At least that's what people have told me for so many years. So many, many years.
It's OK. I'm aware of this. And hey, by now I have to agree that, no, I don't have what would be considered a typically black voice.
Different folks sound different ways, but there's nothing particular about my voice most times to illustrate my race.
It falls into a combination of grammar, diction and tone that the general public doesn't associate with black men. Which is OK to discuss smartly. But there's a thin line between frank discussions about race in our lives, and expressing bigotry.
The non-bigoted bit is about the tones of speech and generalities among specific people. The bigoted bit comes in when someone affixes value to one group over another based on that voice. Or when one voice is deemed more authentic than another.
A lot of comments I've heard about my voice fall on bigoted side. I've heard “You don't sound black” from white people, as if I'm supposed to sound like 50 Cent or something. (No one ever thinks Paul Robeson, Don Cheadle or Neil deGrasse Tyson, right?) Even if the comment is good-natured, saying “He's so well spoken!” and “He's so articulate!” sound as if I'm supposed to be incapable of doing so. As if I'm lacking some amount of blackness based on grammar and diction choices.
What stung more, however, were comments from other black kids growing up who said I was “talking white.” It's different hearing it from your own people, even if we were just a bunch of inexperienced kids. It was sadder because I was hearing prejudice and bigotry turned inwards. I heard people buying into a lie that was built to hurt them.
And that pressure doesn't really go away, competing in this authenticity contest. Keegan Michael Key and Jordan Peele, blerds and white-sounding black guys themselves, joke about ratcheting up a more black-sounding voice around other black people.
Despite its satirical point of view, Spike Lee's film Bamboozled has its race-dodging black male protagonist speaking in this cartoonish voice that's meant to say from the get-go that he's not comfortable being black.
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