what I learned in college that I wish I could undo
We try to make our kids vanilla, somehow.
Universally, I mean. And also – as educators. Maybe even as parents.
(I like vanilla as a flavor for ice cream, but maybe not as a description for a run of the mill, looks and sounds like everyone else kind of recipe for humanity.)
Social media, modern culture, fashion, the machine that tells us what to eat and what to watch and what to wear and how to wear it and when to wear it are endlessly fond of this concept of sameness. They thrive on it. (Even while duplicitously declaring it unique.) It’s so good for business. It IS business. When people can be categorized, their behavior can be predicted. Then they are products. They buy in bulk and along a theme – a line on a chart. It’s all so very convenient.
I’m still kind of mad at myself for my role in this Becoming Alike college experience in a class titled Voice & Diction. (Yes, I can hold a grudge against myself for more than twenty years. Why not?) The professor was D. Reed. It was a small college in a small town where the college brought in and sent out “foreigners” on a regular basis and the professors came from other towns and the cafeteria staff never left Kentucky.
Mrs. Reed taught to classrooms full of eager nineteen year olds who had voices and dialects as varied and as beautiful as the mountain terrains behind the fancy white columns of the college.
We sat in her classroom in blue plastic chairs and we shared mediocre speeches about mundane and forgettable topics and we sounded like Ohio and Georgia and the Tennessee hills. I sounded like rural Virginia and a county whose pride was in the title “Moonshine Capital of the World”. I found myself repeating the words “oil” and “water” often to ears unaccustomed to my accent and I frequently changed entire sentences to avoid the use of the word “iron” at all.
Sitting in a plain classroom in Williamsburg, Kentucky before the internet hit the ether and inkjet printers were almost science fiction, Mrs. Reed stood in front of us and said, “You can call me by my first name and before this semester ends you will lose your accents. You will come to me sounding regional. You will leave sounding ‘everyman.'”
We practiced like idiot parrots repeating Aretha Franklin’s “R-E-S-P-E-C-T” in unison without accents and with uniform inflection.
“Sounding Southern will hinder your careers,” she informed us. “Sounding neutral is my goal for you all.”
I learned to say “wah-ter” instead of “wuh-der” and “oy-ul” replaced “uhl”. (I still struggle with that appliance used for removing wrinkles from your clothing. I guess some parts of Franklin County die harder than others.) “Y’all” was severely frowned upon.
I’m sorry I believed Delanna Reed. I’m sorry I shifted my speech patterns and corrected my dad’s grammar. Sorry that I came home on holiday breaks with a chip on my shoulder and a tiny distaste in my mouth for people who routinely used the word “ain’t” and finished sentences with “at”.
I’m not anti clear speech or good grammar.
But I am anti shutting off and closing down, rewiring and rerouting my natural speech and inflection and coming out sounding like I am actually from no place at all when I’d love for my voice to reveal my heritage.
I’m anti taking what is genuinely unique about a person, a region, and declaring it unfit, deeming it “uneducated” or too nasal-y or too anything at all.
I don’t want us all to sound alike and look alike. Goodness, I certainly don’t want us all to be alike.
It’s magic – all the differences. I love a British accent. And an Alabama one too. I like the boots in the west and the Chacos back home. I don’t want to live in a vanilla world.
And I want to raise a band of kids who value their uniquenesses and glory in other people’s variety. Who give permission to sound like what you sound like and wear what you wear and be who you are.
2 Comments
Mandi Buckner
I think I must have just blocked out that class from my memory – thank goodness! I really don’t remember much about it at all except we could call her by her first name felt that class was a waste of time – ugh!
I agree with you in embracing who we are and the beauty in our uniqueness! 🙂
Chelsea
This is an interesting perspective.
It’s probably time to forgive yourself. ;o)
Drew grew up and began college with a very strong mountain accent, and found once at college that people did not take him seriously. He purposefully trained himself out of some of the strongest parts of that accent, although there are plenty of southern words still interspersed. Also, when spending quantity time with his family in the NC mountains, some of those habits come back. That’s always fun for me to listen to. Evidently, though, when he first chose to drop some of his accent, he was judged and ridiculed by family for leaving behind his heritage. They all still have very strong accents. So strong, in fact, that when Drew’s mom went with us to Disney, we had to actually translate for her. The responses when she talked were extreme. Some people would just stare with their mouths hanging open. Some people would laugh, seeming to think that she was actually joking. Some people would try their best to figure out what she was saying, but that process would be frustrating for the both of them. Eventually she exclaimed, “I feel like I’m talking in another language!” and that’s when we began translating for her. It became clear that she was not being taken seriously, and even more than that, viewed as uneducated and even unintelligent because of the way she spoke. She’s actually a nurse, so these things aren’t true, but she felt so condemned. She admitted that they have an automated system at work to call in prescriptions and that she has to have coworkers call hers in because the voice recognition system can’t identify her words. Even when she spells things out, the system cannot identify the individual letters she is trying to pronounce. It’s wild to me that her pronunciation of the English language is not actually even functional under certain circumstances.
Interestingly, the man that runs Hyder’s peach stand by our house talks like a good ol’ country boy with his friends, and then can completely turn it off and speak without accent and with proper grammar to the strangers that come to purchase his produce. I’ve never experienced someone who can switch so quickly from a strong accent to virtually no accent at all.
I do think the variety of Southern accents are judged more negatively than accents from other areas of the United States. I’m not sure why this is, but I, too, enjoy hearing a variety of speech and dialect.