Literacy & Language Essay

Angelina Brown

February 15,2022 

English 110 

I was very quiet as a child, especially in school. I only spoke to my teacher, my family members, and occasionally my one friend. I was quiet to the extent in which my classmates overheard me talking to my parents at a parent-teacher night in school and one of them exclaimed “ OH MY GOSH!! You can talk?!” It was embarrassing on multiple levels.  I didn’t want my classmates to hear me speak, but I also didn’t want to be seen as someone who could not speak. I ran out of the school building holding onto my fathers hand. 

After that, I eventually gave in and began to speak more often. My teacher was amazed by how articulate and well spoken I actually was. The same day, after getting picked up my teacher asked my dad to speak after class.  My teacher sat my father down and in more complex words told him that I’m a lot smarter than she initially thought. She told him that he should get me into a better school system. She had been doubting my intelligence due to how little I spoke. By the next year, I was enrolled in the Westchester School system where I spent the rest of my education before college. My lack of speech made my peers and my teacher view me as incapable and not as smart as I could be, and my speech completely changed my environment for the rest of my life. 

People treated me differently once they realized that I was capable of speech, students I expected but not teachers. The way that I spoke was different from a lot of my classmates. I had a very standard American Accent and spoke in standard english. 

I was always told that I was smart, but so were the rest of my classmates. There were other children who were well-behaved, and studious. I realized it wasn’t just the fact that I was capable of speaking, but how I spoke and what I chose to speak about. My teachers would describe me as articulate with an extensive vocabulary, while my peers would simply tell me I sounded white. I only spoke about school and topics related to school because I was too shy to speak about anything else. What about the children who had the same grades as me but sounded different? The children who had the courage to be social and be playful? Why didn’t they get the same “reward” of being told they were too good for that school? Why did me sounding white equate to me having a higher intelligence level?  Once I switched schools I was no longer excelling in all of my subjects the way that I had been at my school in the Bronx, I was just average. I wasn’t smarter or better than the black and brown children around me, I just sounded white and happened to be shy.  

Olivia Kang, a psychologist at Harvard who is working on a project discovering human biases describes some of the biases that comes with language and the way it’s spoken: “If you speak with a standard accent, you’re judged as being more intelligent, more competent, more credible, more hireable. Now, having a regional accent, or a non-standard accent, now you’re not getting those advantages. You’re seen as less credible, or less hireable.” I’ve come to realize that the term “standard accent” in the US is interchangeable with “sounding white.” My sounding white in kindergarten changed my environment and arguably my quality of education, but most importantly it completely changed how people perceived me, which was more intelligent. 

This change in perception also happened to me socially. There were a few black kids at my new school, but they were no longer the majority. The black children mostly stuck together, and they sounded just like the people I had attended school with before, but they only spoke to each other. I didn’t quite understand why White children felt so comfortable speaking to me and not to them. On multiple different occasions by different white children I was told “yeah but you’re not really black” or “yeah but you’re different from the other black kids.” I was not at all. I wore the same clothes as the other black children, had the same interest, went home to similar family dynamics as them, I only sounded different. 

Sounding white did not only change my environment and who felt comfortable to befriend me, it made people see me as more trustworthy than all of the other black children. Kang says “But, the interesting thing is that you can also form impressions about character. So, how intelligent someone is, how competent, how likable, how trustworthy.” Since most of my time was spent at a Primarily white school as well as extracurriculars k-12, the standard accent is the dialect that feels most natural to me now. I hardly remember a transition, but I notice myself embracing my standard accent much more when it’s time for a presentation, a job interview, or anything where I need to make a good impression. It upsets me that somewhere in my subconscious at points in time I’ve been afraid of sounding like I belong to my race.  

I want to express how grateful I am for all of the opportunities I’ve gotten be cause of the environments I’ve been placed in, although it’s upsetting to not sound like my family or some of my peers that look like me, I have to be grateful that at least one of us is getting the opportunities. I know that my standard accent has and will continue to  make my life a lot easier, but the thought of what happens on the opposite end of the spectrum is what troubles me. My “accent” does not make me more intelligent or better than anyone else. There are so many smart and talented people who don’t sound white, and they deserve to be heard. 

`

Cover Letter

Dear Professor Moran, 

I enjoyed doing this assignment a lot more than I anticipated. I know that I like writing, but I didn’t realize how much creative freedom I’d get to use during it. I always had these underlying feelings and frustration with the way I sound and the privilege I’ve gotten for sounding the way I do. However, I always felt so ungrateful when I considered bringing it up. Who would complain about privilege? 

  Completing this assignment really helped me to express the feelings I never felt comfortable sharing with my family or friends. It was the first paper I wrote where I wasn’t unsure about my writing voice. I felt very confident in explaining what I’ve been through, backing up my experience with research and credited sources. At no point was I unsure of what my message was, who I was trying to reach, or that my words wouldn’t be powerful enough. 

I struggled a lot with the multimedia part. I’m a rather artistic person, so I really tried to imagine a way to represent the message of my essay in an abstract picture. I came to the conclusion that I could not. I realized that I can do what I did in my essay, bring in statistics. I’m not the first person to speak about this, and not the first person who’s made these observations. It was overwhelming to scour the internet for black trauma. But I knew that that power would touch an audience. I couldn’t figure out how to make the videos I sound flow naturally with my speech, so I turned it into a video essay. 

Making the video essay was definitely my favorite part of the assignment. I find that I excel when I can utilize my greatest strength, creativity. I really enjoyed scripting, filming, and editing the project. I spend a lot of my free time watching video essays on youtube on random social constructs, movies, books,etc. So I was pretty familiar with the format. It felt good to have so much confidence and such a clear vision of how I wanted my video essay to turn out after doubting myself with the multi media for so long. 

All in all, I think it was a great assignment to start out with and it gave me a lot of confidence in my abilities, as well as got me more in touch with my identity within language and what I care about. 

Thank you, 

Angelina Brown