‘You don’t sound Black,’ she said. But I am, so then we could talk
I got a call a few weeks ago from a Kansas City activist who wanted to complain that something I wrote was racist against Black women.
The activist is Black but she didn’t know at the time that I am, too. She couldn’t tell from the sound of my voice.
I’m from New York but have lived in the south and the Midwest, unintentionally picking up accents from each that make my speech hard to pinpoint, I guess. But I always think it’s funny when anyone tells me, “You don’t sound Black.” I’m not sure I know what that means really, but it feels like they are not complimenting me.
My dad was Jamaican, with a heavy accent — Patois. My mom was from West Virginia, an educator with a slight twang. Both stressed using what they called proper English. They meant, speak grammatically, even when you code switch. And that’s a whole ‘nother thing.
When a person says you don’t sound Black, even if they themselves are Black, I always want to ask them: What does a Black person sound like?
In this case, if I had “sounded Black,” it would have changed the conversation. At least initially.
Black folks speak differently to other Black folks. It has to do with a shared experience, a shared world view. Women assume a shared experience with other women. And, I suppose, men do the same, and so on. “You look like me, so I trust you.” A shared history that includes slavery and Jim Crow and yes, George Floyd, only heightens that connection, though it doesn’t make us a monolith.
Back to the call. I listened.
Politely, but sternly, the activist took issue with the use of the word “aggressive” in an editorial mentioning that two Black women running for the Kansas City Public Schools board wanted a more aggressive approach to improving academic achievement for students. She perceived the word as a racial microaggression.
“Strong Black women are too often accused of being aggressive or angry Black women, and it’s racist,” she said. That’s when I knew. She thought I was white.
“I know something about that,” I replied. “I’ve been the only Black woman, and the only woman speaking out, in a room many times.”
Then came a long pause followed by her realization that she was not, as she had thought, talking to my boss, a white woman. “Oh, you are Mara’ Rose Williams. Forget all about what I was saying. Let’s start over.”
Oppression, discrimination bring people together
We talked like girlfriends, an immediate trust existed between two Black professional women. I then could explain that I had written the editorial and had used the word “aggressive” to refer to the process the women wanted to use, not to the women themselves.
She understood and we were cool. But I wonder if the same explanation had come from my boss, and it would have because it was the truth, would it have been so easily received? I don’t think it would have, because there was an assumption that that word meant something different when I used it than if a white person had.
“This is rational behavior for people who historically have a collective experience,” said Gregory Carr, an associate professor of Afro-American Studies at Howard University. Carr teaches race, law and change at Howard’s law school.
Indeed, it’s human nature for us to search out commonality and when we find it, we tend to hear that person in a way that extends the benefit of the doubt. There’s an unspoken connection and acceptance even when you come from the same town, went to the same college or share the same political ideology. So imagine that connection if what you share is a generational history of 400 years of oppression, discrimination and degradation.
The activist had entered the conversation “on guard,” Carr said, adding that it has everything to do with us living in a world where we are forced to defend our Blackness. “When confronted with whiteness, our default is self defense even from the well intentioned. It is grounded in real world experience,” Carr says. “It is so tragic. But it is the place we find ourselves.”
Dennis Carpenter, an expert in equity and inclusion and a former local school superintendent, sees what happened on that phone call between me and the activist as an “undeniable spiritual connection.” Her learning the person she was speaking with was also a Black woman “gave clarity to who was on the other end of the call,” Carpenter said. “Unapologetically refreshing.”
I must say I felt it too. An ease and confidence. And that’s OK. I think it’s good, in fact. But I also think we risk missing out on something when we make assumptions about people who don’t look, sound or think like us, especially at first glance. Just look how polarized we are in this country, with everybody listening and extending the benefit of the doubt only to those most like ourselves.
I try to check myself, no matter whom I’m talking to and no matter what their background is. I try to hear them fully. That’s what we have to do, to move the needle at all toward uniting America.
