This Is the Voice

by John Colapinto

  * * *

  Labov has stated that any public discussion of Black English “generates emotional waves whose violence cannot be overestimated.”46 As a Caucasian (from Canada, no less), I certainly feel considerable trepidation wading into such troubled waters. And I haven’t even strayed into the deepest water of all: the question of whether African American voices actually sound different from white voices, apart from the accent and grammar elements I’ve been discussing—whether some other sonic signature distinguishes them. According to John McWhorter, an author and professor of linguistics at Columbia University, this is a subject that no one relishes discussing. “African Americans take it as an insult,” he told me, “because Black voices are so often associated with stupidity; while white people avoid it for fear of sounding racist. There is the whole idea that you are not to stereotype, you’re supposed to see people as individuals.”47

  But McWhorter, who is Black himself, has made a career of speaking up on matters that others sidestep, and he has identified nuanced aspects of pronunciation (subtle refinements of the Black voice described by Labov, Rickford, Baugh, and others) that, he says, make virtually all African Americans sound distinct from other English-speaking Americans. He calls it the “blaccent,” and he says that every American (Black or white) is sensitive to it, whether they admit it or not. “If you’re sitting on the subway, looking into your book, and you hear someone’s voice, you can know instantly whether it is a Black person,” McWhorter told me. “You are almost never wrong. To be an American is to have that ear. And I thought, it’s time for somebody to lay out why that is.”

  He did so in his 2017 book, Talking Back, Talking Black, where he says that African Americans have a subtly different way of shaping certain vowels that is unique to a lineage of people whose speech sounds have come down, ultimately, from the original slaves, transferred, generation after generation, by Motherese, and thus etched, at birth, into the basal ganglia and myelinated into the motor circuitry. “It’s learned in the cradle!” McWhorter told me. “I find that scientifically fascinating—something that happens to people so early and is so deeply imprinted.” So deeply, he says, that these tiny vowel “frills” (as he calls them) are manifest even in the speech of African Americans who, in every other way, speak in the most generic, broadcast-ready GA accent. “Even among highly Standard-sounding Black announcers and newscasters,” he writes, “extent sounds a bit like extint, sense will sound a bit like since, and attention will sound rather like attintion.”48 To catch the distinctive African American short o and a vowels, McWhorter invites his reader to

  imagine how Chris Rock would say “Got that?” The difference between how he would say that and Rachel Maddow would nails the nature of these vowels in a light blaccent: as subtle as it is, it is part of what reads “black” in the back of an American mind.49

  Elsewhere in the book, McWhorter addresses the possibly even touchier question of whether there is a quality to Black voices that is not a matter of articulation, grammar, accent, “blaccent,” or vocabulary but is, instead, found in some ineffable difference in vocal acoustics, the quality, or timbre, of the sound itself. The question arises if only because decades of listening to James Earl Jones’s and Morgan Freeman’s resonant voice-of-God baritones, or Oprah Winfrey’s soothingly low-pitched voice, has inculcated into listeners an unconscious association between someone’s being African American and speaking in a rich, slightly more bass-heavy vocal tone. If such a thing does distinguish some Black voices from white ones, McWhorter says, it emerges not from any anatomical, physiological, or biological difference, but purely from cultural factors, a learned tendency picked up in earliest childhood, from listening to adult voices, and mimicking them.

  * * *

  For all the pussyfooting and apologizing that academics and authors (like myself) display when broaching the question of whether Black and white people in America sound different from each other, Black comedians have been happily capitalizing on the distinctions for decades.50 In the 1978 movie Live in Concert, Richard Pryor famously code-switches from his characteristic Black English stage voice—a magnificently supple and varied instrument—into a pitch-perfect “white guy voice.” The hilarity, and accuracy, of the bit (which hinges on a white man who nervously gives up his place in line to a group of Black men) depends on Pryor’s pinched nasality, near-falsetto monotony, rhythmic rigidity, and utter lack of anything resembling the state of being that African Americans taught the world to describe as “cool.” (“Go ahead, sure, cut in”—and in panicked aside to his white friend: “What do you want: trouble? There’s a whole bunch of ’em!”). Since then, many African American comedians have incorporated a “white voice” bit into their routines, including Whoopi Goldberg, Martin Lawrence, Dave Chappelle, and Eddie Murphy.

  In the summer of 2018, two different Hollywood movies by Black directors took for granted that white and Black people in America sound different from each other: Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman and Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You. Both featured Black protagonists mistaken, over the phone, for white men. In Lee’s movie, undercover cop Ron Stallworth uses his “white voice” to converse with Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke (who never suspects he’s talking to a Black man); in Riley’s movie, a hapless telemarketer, played by Lakeith Stanfield, can’t make a sale when speaking in his normal voice. His coworker, played by Danny Glover, offers some advice: “Use your white voice.” Stanfield’s character snorts and says, dismissively, “You mean like this?”—and pulls out a version of Pryor’s “white guy” routine. Glover shakes his head. “I’m not talking about sounding all nasal,” he says. “It’s like: sounding like you don’t have a care. Got your bills paid, you’re happy about your future.”

  Here, director-writer Boots Riley digs for something deeper than the sardonic laugh of Spike Lee’s movie, or Pryor et al.’s brilliant impressions. Riley (as committed a socialist as George Bernard Shaw ever dreamed of being—indeed, he confesses to being an actual communist) shows that the distinctions between white and Black voices are, at bottom, distinctions of class and economics—the same thing that Shaw was writing about in Pygmalion and that Gatsby was talking about when he said Daisy’s voice was “full of money.” F. Scott Fitzgerald himself could not have put it better than Riley does when he has Glover continue: “Put some real breath in there. Breezy. Like: ‘I don’t really need this money.’ You’ve never been fired—only laid off.” And then Riley delivers the coup de grâce, that takes the speech beyond any consideration of “race”—which, after all, is not a biological or genetic reality but a purely cultural construct. We are all Homo sapiens, all brothers and sisters under the skin, all in possession of this remarkable endowment of speech that (as Edward Sapir pointed out in the 1920s) is equally complex and expressive in every tongue, and differs only in the surface details dictated by history, culture, and what you learn in the cradle.

  “It’s not really a white voice,” Glover’s character says. “It’s what they wished they sounded like; what they think they’re supposed to sound like.”

  * * *

  In 2012, Labov published a deceptively slim volume called Dialect Diversity in America that managed, in under two hundred pages, to compress everything he had learned over the previous five decades about American accents and the social, economic, political, and racial forces that shape them. The book included findings from a remarkable project he had undertaken at the beginning of the 1990s when he scaled up his study of progressively larger and larger “islanded” populations (first Vineyard fishermen, then Manhattanites, then the city dwellers of the Inland North, then African Americans) to embrace an “island” of speakers that included all of the United States and Canada—a fifteen-year project that resulted in the monumental Atlas of North American English (2006).51

  The chief surprise to emerge from the project is that, contrary to widespread belief, regional accents in America are not vanishing and voices are not converging on a single, idealized G
A accent inculcated by electronic mass media. Quite the opposite. American voices are diverging. The Northern Cities Shift is not a unique development, but just one of a set of “vigorous new sound changes” in progress across the entire country. (In Dialect Diversity, he would write: “The dialects of Chicago, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Los Angeles are now more different from each other than they were 50 or 100 years ago.”)52 The Atlas also drew on findings by Labov’s student Penelope Eckert about the voice that has, in the last few decades, become the stereotype for laid-back California. Eckert traced its origins to Moon Zappa’s 1982 pop hit “Valley Girl,” in which she (in a rap-like spoken-word section) comically exaggerated the drawled, fronted vowels (“Like, tewtilly”), vocal fry, and upspeak of girls from affluent sections of the San Fernando Valley. These mannerisms, Labov says, became a kind of contagion, like Yeager’s cockpit drawl and the Kardashian fry (of which the song might have been the initial germ); the voice spread from the Valley (with later help from the 1995 box office smash Clueless, about rich kids in Beverly Hills) and is today a vocal signal of prestige for young women in wealthy enclaves across the country. Although it did not begin as an accent, in the strict sense of pronunciations that become hardwired in the cradle, the Valley Girl voice is what linguists call a “stylistic innovation.” By now, however, it is almost certainly being inculcated into newborns by their “chill-talking” parents and can legitimately be called a new American accent.

  That the divergences in American voices are shaped by sociolinguistic forces—clashes of ideology, culture, class, politics, and race—is a fact that hovers uneasily over the Atlas of North American English, whose pages are replete with maps that show, superimposed on the fifty United States, a spaghetti-tangle of lines (linguists call them “isoglosses”) that define the borders between accent regions. Given current sociopolitical realities, it is hard to see these isoglosses as anything but fault lines traced on a dangerously unstable seismographic map. Labov acknowledges as much when, in Dialect Diversity, after describing the incredible fact that vowel-shifting people in the Inland North are misunderstood by each other, he writes that the divergence of voices, in all societies, “runs counter to the primary function of language as it has developed in the human species: the capacity to communicate information about states of affairs across distant times and places. We are not better off because we do not understand each other.”53

  Labov here hints at the prime paradox of the human voice: at the same time as its specialization for language has united our species and given us dominion over every other living thing by bringing us together into cooperative groups, it has, at the same time, “pushed us apart”—and continues to do so. In the Origin of Species, Darwin used the way languages change over time as a metaphor for natural selection. Like animal species, he said, languages are evolving toward greater efficiency, which would mean enhanced understanding between all human speakers. This is one of the few times Darwin got it wrong—because this is not at all what happens with language. The exact opposite. It is precisely through the incremental, natural-selection-like accumulation of tiny, random changes in articulation—McWhorter’s “frills” on the vowels, the migration of an o or an a backward or forward in the oral cavity, that slight shift in a tongue target from teeth to gum ridge, a change in cadence or intonation like Valley Girl upspeak—that the Babel of mutually incomprehensible tongues, across human populations, came about. It is an amazing philological fact that languages as different from one another as Russian, Hindi, Greek, Albanian, French, German, English, and Icelandic all descended from a single group of Proto-Indo-European dialects that ultimately had to have developed from some single, original, and now unrecoverable ur-tongue. This means that our greatest endowment as a species—the spoken language that has allowed us to converse, coexist, compromise, and cooperate in a manner unique in the animal kingdom—is also what renders us dangerously unintelligible to one another. And pushes us apart.

  Which is where political leaders come in: those people who shape our collective future, and whose task it is to unite people of widely differing views and values, colors and creeds, attitudes and accents; who instill within us—primarily through the galvanizing force of their voices raised in oratory—a sense of common purpose, of our shared humanity and shared challenges and goals, so that we might bridge our differences of class, race, education, religion, politics, gender identity, sexual orientation and even nationality, to forge, for the betterment of the species as a whole, a bright and blessed future for all humankind!

  That’s the idea, anyway.

  I. Q: How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb?

  A: Just one—but the bulb really has to want to change.

  SEVEN THE VOICE OF LEADERSHIP AND PERSUASION

  The idea of democracy, “rule by the people,” was dreamed up, around 500 BC, by the ancient Greeks, who, even as they extolled it as the best way for human populations to govern themselves, also warned of a danger inherent in choosing leaders by popular vote. This opened society to the risk of charismatic, self-dealing, narcissistic charlatans who attract voters not through an appeal to reason (as the Greek model of dēmokratía demanded), but through a whipping of pure emotion. The Greeks called them demagogues, and political scientists have since shown how these opportunistic threats to civilization use lies, distortions, and fear-mongering to awaken our species’ worst instincts, including class and racial prejudices, xenophobic hatred of the other, and myriad other societal divisions to win votes. Speaking in incendiary tones of rage, recrimination, and vengeance, the demagogue is swept to power on a wave of angry-mob “populist” sentiment.

  One of the demagogue’s chief means for attaining power is through misappropriation of the skills of vocal persuasion that the ancient Greeks and Romans considered essential to democracy: oratory and rhetoric. Oratory is the formal, elevated style of public address used by politicians in speeches and debates (as well as preachers speaking to congregations and lawyers addressing juries). Rhetoric is the orator’s eloquent and inventive use of language—the vivid similes and metaphors, the sensitivity to the sounds of words, the skillful compression, the apt word choice, the sonically similar (or contrasting) grammatical structures that bolster logical arguments, and which hold listeners’ attention and drive ideas home. In Greece and Rome, fine oratory and rhetoric were, says one leading classical scholar, “the lifeblood of ancient politics, law and administration, a shared discourse that enabled communication across boundaries of ethnicity, status and ideology.”1

  Some ancient philosophers (including Plato) worried that oratory and rhetoric are a form of deception—performance techniques to hoodwink listeners. But Quintilian (circa AD 35–100) insisted that they are not surface tricks of voice and speech—auditory masks—that conceal the speaker’s true character and intent. Properly practiced, they reveal the truth of who a person is: crystallizing, in the voice signal, the speaker’s personality, intellect, values, and intentions, so that the person’s arguments may be scrutinized, for accurate evaluation, by voters, juries, or religious congregations. Like the skills of economy and simplicity that Strunk and White endorse in their classic writing manual, The Elements of Style, oratory and rhetoric are “the Self escaping into the open.” To be more accurate, Strunk and White said that all writing ultimately exposes the true self, even bad writing. However, good, vivid, forceful, well-reasoned writing is an index to the essential sanity and moral character of the writer. According to the ancient philosophers, the same is true of fine rhetoric and oratory.

  Cicero expressed this with special urgency in his treatise On Oratory in 55 BC, when the Roman Empire was tilting toward civil war. Because demagogues thrive in periods of political and social instability—when a demoralized, angry, or fearful populace is most vulnerable to atavistic calls for vengeance and violence—Cicero deemed it an opportune moment to remind his fellow Romans of the qualities that make up the ideal orator, whom he describes as a supremely mora
l person, a cultured citizen versed in disciplines ranging from “language and literature to politics, psychology, law, history, aesthetics”—even “child development.”2 Otherwise, he said, “the flow of words is empty and ridiculous.” According to Cicero, the skillful orator achieves three aims: docere, delectare, et movere—that is: he (and in ancient Rome it was invariably “he”) proves his thesis to his audience, he delights his audience, and he moves it emotionally—although not through the demagogue’s resort to yelling and hate speech. Emotion is instead engendered by an artfully poetic and euphonious language that is part of a larger rational argument that wins listeners to a just cause.

  Cicero catalogued many rhetorical devices for persuasive public speaking; some aimed at supplying the liveliness and beauty that he believed necessary for holding an audience’s attention by pleasing the ear. These included alliteration, the artful repetition of consonant sounds (like the s’s in the opening of Shakespeare’s sonnet 30: “When to the sessions of sweet silent thought / I summon up remembrance of things past…”); assonance, the deliberate repetition of vowels (like the o’s that come later in that sonnet, “And heavily from woe to woe tell o’er/ The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan”); but also grammatical devices like asyndeton, the piling up of clauses with no conjunctions between them, which lends vigor and intensity to speech, as in Caesar’s boast veni, vidi, vici (“I came, I saw, I conquered”); or a device like zeugma, the witty use of a single word to modify two others, as in, “I broke the mirror and my promise” or “She played the piano and the fool.” Cicero also included a host of grammatical constructions, like antithesis, in which opposed ideas are expressed in identical form to make a statement powerful and memorable (like Neil Armstrong’s words as the first human to set foot on the moon: “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind”); and various rhythmic variations, each with its own term and definition, that strengthen oral argument by making it moving, memorable, pleasurable—and thus persuasive.