, but it just tastes good. Same thing goes for “callipygous,” only callipygous has the added benefit of being an uncommon word for a very common thought, so I could be ribald and cerebral and speaking in code (talking sanskrit, one of my friends calls it) all at the same time. But even beyond regular words, I like to make up words when I just feel like it. In some post over the last couple months, I broke out “exorcistic,” as in the exorcistic beating Jack Johnson laid on Jim Jeffries; he beat the devil out of him. So for a while I was talking about being exorcistically confused or whatever. Then I took it to the scatological next step, laxativistic. I don’t care if it’s not a “real” word, it gets my point across. Same thing with the seating chart. They’re just words, there for us to play with and enjoy. Water’s good for work, but it’s also good for play. Same thing here.

The idea of “talking white” is both understandable and utter nonsense at the same time. If I had grown up with a white family from suburban Chicago, I would sound like they do. If I had grown up with a white family from Biloxi, I would sound like they do, but I bet I’d only get 1/2 as many comments about sounding white. Based on this construction, I believe that “talking white” has as much to do with class line as racial lines. In other words, if you read Huckleberry Finn, it’s clear that Huck and Jim don’t talk the same. But neither of them sounds anything like the narrator in Tom Sawyer. Likewise, I know of students who take classes to scrub the Southern dialect from their tongues so they can sound more “white,” if you will. It’s not about race, it’s about power. Northern Standard English acts as a gatekeeper. If I want access to certain levels of power or prestige, I must communicate in a certain way, using a certain pronunciation and certain idioms. It just be’s that way sometimes.

What the devil? They lost to Puerto Rico?!

This ain’t fantasy basketball leagues, y’all. This hodgepodge all-star thing doesn’t work, especially when the starriest of the stars stayed home. Come on, now. Seventy-two points? Are you kidding me?

*shakes head in disgust and walks away flapping arms.*

La Shawn has an interesting post on watchdogs for political content in sermons. My initial take is that it’s dicey business, at best. I can easily see a situation like that devolving into a witch hunt based on political affiliation and ideology. We don’t need all that.

What’s more interesting to me is the question she asks about the definition of social justice.

As always, I think there are different ways to analyze things. We can try to dichotomize and isolate things into binary pairs or we can look at issues as if they are on a continuum. I’m with the continuum. There are polar opposites, but most of life, at least as it exists on the physical plane, is somewhere between the two. Social justice is one of them. There’s a way to look at along Democrat/Republican, liberal/conservative axes, but I don’t know that that really gets at the issue. To me, that’s just a means of dismissing it as something not worth interrogating instead of looking at as a potential corrective for complacency and inaction. As I’ve said before, I think that the church is primarily a spiritual institution, but if it is properly carrying out its mission, then it will reflect in ways that register on the social justice scale.

I think that social justice seeks to navigate the space between what is legal and what is right. I think there is a tendency to conflate those terms. For example, to go to one of my favorite examples, Dr. King’s Letter From A Birmingham Jail was not addressed to politicians or to klansmen, but to a group of Christian ministers. Segregation in the South was legal at that time, but that did not mean it was right. Nevertheless, the ministers addressed in the letter were more concerned with upholding the law than confronting the moral limitations of the legal edict. Churches emphasizing social justice follow that model.

That one was easy, though. Nowadays, the issues that social justice concerns itself with are much more slippery. In Ambra’s post on this very topic, she highlights homelessness. I know that some churches look at gay “rights” as a matter of social justice, as well as affirmative action and any number of other challenges. That’s why it normally breaks down to that binary we-they setup, because “we” have our positions on the issues, and “they” have theirs. “Our” position is right because “we” have rightly divided the Word, “their” position is wrong because “they” have allowed “their” own selfish wants to lead them to an improper eisegesis. The problem is that the truth and political opinion rarely converge, especially partisan opinion. It’s a classic case of Who’s Right v. What’s Right.

For instance, on the issue of gay rights, I just don’t believe there’s any biblical justification for homosexuality. I’ve read some attempts to make Romans 1 gay-friendly, but I really don’t think that interpretation is valid. It just seems incompatible with everything else that’s being said there. Because of that, I don’t think the church has any business validating homosexuality as a lifestyle. At the same time, I don’t think it’s appropriate for the church to hate on gays. It’s one thing to speak the truth in love but it’s another thing altogether to use the truth as an excuse to spit venom. You know, it’s one thing to say “That’s not biblical.” Or even to explain the consequences of remaining in sin and say “if you keep that up, you gon’ wind up in hell right with the rest of that lineup in Romans 1:25-32 (which is everybody).” To jump out like “God hates fags” though? That’s not righteous. Neither is it righteous for the church to sit idly by while other so-called Christians spew this nonsense. Jeremy has an excellent post pointing out the inconsistency of the mainstream church in its declaration of the threat gay marriage poses to the institution of marriage while portraying divorce and cohabitation as less-serious threats.

Let’s face it, gays are easy to pick on. They do stuff that the majority of us find physically repulsive and there aren’t really that many of them. Moreover, as a political entity, they’re pretty aggressive. That makes it easy to let the discussion break down into name calling and general dislike. And I’m not advocating for some special treatment for gays, or some special set of laws or anything like that, but let me put it like this: if you saw a gay person being beaten, would you step in to help him? What if he was being verbally accosted? What if the attackers were self-proclaiming Christians?

In some instances, I think the church, on both sides of the political aisle, has become a bunch eighth graders at a dance. We get comfortable where we are, talking to our friends, who think like we think and do what we do, but we don’t get out on the floor and mix it up. Social justice means sometimes dancing with that person we don’t like or the one who looks funny or smells bad. It’s not about the teachers making us dance, we should be out there because it’s the right thing to do.
Sometimes it will take courage to get away from the partisan cool kids who want to play the wall all night, but in the end, we’ll all be better for it.

Somebody go get a record.