Carrie Gillon: Hi, and welcome to the Vocal Fries podcast, the podcast about linguistic discrimination.
Megan Figueroa: I’m Megan Figueroa.
Carrie: And I’m Carrie Gillon.
Megan: Da-da-da-da. We have a great episode today.
Carrie: Yes. It accidentally fits Black History Month thematically. If we had tried to make it work like this, we wouldn’t have been able to do it.
Megan: Right.
Carrie: So it’s completely an accident.
Megan: Yep. But we are happy that it’s coming out today.
Carrie: Yeah. It’s up there. It’s one of my faves.
Megan: Yes.
Carrie: I want to remind people if they can slash want two they can listen to us through RadioPublic, their app, because if you do, then we get paid and it’s completely free for you. So it’s like a win-win.
Megan: Yes. Cha-ching,
Carrie: Yeah. We finally got our first payout and I was like, “Oh, exciting.”
Megan: Yeah. Taking myself out to lunch.
Carrie: Yeah. It’s pretty much about that amount but better than nothing.
Megan: Yes.
Carrie: We also have three new patrons to thank. We have Pamela Ebby, Gerald Roche, and Kathy.
Megan: Yay.
Carrie: I love it when people just use their first name, it is so baller.
Megan: It’s like the comic Cathy.
Carrie: No, it’s with a K.
Megan: Okay. Thanks, Kathy with a K
Carrie: I mean, you can’t tell, right? Yes. Thank you, Kathy, with the K. Thank you, Pamela and Gerald. Yeah. So if you also want to become a patron, you can support us at three different levels. The $1 level, we thank you, the $3 level you get thank you plus you get your name on our podcast, but also you get a sticker and we have a new announcement. Every three months we’re going to send you a new sticker.
Megan: Yeah.
Carrie: So if you stay supporting us and it’s month four, you get a new sticker.
Megan: Yeah. And it’s not like we’re just like, giving you a fresh, clean sticker that you had before. No.
Carrie: No. It’s a whole new sticker.
Megan: A new design.
Carrie: So we’re very excited about that.
Megan: Yeah.
Carrie: So if you’ve already been supporting us, worry not
Megan: Yeah.
Carrie: You will also be getting those stickers.
Megan: Yeah.
Carrie: And then at the $5 level, all of what I just said applies but you also get access to our bonus episodes.
Megan: Yeah.
Carrie: We so far have 13, so that’s whole new episodes that you can listen to.
Megan: In the latest episode we talk about Spider-Verse.
Carrie: Which is so great.
Megan: Yeah. I love that movie. I don’t know if talk’s the right word, we nerd rage.
Carrie: We nerd rage a lot, although not so much with Spider-Verse.
Megan: No. Yes.
Carrie: No nerd raging. That was more nerding out.
Megan: Yes. The rage was gone. It was just the nerd.
Carrie: Yeah. And I really want to encourage people to support us because it would be really great to hit 300$ a month because then we could pay for transcripts for each of our going forward episodes, which would be so great.
Megan: Yes.
Carrie: Because I’m not good at it.
Megan: Yes.
Carrie: It takes me forever.
Megan: Yes.
Carrie: So it’d be nice to be able to pay a professional to do it.
Megan: It would be great. We feel bad that they’re not already readily available to everyone. We want to make it more accessible.
Carrie: Yeah. More accessible and more inclusive.
Megan: Yes.
Carrie: That’s always our aim. And we have the 15 first transcribed now.
Megan: But we just keep rolling along so it’s like hard to keep up and Carrie’s doing such a good job. But we want to pay someone, so we’ll do this.
Carrie: Yeah. Because they’ll do it faster and better.
Megan: Yeah.
Carrie: So feel free to support us so we can do that.
Megan: Yes.
Carrie: And speaking of Black History Month, it’s been a bizarre Black History Month, as many people have talked about before.
Megan: Yes.
Carrie: I mean, how many people in blackface are politicians now?
Megan: I mean…
Carrie: We also have a couple of emails that I wanted to read. We have one from Nelly, ” Hi, there. I don’t really have anything useful to say. And to be honest, I’m not even sure if this is the right form of compliments.” Sure.
Megan: [inaudible]
Carrie: You know, it’s nice to receive compliments once in a while.
Megan: Yes.
Carrie: “But I just want to take a moment and thank you so much for all the work you do. As an inspiring linguist, who happens to be a young woman, it’s so [inaudible] inspiring to listen to you discuss all the things I’m passionate. about. Especially since you do with such deep knowledge and empathy. You’re been my [inaudible] companions throughout the first leg of my undergrad and I can’t thank you enough for all the perspectives you brought forth and all the new things you thought me sidebar. Aww.
Megan: I know.
Carrie: It just makes me a little sad for myself when I was at that age. I didn’t have anything like this.
Megan: I know. Yeah, me neither.
Carrie: Because there…the podcast didn’t exist but, yeah.
Megan: Yeah.
Carrie: “I’m from Northern Europe. Currently taking a foreign affair exchange program in Canada and your discussions around New Finland English and [inaudible] English really [inaudible] my understanding of the multiple linguistic varieties in this large country.” Yes, it is very large. ” Also, being so far away from home was made so much easier with your podcast close at hand. So again, thank you so much. I really hope you still enjoy doing what you do because I sure enjoyed listening to it.”
Megan: Aww.
Carrie: I know. “Being a student, I, unfortunately, can’t afford to become a patron [inaudible] right now, however, as soon as I have a little bit of cash spare, I’ll definitely send you right away.
Megan: No way.
Carrie: We totally understand.
Megan: Yeah. Don’t sweat it.
Carrie: No [inaudible]. If you can help, obviously, we’re happy. But if you can’t, it’s all good.
Megan: Yeah.
Carrie: “I have [inaudible] to the new year and that 2019 will be kinder year to us all. Kind regards, Nelly.” She has P.S. here basically like ” As you can probably tell, English is not my first language.” No. That was like I could not tell.
Megan: Yeah.
Carrie: Thank you so much.
Megan: Yes. Thank you.
Carrie: We have another one from Steve Lee. “Hi, Carrie and Megan. I’ve been meaning to write to you for a while, but you know how to do list [inaudible] here in Academia.” Yes. “I’ve been a fan of your podcast since around the time it started and I’m always excited to see new episodes posted. I’m an ethnomusicologist with a background in linguistic anthropology. And last semester, I taught a graduate seminar called Music and Language.” Oh my God, I wish I could take that class.
Megan: I know. Yeah.
Carrie: There aren’t that many people who kind of like study that overlap, but there are some and it’s incredible. It’s great.
Megan: Yes.
Carrie: For one week, I assigned my students episode 23, Rock ‘n’ Rhotic, and it was a hit. Yay.
Megan: Yay. That was a hit for non-musicians too or, you know?
Carrie: Yeah. I mean talking about music is always fun.
Megan: Yeah.
Carrie: So thank you, Bob Kennedy.
Megan: Yeah.
Carrie: “It sparked a great discussion and I was glad to have an excuse to share your podcast with them. Anyway, I just wanted to tell you both what an awesome job you’re doing to let you know what a great teaching tool your podcast is. Looking forward to the next episode. All the best, Steve Lee.” Thank you so much.
Megan: Yes.
Carrie: By the way, if you do use this podcast in your class, please let us know because we’d love to send you a pin, a button as thank you.
Megan: Yeah. We definitely want to thank you and I love hearing about it.
Carrie: Yes, absolutely. I mean, it’s just so great to know that we’re like helping students with their learning because that’s always what I wanted to do when I was teaching.
Megan: Yeah, me too.
Carrie: So thank you so much.
Megan: Just one more little thing that I wanted to bring up because, of course, language Twitter was just all up on this but I want to bring it up for anyone who didn’t see this. Also, just as a reminder, not to be an asshole Barbara Ehrenreich on Twitter. So Barbara says, “I confess: I hate Marie Kondo because, aesthetically speaking, I’m on the side of clutter.
As for her language: It’s okay with me that she doesn’t speak English to her huge American audience but it does suggest that America is in decline as a superpower.” [inaudible]
Carrie: I know. I saw that and I just was like, what? Like how could you feel okay saying almost any of this? The very beginning of it is fine. If you like clutter, who cares? It’s fine.
Megan: Yeah. And you’re being cute about it.
Carrie: [inaudible]. Yeah. Like if she had ended their, I bet she would have gotten a lot of like, “Yeah, me too” I mean, I don’t think you should dislike Marie Kondo because you like clutter but…
Megan: Right.
Carrie: I can sort of understand. I’m like, “I’m a clutter person too.”
Megan: Me too.
Carrie: I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being organized. In fact, I kind of wish I was more organized but whatever. That’s a whole separate issue but no, she didn’t stop there. No. She had to go to this like really racist English Centric place that is just bizarre.
Megan: It’s bizarre. And you know that she lost Twitter that day because there are more comments than there are likes.
Carrie: Also known as she was “ratioed.”
Megan: Yes, so.
Carrie: Yes.
Megan: So fuck you Barbara for that because it is all sorts of gross.
Carrie: And then, I also had one more thing I wanted to bring up because I just happened to watch finally the Mr. Rogers documentary which…
Megan: Cries, and tears.
Carrie: There’s a lot of things to talk about there like I wish we had time to talk about like gender…
Megan: Wow.
Carrie: …homosexuality and all the stuff that came up. There are all themes that came up in it but related to the podcast, there was a clip of Ralph Ellison, who is a black man, was a black man. I don’t even know what remember what he was talking about but he used a lot of vocal fry, which is interesting because as we talked about in this episode, vocal fry is associated with young white women, which is none of those are actually true. It’s not gendered or not particularly gendered. It’s not racial and it’s not age-based either. So that leads very nicely into this episode. It’s about Black English and we talked with Dr. Nicole Holliday.
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Sarah: So check out Strong Feelings, your weekly dose of fun feminist real talk with the best friends you didn’t know you were missing. Subscribe, wherever you listen to podcasts, or check us out at strong feelings.co because life’s too short to bottle things up.
Carrie: Today we have Dr. Nicole Holliday who is an assistant professor in the Department of Linguistics and Cognitive Science at Pomona College. She studies sociolinguistics specifically how individuals interact with language to conceptualize and construct an identity of both self and others. She’s especially interested in how individuals who cross traditional, racial/ethnic boundaries, reflect multiple social identities through linguistic practices. So welcome.
Dr. Nicole Holliday: Hi, I’m so excited to be with you guys because I was like cramming before the test and re-listening to all the old episodes.
Carrie: How nice.
Megan: Aww.
Dr. Nicole: Just in case. I don’t what to say the same thing as somebody else said. And really, you talk to some of my favorite people.
Carrie: Oh my gosh.
Dr. Nicole: So my colleague at the Claremont College, Carmen [inaudible].
Megan: Yes
Carrie: Carmen.
Dr. Nicole: Yeah, which was an awesome episode about Chicano English. So the Claremont Colleges are in a consortium, so Carmen teaches at Pitzer and I teach at Pomona. But in reality, we actually teach the same class. She just teaches the fall version and I teach the spring version and students from whatever college can take them.
Carrie: Very cool.
Megan: Yeah. That is so fun. I would love to take that class from both of you like [inaudible] in the fall and spring, that would be so great.
Dr. Nicole: [inaudible] taught it in [inaudible] 16 when I was a post-doc and it was so fun, like, for us, I mean, the students had good feedback, but we were just like hanging out. I and Carmen hanging out and talking about African American English and Chicano English for the whole semester.
Carrie: Nice. That’s so sound fun.
Dr. Nicole: Yes. I just got chills. I literally got chills [inaudible].
Carrie: [inaudible] that sounds like people, we got a lot of comments about that episode about how just like passionate she sounded. I can see how that be like infectious if she was your professor to [inaudible]
Megan: Yeah, for sure.
Dr. Nicole: And I was a baby professor so she [inaudible] to learn from her.
Carrie: That’s amazing. I’m so excited to have you. [inaudible] I just like say I. We. We the Vocal Fries are so excited for you but there’s so much that I kind of like to cover, so let’s just get right into it with what kind of like at this broad broader question of I mean how do individuals interact with language to conceptualize and construct an identity of both self and others.
Dr. Nicole: Oh my gosh. They are both [inaudible] so speaking of Carmen, you talked the Chicano English but she also wrote called Language and Ethnicity. I’m not the first person to be interested in this, right? And in fact, the sociolinguist, this kind of the heart of sociolinguistics is what does our language say about who we are but also the society that we construct, and what has happened sort of I think in popular mainstream sociolinguistics in the last couple decades is there’s been a shift in focus towards the agency of the individual. Yes, there are things that we perform about ourselves that we are not doing at a conscious level but we also have some control, right? And, and some control at the conscious level and some control at the subconscious level.
The variable that I study are things like tone and pitch and intonation, so the movement of the voice, which I think are things that usually kind of operate below the level of consciousness for people, although they have some awareness of it. I’ve had people that I’ve interviewed tell me, “Oh, I have like a switch, like, I have this mode where I can sound black and I have this mode where I can sound white.” And they can’t tell you what features are changing, but they know that there’s something different. There are things sort of at the level of the pitch, which is all intonation, right? But also the voice quality, the voice itself, and vocal fry are really interesting because it does have this popular association with femaleness but it’s also characterized as young and white.
Megan: Yeah.
Carrie: Right.
Dr. Nicole: So for a long time, we kind of just took it for granted like okay, African American language speakers don’t use vocal fry but they do.
Carrie: They do.
Megan: Yeah.
Dr. Nicole: Yes, they do. Beyoncé uses it sometimes. And whenever Beyoncé is doing I’d like to do because I would want to be on the right side of history.
Megan: That is the best to use that phrase I never heard.
Beyoncé: I was really connected to the character. She is so graceful. I wish I could be that graceful. It’s so beautiful to see that and hear my crazy voice, It’s so strange
Dr. Nicole: These identities are complicated. For me, for example, I have to simultaneously be a youngish woman, Californian. I’m in California, but I’m from Ohio and I did a stint in New York, so I got to be all of those things. I’ve got these regional identities. Also, I’m black, but also I’m biracial and black. So that’s another layer of things. And these things are sometimes sort of in the popular imagination seem to be in opposition to one another or we imagine that sounding black isn’t what sounding Californian is but there are millions of black people in California that somehow managed to do both when we talk about sort of identity, performance, and construction, its this Penny Eckert had from Stanford has this concept of bricolage, right? The layering of features to construct an individualized identity. And that’s something that I think is really powerful for speakers because I can be all of the things that I feel myself being at once through my language, through this particular combination that becomes unique to me.
Carrie: I don’t know if you would know the answer to this but do you see that vocal fry is used a lot in the black Californian dialect of English?
Dr. Nicole: Yeah. Anecdotally, I would say, yes, most of the recordings that I’m still working on were things that I did for my dissertation work in DC and because I study intonation, I love vocal fry. I love all voice quality phenomena, but if you study intonation, vocal fry is like the bane of your existence.
Megan: Yeah. I guess that [inaudible]
Carrie: I hadn’t thought of that.
Dr. Nicole: What happens is that people are at the very bottom of their pitch range, rate, and the movement of their voices, vocal folds is a periodic and so you can’t actually get reliable pitch measurement. So if you’re trying to study pitch and people are doing all of this creek and stuff, it’s like, “Ah.”
Megan: Yeah.
Dr. Nicole: And so, because that’s what I was doing, I can tell you that every single black biracial man that I interviewed in DC was creaky. And all of them, we’re at the time that I interviewed them in 2015, they were all 18 to 32. So it definitely is a younger phenomenon when I talk to older black speakers, they don’t seem to do that as much, but the men are very creaky.
Carrie: You know who I’ve noticed is creaky and actually, I sent a message to Megan about it. Have you heard Lizzo?
Dr. Nicole: Yes. Lizzo is creaky.
Carrie: She uses so much fry in Juice so much. I love it.
Lizzo: Mirror, mirror on the wall
Don’t say it, ’cause I know I’m cute (ooh, baby)
Louis down to my drawers
LV all on my shoes (ooh, baby)
I be dripping so much sauce
Gotta been looking like ragù (ooh, baby)
Lit up like a crystal ball
That’s cool, baby, so is you
That’s how I roll
If I’m shining, everybody gonna shine
(Yeah, I’m goal)
I was born like this, don’t even gotta try
(Now you know)
I’m like Chardonnay, get better over time
(So you know)
Heard you say I’m not the baddest bitch, you lie
It ain’t my fault that I’m out here getting loose
Gotta blame it on the Goose.
Dr. Nicole: Yeah, it’s true. I don’t think it’s interesting because I don’t think that hearing that feature. I’m really interested in how people make ethnic judgments, so when you hear somebody behind you and you’re like that’s a black guy I really want to know what it is about the voice that tunes you into that and I think that vocal fry is actually not a disqualifier, maybe it was, right? because it’s been a change in progress, so it’s possible that 15 years ago, black speakers really weren’t very creaky and they have become so as a change over time. I think it’s very possible to sound quite identifiably black and to use a lot of vocal fry.
Megan: Yes, absolutely.
Carrie: Yeah. And speaking of DC and being biracial, we saw that you did some work with the way that President Obama speaks
Megan: And Michelle.
Dr. Nicole: Yeah. And Michelle.
Carrie: And Michelle. Of course. Yes. What is it about political figures who alter their patterns of language used to perform some sort of different identity appealing to constituents, what is it exactly that we’re picking up on?
Dr. Nicole: I’ve been joking that I’m the pioneer in the field of Obama Linguistics.
Megan: I mean, what a great thing to do a pioneer of him.
Carrie: Yeah. That’s awesome.
Dr. Nicole: It’s a new [inaudible]. Actually, I have a number of papers about Barack Obama and a couple that I’m still working on. He’s so interesting, right? So I kind of set off interested in studying biracial people, not because I think biracial people are special, but because I think that anybody that lives on this sort of borderland with sustained contact with multiple varieties and sort of push-pull factors for different identities might have some interesting things going on with what they’re doing in terms of their language. Obama has all of that because of his background and upbringing things like that but also politicians are very genitively constructing themselves at all times. Even in what is supposed to be a casual speech situation, everything is a performance. I don’t even know. I mean, I would love to like to get a surreptitious recording of Obama, which is illegal and would probably get me in a lot of trouble. But [inaudible]. If somehow, somebody sends me one, I don’t imagine that he actually has anything resembling a casual style anymore.
Megan: Yeah.
Carrie: Yeah.
Dr. Nicole: Because even when he was living in the white house, I mean, Michelle we’re living in the White House, like the Secret Service is listening. There are always interlocutors and the framework that I work in was sort of pioneered by Allan Bell, audience design, which means that we’re doing a sociolinguistic performance in response to the people around us and even the imagined audience around us. If you’re a politician, that’s really important, right? And they get it wrong so often. There was actually a report on NPR recently about the race for black voters like all the Democratic candidates are trying to appeal to Black voters. And my joke is like, “Oh, they really need to talk to a linguist.” Like I help you out with that because it just seems to go so wrong so frequently, like, what people do to talk to black voters, particularly white candidates so often it’s just go totally off the rails and try to sound some kind of like down-home folksy weird [inaudible]
Carrie: Right. Yes.
Dr. Nicole: And like black voters are like, “Excuse me?” In a lot of African-American speech communities, authenticity is really valued, so any hint of inauthenticity is going to put off a lot of black voters, but I think that’s what’s so masterful about Obama. Because of his upbringing and sort the way that he styled himself as a politician was able to be always inside a black community but also appeal to white audiences. So Obama mastered this, “I’m black but a not too black thing.” And this comes out linguistically too and this is this was part of his political strategy I think. It’s not a criticism, right? Race is a reality in our society and it informs so much of what everyone does. So I don’t mean to say that he was doing anything necessarily unauthentic for him, but his identity sort of made him appealing. Obama sounds very identifiably black to most people, I think and what you’ll see him do is move in and out of rhetorical styles that are familiar to black audiences, so the black preacher style, for example, using things like call and response and he does some of that with white audiences. But he really takes it down a notch, right?
He does much more mainstream political speech when he talks to white audiences and people have some awareness of this. There’s a study that I did with Dan Villareal at the University of Canterbury where we basically asked participants in a survey, how black does Obama sounds now which is a very weird study. I know. But we played all these [inaudible] of Obama that we had applied different intonational manipulations too to see that if we moved the sort of maximum pitch in a particular intonational contour and then, we move the maximum up and we move the minimum down in the same contour, could we get people to say that he sounded blacker and they did, reliably.
Megan: Wow.
Dr. Nicole: So there is a sense that there’s a way in which he has the ability to manipulate his voice to sort of appeal to these different audiences and he does it really masterfully.
Carrie: I wonder so he still sounds like recognizably Obama when you work with the pitch and that way when you change the contours?
Dr. Nicole: Yeah. We told them that it was Obama because there’s no obscuring Obama.
Carrie: Yeah. Okay.
Megan: Don’t even try.
Carrie: Yeah. His intonational patterns are very recognizable.
Megan: Yeah, they’re very idiosyncratic.
Carrie: Yeah.
Dr. Nicole: Yeah, there’s definitely some stuff go– See? Obama Linguistics as a subfield.
Carrie: Definitely.
Dr. Nicole: We needed more studies. What’s up with him? And then I have a paper that came out last year in American speech where I looked at him. I compared him and Michelle and their rate of Coronal stop deletion. So this is like when there’s a consonant cluster at the end of a word like in a word like just or left, African American English speakers tend to omit the coronal stop, the T, or the D that occurs there at a much higher rate than mainstream speakers. Although, mainstream speakers do it pretty, pretty frequently too, especially in casuals situation. So the rate that Barack and Michelle both do this. That is between 20% and 30% which is a little higher than what you might expect for a white mainstream white politician in that kind of context, but not super high, but the types of words they do it on are different. And Michelle patterns much more like a canonical African American English speaker and Barack does not. It’s a little bit more kind of a random distribution in the types of words that he does this on. And I kind of argue that this is evidence that he speaks African American English as a second variety.
Megan: Yeah. That was going to be [inaudible]
Carrie: Yeah.
Dr. Nicole: Yeah. He’s got the rate right but he’s got the contexts a little wrong.
Megan: It’s really fun and interesting. Yeah.
Carrie: Have you looked at comparing how people would rate how black Obama and Michelle sound like contrasting them because I feel like I know the answer?
Dr. Nicole: That’s interesting because there is this ideological link with African American English as male and young, so I think that when people have done ethnic identification tasks, they are more reliable at identifying men as black than women and this is even more for middle-class speakers but with Barack and Michelle, I mean, you’d have to find people that are not haven’t heard them all the time. So maybe this is a study we can do in like 20 years when there’s children that haven’t heard their voice all the time.
Megan: Yeah, maybe.
Carrie: Yes. So what is the context that Michelle was using that Obama wasn’t quite getting?
Dr. Nicole: So he gets them. I don’t mean to say that this is a fairly subtle difference, so I don’t want to overstate the claim here. There are three kinds of things, three types of words, where you can get this type of coronal stop deletion or at least I used three categorizations. There are monomorphemic things like left; left hand. It’s just the direction, right? there’s only one morpheme there. There are regular past-tense things like walked, right? Walked the dog or whatever and then there’s what we call semiweak past tense forms so things like went, irregular pasts that end in T and the semantic contribution is different for each of these. You actually really semantically kind of need it the most in regular past tense context because that’s how you distinguish the present from the past. Although these go out the window in African-American English all the time and speakers are fine with it but for content, that’s kind of what you would expect. And then, kind of semiweak past tense and then monomorphemic. What you see with Michelle is a higher rate of deletion in monomorphemic contexts which is also what we’ve seen in other studies of African American speakers whereas Obama’s a little bit more even across the context.
Megan: Okay, that’s cool. Yeah.
Carrie: Yeah. And for like contextualizing this, Obama was raised by his mother and his mother’s grandparents who are white, and Michelle is raised…yes.
Megan: His mother’s parents.
Carrie: Yes. His grandparents, his mother’s parents, and then Michelle were raised by her mother and father who are black.
Dr. Nicole: But it’s not just their immediate family. It’s also the community around them so Michelle [inaudible] south side of Chicago. Predominantly lower middle class, middle class African American Community. Obama was raised all over the place, right? Indonesia and then in Kansas and Hawaii whatever, but he talks in his memoirs about kind of learning to be more comfortable in black spaces as a teenager which corroborates this idea that maybe this is a sort of a second dialect thing for him but interestingly he is reified as an authentic a [inaudible] speaker, and I wouldn’t see that he isn’t. I think it’s just that his exposure has been different than hers.
Megan: Right.
Carrie: Yeah. And I’m thinking about how Obama was in office and did this amazing mental gymnastics when I came to judge him by the way he spoke and they would even sometimes I would read them calling him pedantic, so what’s going on?
Dr. Nicole: It’s so funny because Obama, I’m saying he does this really masterfully and he appeals to black and white audiences but he also has like haters across the Spectrum. He was criticized for being an elitist, right? The great arugula scandal.
Megan: I miss those days, man.
Dr. Nicole: So many were really mad at him for eating arugula and he’s a law professor. What do you expect him to sound like? [inaudible] job before he was a senator. Of course, he’s gonna sound traditionally classically erudite.
Megan: [inaudible]. Yeah.
Carrie: Yeah.
Dr. Nicole: [inaudible]. I mean, and if he didn’t, he’d be criticized for that. “Who let this guy be a professor?” At the same time, when he’s in this kind of more casual context in black communities, he definitely uses identifiable African American English features, so there was this clip that I call [inaudible] we straight heard around the world and people have written about this, a bunch of stuff, but Obama was doing a campaign stop. This is 2008 and he’s in DC at this restaurant Ben’s Chili Bowl, so he’s like getting chilly. It’s really late back and the server goes to give him his change and he says, “Now, we straight.” And he’s like keeps it moving? That is zero copula. Zero copula is one of the most stigmatized features of African American English. I was shocked because middle-class black speakers do not typically leave the house with zero copula. [inaudible] like we do it, right?
Megan: Not outside.
Dr. Nicole: But only with ourselves.
Carrie: Yeah.
Dr. Nicole: Because we know it’s very highly stigmatized. So either he was very comfortable and just kind of forgot or that came really naturally him or it was some kind of performance. I don’t know. I know I’m not inside his brain, but after that happened, Samuel L. Jackson wrote this editorial about how he doesn’t sound presidential.
Carrie: No.
Megan: Wow. I missed this.
Carrie: Yeah.
Dr. Nicole: Yeah. And it’s like, what does this man have to do? Either the arugula is too far and then now we are straight at the Chili Bowl is too far. And so, his language was [inaudible] sort of really unfairly from all directions. Obama has a really nice Rorschach test. Not only for race but also for like, what do you think ratio linguistically should be going on.
Megan: Yeah.
Carrie: What are our listeners doing them? They’re picking out these features that they’ve decided are very stereotypical of a certain ethnicity or race that they’ve built up in their head and that’s how they’re judging people.
Dr. Nicole: The way people tend to think, it’s the words like, it’s got to be the vocabulary because, of course, there are lexical differences between African-American English and mainstream and all the varieties and sometimes it is but when we’ve done ethnic identification studies, so [inaudible] did this where [inaudible] who is a black linguist had a Chicano English guys in African-American guys and a mainstream guys. It’s his voice but in three different conditions and people were able to reliably identify which guy was which, which voice was which from hearing one word.
Megan: Woah.
Carrie: Wow.
Dr. Nicole: Yeah. And there are a number of studies like this. So that is why I’m so interested in intonation and voice quality. And when you ask people about this, so in my dissertation work, I asked speakers, like, do you think that you sound different when you talk to black and white friends, do you think you have a black voice and white voice, what’s the difference? And they all said all of this stuff that was like not true. The answer is that nobody knows but one of the main things is that I had a person that said, I put more bass in my voice with my black friends.
Carrie: Interesting.
Dr. Nicole: And I hear that a lot. People frequently tell me, “Oh, well, black men’s voices are lower.” That’s not empirically been proven in anything that we’ve looked at so far and I think that that is an ideology related to black men being sort of painted as hyper-masculine.
Carrie: Yeah, that’s what I was thinking.
Megan: Yeah.
Dr. Nicole: Yeah, so there’s something else going on. My best feeling about this is that listeners pick up very quickly that there’s another intonational system happening, so in one or two words, they can do that, but also that there is something with the voice quality so maybe there is vocal fry but it’s in different contexts. Maybe the voice is less breathy, other things like this. So in that in the study that Dan Villareal and I did, we looked at a number of voice quality features that are weird and technical, but there seemed to be some things that pattern with how black Obama gets rated in terms of what’s going on in his voice too, so this is sort of my on going my life’s work is how did they judge that guy as black into syllables?
Megan: Yeah, I’m so curious about that because I remember reading about that study but I haven’t read it in any detail. I had no idea it was that fast. And the other thing that I was thinking of is your speaking is that Key & Peele do that skit where they like code-switch.
Key: Unfortunately, the orchestra’s already filled up but they do have seats that are still left in the dress circle, so if you want to, we need to get [inaudible] tickets, right now. I will do it right now.
Peele: What’s up, dough? I’m about five minutes away.
Key: Yeah. [inaudible]
Peele: Come on, man. You know I’m almost there, all right?
Key: Right. No. I’m going to pick your ass up at 6:30 then?
Peele: Cool.
Key: Cool. All right. Yeah. The parking is [inaudible].
Peele: Oh my God, Christian, I almost totally just got mugged right now.
Megan: And they sound much deeper. So, I think they’re also playing off of this idea in their head that black men’s voices are deeper which I didn’t really think of before now.
Cassie: That skit specifically was where they “put on this black voice” because they were trying to look tough to the other guy, right? So it is kind of true like it really plays into the hyper-masculine thing.
Dr. Nicole: And each of them is talking in a very mainstream way on the phone and as they get closer to each other, they use like more African-American English features and it’s very clear, right? It’s more of a syntactic and lexical feature too. There are really over-the-top stereotypes of black masculinity, right?
Carrie: Yeah.
Dr. Nicole: That is part of why that is so funny and also so sad.
Megan: Yes. Absolutely.
Carrie: Yeah. Definitely. Well, Key and Peele are both biracial as well. I wonder that’s got to have looked differently if they weren’t biracial.
Dr. Nicole: Yeah, I think so. Man, I want to teach a whole Key and Peele class [inaudible]
Megan: Yeah. [inaudible]
Carrie: [inaudible]
Dr. Nicole: There is another Key and Peele sketch that I like we’re because they talk about being biracial pretty frequently and it’s called Black Jeff. So everybody go look it up.
Megan: Yes.
Waiter: That’s not how things work in this establishment. Someone will come to you.
Key: Yes, we’re sorry. No problem.
Woman: What was that?
Key: What?
Woman: Well, were was Black Jeff?
Key: Black Jeff?
Woman: Yeah. Black Jeff. I read somewhere that when you date a biracial guy, you’re supposed to get the best of both worlds, so there are white Jeff situations and there are Black-Jeff situations and that was definitely a Black-Jeff situation.
Dr. Nicole: It’s Key, he is on a date in a fancy restaurant with a white woman and they walk in and the server says that the woman needs to cover up her décolletage. He is like, “Oh, so sorry. We didn’t know there was a dress code.” And then the server walks away and the date says, “What was that? I thought you were supposed to stand up for me. What’s going on?” I thought that you as a bi-racial man, the advantage was supposed to be that you knew when to like turn it on like be [inaudible] up for me or whatever. So then the server comes back over to like offer them some bread and he goes on this aggressive change like, “What man? Like you’re trying to give us bread?” And then she’s like, “No, that was too much.” So he spends the whole skit going back and forth and he’s like black masculine stereotype where he’s using African American English and this like hypersensitive mainstream quiet, like white man stereotype voice, I guess.
Key: Do you have to ask the black man to leave, huh? Actually, you don’t have to ask us to leave. We just want to see ourselves out and we ain’t never coming back again. Though, we really appreciate your help.
Dr. Nicole: And you watch the skit unfolding. You’re like, “Wow, he is having a hard time.” Because she told him, the date, told him about the offset that she expects him to be able to manage Blackness and whiteness in the way that she expects them to work.
Carrie: Yes. Yup.
Dr. Nicole: For her benefit.
Megan: Yeah, of course.
Carrie: Right. It’s always for our benefit.
Dr. Nicole: Yeah.
Carrie: Here’s more Key and Peele but it’s just like the perfect encapsulation of everything you’ve been saying is the whole Obama translator.
Dr. Nicole: Yes.
Peele: I want to wish my opponent Mitt Romney well. He ran a good campaign. Take that shit back to the lab because he lost.
Megan: Anger translator. Yeah.
Carrie: Yeah. The anger translator, because it was basically, like it was Peele, right? Yeah, it was Peele who would be Obama and he like had to be really calm and buttoned-up measured, and then you got Key over here being the angry black man, basically, right?
Dr. Nicole: Yeah, I think we all felt like that’s what Obama was had like Obama’s inner monologue.
Carrie: Yeah, that’s what he felt like.
Dr. Nicole: [inaudible], right? Yeah. You’d hear Obama say things like, “The Republicans are using obstructionist tactics but what you knew about [inaudible] these motherfuckers right here.” And that’s what they elicited.
Carrie: Right.
Dr. Nicole: And this is why I wanted to study biracial people because I think that when you have the practice of other people having this expectation about you, you might be able to talk about it a little bit more explicitly and you see similar things with particularly middle and upper-middle-class black speakers, they talk about being accused of talking white, sounding white selling out, being inauthentic, but a lot of them grow up in communities where they’re the only black head or one of ten black kids in the whole town, right? So what are they supposed to do? And their input is from white teachers who have a certain expectation of them, but then when they go home, it’s a different setting. This is also, if you know the movie, The Hate U Give.
Megan: Yes.
Dr. Nicole: Starr in The Hate U Give talks about School Starr at her private school and Home Starr like in her black community and she has different ways of speaking that go along with these as well.
Carrie: Right. I read the book and then seeing that movie I thought Amandla did a really great job of kind of like…
Dr. Nicole: She’s also biracial.
Carrie: Yeah. I was about to say, “Is she biracial?” Yeah. She went back and forth between this like she was at the boundary. It was a really good way to introduce a bigger audience to this kind of switching, I thought. I saw that you have a paper. I’m going to butcher it but it’s something like put a hoodie on him and he’ll definitely sound black to you or something, what was it?
Dr. Nicole: Put a hoodie on him, have him walk down an alley, and see how biracial he is then.
Carrie: Right.
Dr. Nicole: Black biracial men identity and language variation in law enforcement, in dialogues about law enforcement.
Carrie: Yeah. I mean, I was just like it hit it like…
Megan: Yeah, it hits you hard.
Carrie: It hits you hard and you realize this has wider legal implications, like this kind of really impactful societal implications that many white people probably aren’t thinking about.
Megan: Although, after Trayvon Martin, you should definitely be thinking about it.
Carrie: I mean, you hope so but white people.
Megan: I recognize that’s not realistic, but.
Carrie: Right.
Dr. Nicole: Yeah. Well, that title is that there was a person that was like an official in the NAACP and somebody asked her like, “Oh, well, is Obama really black? He’s biracial.” That was her response. “Put a hoodie on and having walked down an alley and see how biracial he is then.” It’s so good because it gets down to the heart of it. The way that race works in the United States is still very much binary. Although I’d say it’s moving a little bit because we have so many Latino folks, so many Asian American folks, and increasing recognition of different groups but traditionally, the United States has been a racial binary. And in fact, there wasn’t even an option to pick more than one racial category box on the census until 2000. So we’re talking about the first generation of kids now or people my age that has been always able to sort of say that we’re biracial. But still with this recognition that when it comes down to it and life or death situations, where black? And the government will classify us as black. So what happened? Actually, this paper is under review now. Yay.
And what happened is when I was interviewing these, I don’t like to call them biracial because they have a lot of stuff going on, but they’re men with one black parent and one white parent and some of them identify as biracial and some are black and some are both and some, it depends on the day. But when I was interviewing these men, I didn’t ask anything about the police. But a number of them, like, 7 of them abruptly started talking to me about the police when I was asking other things. And usually, it was when I was asking about the messages that they received from their parents about race, and what they said was that even the ones with white moms were like, “My white mom told me to never talk back to a cop.” Because their mothers got it right? Having a black child is a terrifying experience, and having a black boy child is a terrifying experience. And so, when their parents talk to them about race, it was an issue of safety in so many of their homes. And they have this you can sort of physically see how they react when they start talking about the police.
So what I thought was going on is maybe there’s some intonational correlation of this too and what you find is as soon as they start talking about the police, as opposed to other aspects of their identity in the things that their parents told them, they get hyper standard in their intonation. Very mainstream.
Carrie: Wow.
Dr. Nicole: And this is the whole thing about audience design and imagine interlocutor. They’re talking to me which is the same context that’s been happening the whole interview, like nothing has changed but the thought of the police, right? Puts them in this. “Okay, I have to behave as though I would if we’re talking to the police.” So they get really standard for their own safety, right?
Megan: Yeah. That makes total sense.
Carrie: It does and it shows you how powerful others’ perceptions of us are in our own identity creation.
Megan: Yeah, but especially the police. I mean they have guns and they will shoot you especially if you’re a black man or a native man.
Carrie: Yeah. Absolutely.
Dr. Nicole: It took me two more than 2 years to write that paper because it was too hard. It hurt me too much.
Carrie: Right.
Megan: Yeah.
Dr. Nicole: That’s the way that speakers carry around with them. Sometimes we talk about variation at this very surface level, like, “Oh, do people say soda or pop? So cute? Haha.” But like there’s some really deep stuff going on here.
Carrie: Yeah. And even if you don’t, if you manage to not get shot by the police, you may then go into court and you’re going to be judged by the way you speak as a black man in front of a judge and jury.
Dr. Nicole: Yeah. I teach a class on linguistic discrimination. [inaudible] guys think and I teach it in the inside-out prison exchange format. We take the students from the Claremont Colleges in Pomona to a medium security, prison here in Southern California. And we hold the class with 12 students from the colleges and 12 incarcerated students, just together.
Megan: Very cool.
Carrie: It’s awesome. Yeah.
Dr. Nicole: Yeah, it’s awesome. It’s the best possible situation in which to teach that kind of class because you get a really wide variety of linguistic backgrounds and experiences even from college students, right? But I had a student who was not a native speaker of English and he ended up writing a paper about everybody that he had met in the prison and their linguistic experiences from their point of view and how they had all been treated unfairly, how certain people from his perspective, certain people had been given longer sentences because they weren’t able to communicate or they weren’t seen as credible because English was not their first language or because they spoke African American English or Chicano English or because they were lower literacy and injustice that he personally had witnessed as an incarcerated person on the basis of language and I again like so heavy, right? Because what it means is there are people sitting in jail for using zero copula. They are sitting in jail for an extra year because they use zero-copula right? Like this is some heavy stuff.
Carrie: Yeah.
Megan: Yeah.
Dr. Nicole: And it’s from the bottom level all the way up to every institutional power structure that we talked about. So we’ve talked about it a lot in the education system for 50 years. The criminal justice system too but it’s a little bit harder to break into, right? You can’t really do studies in prisons. We do studies in schools but certainly, that stuff is going on and of course, there’s Rickford and King’s 2016 paper about the George Zimmerman trial where they talk about Rachel Jeantel, who was on the phone with Trayvon Martin when he was killed and the ways in which she was painted as not a credible witness because she her parents, she’s a Haitian-American, she struggled with literacy. As a high schooler, she went to an underperforming school in Miami and she spoke a very black American variety and people in some cases willfully and in some cases, sort of maybe not willfully did not understand her and did not find her credible and they argue that probably impacted the outcome of the trial, which in which case, George George Zimmerman was not sent to prison for that.
Megan: Right.
Carrie: Yeah. I even read some people claiming that she didn’t even speak English which was obviously false.
Megan: That is so hateful.
Carrie: Yeah. I mean that comes from a very ugly racist place when you say stuff like that about the way it’s someone else.
Dr. Nicole: Yeah, but you all know [inaudible], it’s almost still acceptable to discriminate against people on the basis of their language.
Carrie: Absolutely. That’s the whole…
Dr. Nicole: Even if what’s really going on is racism or sexism or whatever.
Carrie: Yeah. Exactly.
Megan: Absolutely.
Dr. Nicole: You can so hide behind that and it’s in the class that I teach, we talked a lot about this and employment. You can very easily say that someone didn’t have the communication skills for the job or that they weren’t a good fit, a good cultural fit.
Megan: Yup.
Carrie: Right.
Dr. Nicole: What does it mean, right? And it’s a very easy way to throw out women and people of color.
Megan: Yeah, absolutely.
Carrie: And I want to talk about the same thing but shift a little to the last thing I want to talk about before we have to let you go is social media and how this is playing into this whole picture of how we use language to create our identities and how we use language to discriminate against people, and all of that. I wanted to bring up a tweet that I saw that made me think of you. So this is from Juan Paul Brammer, who is a Chicano culture writer and he wrote, “It’s annoying to me when non-black people break out that AAVE when it’s time to use their ‘activist voice’ like can you do social justice Tweets in your own vernacular? That’s not how you talk.” So I had never heard an activist voice before he said that but I know exactly what he was talking about.
Megan: No. Yeah, same.
Carrie: And a glaring example for me was the word woke.
Megan: Yeah.
Carrie: So white people co-opt in the [inaudible] woke and I was wondering if you could kind of speak to what is he picking up on when he says activist voice? Do you have thoughts on that?
Dr. Nicole: Yeah, so there is this whole new criticism of like digital blackface, so people sort of putting on some kind of African American English or black persona for authenticity, I guess, or comedic effect but I think what’s going on in this Tweet is he’s complaining about the use of it to try to seem authentic or genuinely interested, or like a particular type of social progressive. One thing that I see is a lot of folks that are experiencing a lot of white guilt feel like they want to say something but they don’t know how to say something and not be offensive. And so, aligning yourself in solidarity, linguistically with the black activist that you think of as authentic and credible and powerful is one way to sort of get gain some of that credibility back. There was a reply to that tweet because you had sent me this Tweet before that I thought was hilarious. “Yo, fam, let’s make this march for the endangered brown tail [inaudible] AF.” Yeah, that’s the problem.
Megan: That’s amazing.
Carrie: Yes.
Dr. Nicole: And the other thing that they’re missing this is just like a linguistic fact is that language changes inside the community in a different sort of faster way than it changes outside the community. By the time somebody is saying, yo, fam, let’s get lit AF, no black teenager in America is using those words. They sort of give themselves away as later to the party by using words that are older, but I think I don’t know that this necessarily comes from a harmful place. Even in that Tweet. He’s just annoyed.
Megan: Yeah.
Carrie: Right.
Dr. Nicole: And he’s annoyed because it feels like the people of color can’t ever have anything. Good Lord. We can’t have our language. We can’t have our music like people. There’s a quote I think it’s Chris Rock, the profanity but it’s like, “Everybody wants to be a nigga, until it’s time to be a nigga.” That’s it. It’s like you guys are really cute to like put on our language and even this thing that the Instagram models are doing with, like, curling their hair and making themselves more tan like fake biracial.
Carrie: Like really dark in some cases.
Megan: Oh my gosh.
Dr. Nicole: These white girls looked like me.
Carrie: Yeah. Well, Ariana Grande does it.
Megan: Yeah.
Carrie: [inaudible], right?
Dr. Nicole: Yeah. You know I’m an Arian Grande fan.
Carrie: Me too.
Dr. Nicole: I’m not going to go her but it’s a thing.
Carrie: It’s a thing. Yeah.
Megan: She’s not as bad as some of these European women who are like lighter than me.
Carrie: Yeah.
Dr. Nicole: But what he you saying is like, yes, these people of color have authenticity in activist circles because we have skin in the game. Literally, we are the people who are often most deeply impacted by these things and that’s why we get this authenticity. It’s annoying and offensive in some cases when you get white activists trying to show their investment or their credibility by too closely aligning themselves with the people who are directly impacted every day.
Carrie: Right. And authentic, right? You mentioned earlier that that’s one of the worst things you can do if you’re trying to be an ally to the black community or line yourself with the black community is being authentic and you’re putting something on. That’s not real for you.
Dr. Nicole: Yeah, it’s rough. But the internet is this whole other [inaudible], right? Where these people, you can think of and have personas and things and even not just [inaudible], but like what these women on Instagram are doing, right? You can sort of photoshop your way into constructing a different type of persona identity for the world than what you can do in real life. And so. if what you’re trying to do is seem like a really woke activist, it might behoove you to make yourself seem racially ambiguous, linguistically, and sort of in the way that you present yourself physically and things too. So I think there’s some element of that going on as well.
Carrie: Yeah.
Megan: Yeah, absolutely.
Carrie: And I think when Juan brought this tweet up, he’s Chicano, he’s half Chicano like I am so he’s not black but I think it was like his way of aligning with the black community is saying “Hey, other non-black people stop doing this.”
Dr. Nicole: People could be using Chicago English features too, although they don’t tend to be registered to people who don’t know about them as much as related to that community. The way they do with African American English. So I think that he can speak to that as a member of the community that he has to but it might not be sort of as evident.
Carrie: Yeah. There are overlapping features of double negatives and consonant cluster reductions at the end, right? Is like Chicano English as well as African American English, so.
Dr. Nicole: Yeah, and those have been in contact. I mean [inaudible]
Carrie: Yeah, absolutely.
Dr. Nicole: Right? Those have been in contact forever. It’s hard to say like this is a Chicano feature, this is an African American feature in all cases, right?
Carrie: Yeah. Do you think that social media is how is it playing into a kind of appropriation of black English? I don’t know, you say by the time that I remember on fleek getting into like the white community finally, and it was like so over, do you think that are we going through these phases quicker now?
Dr. Nicole: I think we are going through them quicker but I think it’s like capitalism.
Carrie: Well, that’s a whole other topic. But anyway.
Megan: Yeah. Clearly.
Dr. Nicole: Yeah. Well, there are a lot of brands that try to have really cute Twitters so they have accounts or whatever. So they have like some 25-year-old running their Twitter. Like Wendy’s got into a feud with somebody recently. I don’t know. I’m like, “These brands.” And so, they’re trying to sort of present themselves as hip, young, and relevant, and so, they do use this language and they hire young people who authentically use this language but the thing is that when you see Burger King using your communities language, all right, now, Burger King’s got it and we’re not using it anymore.
Megan: Right.
Dr. Nicole: I think that that has kind of acted as an accelerator. There’s also just the fact of, yes, does a lot of lexical innovation come from African American speakers? Absolutely. Every word that you have that’s cool, it’s our including “cool.” Yeah. We did that. But lexical innovation also comes from young people on the internet. And so, you get this thing where, “Okay, the new words are from teenagers across the racial spectrum also from African American speakers, interacting with each other online.” And the boundaries of who’s a member of the community and who is allowed to use these words become a lot more porous when we are online because we’re not in real geographically bounded spaces. We’re not necessarily even in ethnolinguistics spaces, right? We’re talking to strangers. The words and the patterns move at different rates and in different way.
Megan: wikipediabrown/[inaudible] on Twitter tweeted a white person just used the word white wypipo in my mentions and I can’t even begin to explain how intensely that makes my eyelids twitch. The co-option of black language practices has happened for generations but the way social media has hastens it is so frustrating sometimes. And then, I also had a friend who is neither white nor black who asked me if it okay to say wypipo. I was like, I mean, I would maybe mention it but I don’t think I would use it because it’s very yeah, it is co-opting. Anyway, how do you feel about this tweet?
Dr. Nicole: White people. Do you know what is a good analogy? It’s like bitches. If I’m talking to another woman, I can be like bitches be crazy, right? in-group language. But if you’re a male-identified person and you say bitches be crazy? No.
Carrie: Yeah.
Megan: Right. Yeah.
Dr. Nicole: And maybe we’re cool and maybe that’s fine like in the context of what you’re saying but like maybe not, bro. I feel like that’s what it is. With white people, where it comes from is a criticism of a particular type of white person and the problem is that, if you are a white person, you don’t get to say that you’re not that type of person.
Megan: Yeah, exactly.
Carrie: Yeah.
Dr. Nicole: So even if you’re right or even you’re the most down [inaudible] white person that ever existed on the planet, like, great, good for you. You don’t get to call yourself not one of those white people. We decide.
Megan: Right.
Carrie: Right. You’re one of them. [inaudible]
Megan: Yes.
Dr. Nicole: And so, I think that’s where the frustration is coming from this, which is like how dare you. It’s like, you don’t get to call yourself an ally. That’s what it is. It’s like if you’re saying white people, you have aligned yourself with me, but I’m not sure that I want you on my side. Do I know you right?
Carrie: Yeah, perfect.
Megan: Yeah.
Carrie: Yeah. It feels a lot more personal than saying ally like doing the same thing. You’re kind of conveying the same message, but in a more intimate way and I see what you’re saying there like “Whoa, wait, what are you doing here?”
Megan: And ally is already so problematic.
Carrie: Yes, of course.
Megan: I never call myself that because I’m like, “How do I get to decide?” like you’re saying like it feels so icky to me.
Dr. Nicole: Told you. Yeah, you feel like such a jerk, you know? “I’ve been an ally to the queer community” like no.
Megan: Yeah, I’m not an asshole to the queer community. That’s the right way I can say, do you know what I mean?
Carrie: There we go. That’s the A we all need to not use. Not an asshole.
Dr. Nicole: Yeah. But also, we are linguists and we are not here to prescribe,
Carrie: Right. Of course.
Dr. Nicole: And so, I feel ambivalent about this, right? If speakers and tweeters out in the world are saying, “No, like this is inappropriate because it’s in a group and it doesn’t mean what you think it means and I don’t like this.” That’s their prerogative. At the same time, language changes and spreads, and is diffuse and particularly online in the ways that we’ve talked about. And so, it’s possible that maybe it’s interesting and useful if white people become a word that everyone uses for a particular type of annoying fake woke white person. I don’t know, right? I’m just here to describe but
Megan: Yeah, I know. That’s how I feel about it too. Especially as a white person, I’m like, “Well, I can’t say whether you can use it or not but I feel uncomfortable.”
Dr. Nicole: But then for me, as a person of color, I also like “I’m not the final say.” Right? I and wikipediabrown might not agree.
Megan: Yeah.
Carrie: Exactly. Yeah.
Dr. Nicole: And it does, this is like another thing that happens a lot is that black students, black linguists, black people in the world are so often put on the spot to speak for everybody, the whole community, and I’m like, “I don’t know whether that’s offensive over in New York.” I don’t live there like I’m not all black people.
Carrie: Yeah.
Dr. Nicole: And it’s hard, right? So I think the best thing we can do is say “Okay, if you are a wypipo and you want to use wypipo, just keep stay aware of what you’re doing, right? Recognize that there might be some backlash like I’m not a person that’s dogmatic about, “Oh my God, that was appropriated and white people can never say it.” Like I don’t think so. Language moves and it changes and it’s alive and that’s okay, but not being an asshole means, being cognizant that things are imbued with cultural meaning that you might not have all of access to at all times. And so, when you’re talking about a community that you are not necessarily a member of you should be a little careful.
Megan: Wow.
Carrie: Yeah. I think that’s exactly the perfect way of encapsulating. The problem.
Megan: I was going to say, Dr. Nicole Holliday, I think that’s a great place to end because that was perfect.
Dr. Nicole: [inaudible]
Carrie: We did it.
Megan: We did it in just under one hour. Hi.
Carrie: [inaudible]
Megan: Let’s all [inaudible] on the back.
Dr. Nicole: We’re really good allies.
Megan: Yeah, we are.
Carrie: Alrighty. Yeah. Well, thank you so much.
Megan: Yeah, thank you so much for talking with us.
Dr. Nicole: You’re welcome.
Carrie: Yeah, that was fun.
Megan: It was totally great. Yeah. We like to leave everyone with…
Carrie: …don’t be an asshole.
Dr. Nicole: I co-signed this message.
Obama: Look at what’s happening right now. Every serious scientist says we need that. [inaudible] says, it’s a national security risk. Miami floods on a sunny day and instead of doing anything about it, we’ve got elected officials throwing snowballs in the Senate.
Key: Okay I think I got it, bro.
Obama: It is crazy. What about our kids? What kind of stupid short-sighted irresponsible–
Key: Woah. Bro, hey.
Obama: What?
Key: What?
Obama: Okay. No. Hey. What?
Key: Okay. With all due respect sir, you don’t need an anger translator, you need counsel.
Carrie: The Vocal Fries podcast is produced by me, Carri Gillen for Halftone. Audio. The music is by Nick Granum. You can find us on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at Vocal Fries Pod. You can email us at vocalfriespod@gmail.com and our website is vocalfriespod.com.
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The Vocal Fries Pod 