July 8, 2020 • 52 mins
For this first pod in a special Permission to Speak series on “non-standard” English (ie. how you probably speak... ehem), Samara chats with the linguist and scholar about African American English: why Black kids internalize shame about how they sound from an early age, what “standard English” even is and who the heck decided, and how all of our assumptions around speaking "correctly" play out on the grand scale (hiring practices, college admissions, policy) and on the small scale (within our friend circles, who we choose to read and admire and trust). This is the pod on antiracism you didn't know you needed.
More on Dr. Charity-Hudley: @acharityhudley on IG, annecharityhudley.com
Her Slate piece: slate.com/human-interest/2014/10/english-variation-not-related-to-intelligence-code-switching-and-other-ways-to-fight-linguistic-insecurity.html
Antiracist action if you're in CA -- learn more about ACA5, on the ballot this November, and consider a YES vote: latimes.com/california/story/2020-06-11/skelton-aca5-affirmative-action-proposition-209-california
Nell Painter: nellpainter.com
Kristin Linklater: linklatervoice.com
Killer Mike’s speech: youtube.com/watch?v=kSWasOhArfM
MLK’s final speech: youtube.com/watch?v=FmkwI5ItCFk
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Today's quote is from Kristen link Later, the famous voice
coach who just passed away a week or two ago.
She says in her book Freeing the Natural Voice two
bullet Points, She says the following two maxims should underlie
all work on the voice. One blocked emotions are the
fundamental obstacle to a free voice, and two muddy thinking
(00:25):
is the fundamental obstacle to clear articulation. Welcome to Permission
to speak. The podcast about how we talk and how
we get ourselves hurd with me, Samarbe. Today's guest is
(00:50):
Dr Anne Charity Hudley, a linguist and a scholar who
teaches at University of California, Santa Barbara. Now, some linguists
spend their entire careers tracking dying languages on remote mountains,
and God bless someone should do it. Glad they do.
But but Anne, she told me to call her. Anne.
(01:12):
An focuses on how the ways each of us communicates
shapes and forms society, and how society shapes and forms
the way each of us communicates, with a special emphasis
on the Black experience in America, what it is to
grow up with different dialects for different scenarios and an
inherent sense of hierarchy from good English quote unquote at
(01:38):
the top down, even though good English is arbitrary, which
we talk about here, and how this hierarchy is both
personal and systemic when it comes to hiring practices and
admissions and what she calls our cultures quote gate keeping ideals.
I wanted to have an on because you know, this
(02:00):
is part of the national conversation that we have to
have if we are serious about doing anti racist work.
There's a chance that we all all have biases around
accents of African American English. Whether you're a speaker of
it yourself and you have some you know, internalized ship
that Anne has done studies to track and talks about
(02:21):
in our conversation starting with four and five year old
black kids all around the US, or you're a listener
of African American English making snap judgments that you may
not even notice. This is the episode for noticing and
for thinking big about why exactly we love listening to Michelle,
(02:42):
Obama and Oprah and what to make of our own
it ellects, which is the very fancy word for how
each of us sounds different from every single other person
on earth. And how we got that way. Also, I
have to say, if you're a Californian to the show notes,
read up on a C A five. It's an amendment
(03:02):
to the California Constitution that is going to be on
the ballot this November and is wildly important to vote
yes on. This is dcor and Charity Huddley. Since you're
the first linguist on, there's a little bit of a
(03:25):
discussion that needs to happen of like, literally, what is linguistics?
Would you talk to me about who gravitates towards linguistics? Yeah?
So what is linguistics is something that I think about
a lot because I've been a lot of my life
teaching first year students, and if you teach first year
students linguistics in particular, it's often something they've never heard of,
(03:46):
and then you've got to make it sound interesting and cool.
So one of the ways that I really like to
think about what is linguistics is thinking about it as
the study of the faculty of the mind. So the
ability of the mind to understand and process language in
all of its forms. So that's communication expression, right, just
part of what it means to be a human through
(04:07):
spoken forms, written forms, sign forms, gesture, the body, messaging, signaling.
That whole thing kind of encompasses what we think about
is the study of cognitive linguistics traditional um kind of
the Chomsky and tradition of generative linguistics, right, focusing on
what does it mean to know a language? On into
(04:30):
modern ideas about language and human and digital expression and
the internet. Right, So like the linguistics of things as
you kind of think about it, then along with that
and equally important are things to me my interests have
lined in the second part is also language as a
social institution. So the ways that we then take that
(04:52):
faculty of the mind and organize it along individual and
community and societal kind of aspects such that they reflect
our communities and they reflect ourselves as an individual, the
ways we communicate. But they also because language is so
central to everything we do, and communication is really how
we form those social organizations. It's looking at how they
(05:14):
inform each other. How is the society reflected through the
way it communicates, But how do modes of communication also
shape and form a society. So that's kind of how
I think about linguistics, and the coolest part of what's
going on right now is the social cognitive overlap? How
do we then think about the ways that we know? Um,
(05:35):
I just know anything as human beings tell us, like,
how did you find linguistics? How did it feel like
that was what you were going to dedicate your life to.
So when I was young, I realized that I picked
up language and language varieties pretty quickly. So I was
more like into singing and acting and performing. And then
(05:55):
I was really fortunate to go to an independent school
to how Throns in Richmond, Virginia that offered a lot
of languages as just part of the culture of educating
right and um, you know, international focused southern women. That
was like what they did at the top now it's people. Um.
So then I was there and I was fortunate enough
to have a teacher there who was really more of
(06:17):
a professor. He had a PhD in Semitic philology, so
the study of like Semitic languages um from Harvard, and
I just really like got into it and decided that
I really I was interested in the languages, like studying
languages or something I love, but it was interested in
the way languages worked. And I didn't even have a
word for it outside of philology, which is a more
(06:38):
traditional way of doing that until one day I went
into an independent bookstore in downtown Richmond and I found
this book called How Languages Work. Basically the title was
like the Encyclopedia of Language by David Crystal, of course
David Crystal, and I was like, oh, this is what
I want to do. So, like my teacher was amazing.
It was totally supportive, but he was like more pushing
(06:59):
me in towards a philological way of thinking about it.
What is philological actually mean? The study is of the
sounds and like how it relates to literature and understanding
like the patterns. But I think the part that was
in the How Language Works for me was tying that
to today's culture and then the you know, back in
the nineties, like really when neuroscience was taking off. So
(07:23):
I realized like my interest was in that science culture
overlap well, which is so interesting because it feels like
that's so where you are today. It was amazing because
I was like, Okay, I'm gonna do this, and that's
like I don't care what y'all call it, right, because
people didn't go back and forth, Oh you should go
into neuroscience you should go into reading education, you should
go in to linguistics, you should go into literacy studies.
I was like, I don't care what we call it,
(07:43):
but here's this piece that's interesting to me. And the
practicality because I didn't really care which disciplined and I
was able to keep the practicality because I just used
what I needed to and you know, like I went
a different path because honestly, to be fair, I did not.
I went to Princeton undergrad that has a pretty good
linguistics department, and I did not know it. You know,
I didn't know when I was twenty that I was
(08:05):
going to end up in this realm uh bummer. But um,
you know, but I've tried to sort of like, you know,
followed pop linguistics since then to sort of fill in
the gap. But equally, you know, my in was like
getting an m f A In acting and wanting to
do regional Shakespeare. But nonetheless, since I was fourteen and
had a had a university level shakespeare teacher explained to
(08:27):
me how I ambic pentameter works and how that's sort
of the heartbeat of language. I've been in the you know,
different way in but same thing of like how we
talk is so revelatory of what is going on with
us emotionally, and we can sort of reverse engineer how
humans are and think based on what's coming out of
their mouth to some extent, yeah, and think about who
(08:48):
we want to be as humans. Right, it's allowing us
to expand ideas of the human imagination, the human possibility,
and the more that we had tuned to language and
communication about that, I think it has the ability to
not just say who we are, but change society for
the better. So this is interesting because part of the
interesting and complicated aspect of talking about language and how
(09:10):
we talk is this idea that, um, I guess what
I want to know how much you think of how
we talk is fixed versus always malleable and changing. Well,
I think that you know there. It's really an open
question still because we know that it's hard to change
the way that you speak without some type of effort.
(09:33):
Is the way that I like to describe it. All Right,
So language occurs naturally in context, So you're learning from
your verse, your your family, and then whoever your caregivers
are and your friends, and even that changes. So young
babies we know when they're babbling there at first it's
like all the sounds of the world, but even by
like six months, they're already restricting their babble to the
(09:55):
sounds of the languages of the people who are caring
for them. Yeah, so that's the early So if you
look at something like that, you're saying, look, your sound
inventory is restricted pretty early. But if it we also
know that if other like other languages, other people come
around them, children are very adept at then picking up
other sounds, other languages, and that really goes on through
(10:18):
what we call kind of the critical period through about thirteen.
You know, pretty naturally, if the conditions are right, kids
can learn language. But we also have much better evidence
these days about how to really effectively teach languages in
school environments and bilingual education and dual language education that
(10:39):
really extends people's ability to learn language, you know, for
a lot later. We also know that if conditions are
right for older people, if they are in multilingual, multicultural
environments where the language is valued, they're allowed to make
mistakes as they learn, and they're learning is celebrated. That
language learning can go on you know, much later and
(11:00):
even later in life and on an individual level. This
idea of an idiollect that all of us, I mean,
I'm always saying, because especially because I came out working
with actors, I'm always saying that our voice reflects our
life experience. And then you know, this word idiolect seems
to suggest that that's that every individual sounds different from
every other individual because of all the what you said,
(11:20):
all the picking up, all this, all the you know,
And I think those of us who are interested in
in performance or voice, singing, acting and linguistics, that idiollect
as a study of an indiellect is so important. So
I actually did my master's thesis on the idio elect
of Bessie Smith was a blues singer and really chasing
her performance styles, her singing styles as well as her
(11:43):
speech styles over the cross of her career. So one
of the things we can really see an indiollect is
how a person changes in both the short term and
the long term, but the ways that they communicate differently
to different people based on who the audience or who
they're speaking or communicating with is. But also how performance
theory comes in right, So I can intentionally change things
(12:04):
about the way that I'm singing in before I'm doing
based on who's who's coaching me, who is hiring me, Right,
Those types of things that that really help us see
that we actually acquire language naturally, but there's a lot
we can do to change them, manipulate both how we
sound and how we sounded different situations. And I think
that's really important is we kind of think about how
(12:25):
we co construct like our identities, right, is that it's
not all just natural and what goes in comes out
input in or input out models. But humans actually have
a lot of command over the big aspects like learning
a language, but a huge command owned the little aspects,
and that even includes like who you're talking to and
what you're saying and why we talk about code switching
(12:45):
a lot on this podcast, and I'm always, you know,
interested in helping people who don't have any of this
kind of background and aren't necessarily conscious of all the
stuff that's going on, about just how many different ways
each of us responds to people and communicates with people
based on the stimulus we're taking in on what's needed
in that moment. And I think thinking about that in
terms of what do we perceive as changing versus all
(13:08):
the layers of what's actually changing. That's why to me,
code switching is the parts of it that we notice,
either the speaker or the listener or someone else who's overhearing.
I do a lot with in African American culture about
not just who you're speaking with, but who else is listening,
right in terms of like that notion of being surveiled
or being watched or listen to in different ways. Um,
(13:30):
And I think what it's so interesting is that for me,
the cool thing about linguistics is I can analyze that
layer that's perceptual, but like the layer that I can
hear how I sound different when I'm talking to you
versus when I'm not doing a podcast. But there's a
whole lot of other linguistic detail that it takes. Um.
You know, you can measure that someone who's trained to
(13:51):
listen forward or thinking about different things can hear sound
changing in progress over time that even the listeners don't
recognize eyes and even the speakers don't hear. What's so
fascinating And like on pitch I'm sure also comes into play.
We're always you know, we go up and pitch when
we want to be unintimidating, and you know, like there's
so many little pitch like how much of a pause
(14:15):
we leave between speaking to people, or if we overlap.
I think it's a really cool one. The amplitude or
the loudness of our voice. I think it's really something
that we can all pay more attention to. And I
know we all hear what we think of as an accent, right,
So those kind of sound differences. But there's so much
going on. Even word choice. I'm really myself have been
(14:36):
always fascinated with which word we choose to use in
a given moment, depending on who we're speaking to, to
either kind of make ourselves more understood, sound more friendly,
or sound more educated in a particular situation. Total one
and one of the one of the aspects of English
that I hear is different from a lot of languages
is that we do have, you know, like four options
(14:57):
for every word, or at least two, you know, the
dramatic and the romantic, and then and then there's and
then there's others, and then you know, yeah, what gets
chosen in the moment. How much is it just about
trying to be as clear as possible versus trying to
you know, perform some aspect of your status or your identity. Yeah,
and I think that's what that performance is just for
me is so big with the lexicon. As you watch
(15:17):
people try to sort that out in real time, you
can kind of see it happen depending on what people
are talking about. So this ties in though, with some
of the more problematic aspects. You know, when I talk
about this with actors, when I get hired for a
TV show, what I'm hired to do is help. In
my mind, they don't producers don't talk in these terms,
but in my mind, I am there to help quote
(15:39):
unquote tell the story of these characters. So what is
revealed by how they're sounding? But obviously, um we can
also make assumptions about people's story based on how they sound.
So I'd love to talk about standard versus non standard
with lots of scare quotes around all those words. Can
you talk to us about what what this means and
how you think of these concept Yeah. I think it
(16:01):
is a continual social process that's happening again, and this
layer of either community or individual ideas about what sounds
either correct in an educational or professional sense or acceptable
in a more social sense. And I think it's a
process that will be going on till the end of time.
(16:24):
But I think about what what we really think about
is I call it standardized English, right, to really help
people understand that it's a constant process that you're you're
involved in yourself. You're making these choices as an individual,
and your your choices are also contributing to society. But
I do think this idea of what why we have
this idea is really important. Um as when religious groups
(16:49):
and organizations and the churches and the synagogues and the
mosques right and all the people who are in them
and lead them still can really control both language and education.
Um you saw a real fixed sense of to know
language and to understand it in a particular way was
(17:09):
to be more like holy. Right. This is a tradition
we see particularly in today Christian tradition that then led
into schools when schools were still run by religious organizations.
And so there's the sense is that the more perfect
your language, the more you're able to read the Torah
or the Bible in or or the Koran in particular language,
(17:33):
it made you more holy, more learned, and therefore more
closer to God. So the sense of what we're thinking
about in terms of standardized is then that Church interpretation.
That interpretation matched up with the rise of modern capitalism,
where in a sense, with modern capitalism you had to
make very quick choices about who was going to be
(17:54):
able to fully participate in that capitalist society and who
would be excluded. And so we see that along you know,
racial line, social class, gender, every kind of geographic location.
And one of the best ways to capture that is
through language use, so privileging the language of the people
who you wanted to privilege, usually white men, straight men,
(18:17):
especially on the East Coast in the beginning, as linguistic
standards UM. And so when you got those two things
going together, that's why people have such fixed ideas about
what standard English is, even though we know that those
narratives are false. Right, It's just as false as believing
that you would ever really fully be able to participate
(18:37):
in the capitalist system if you already aren't wealthy. And
so that's the trick of the process, right, So you're
always going towards something that is not real and that
you can also never acquire fully. So it's a lot.
So I mean the question is, you know, of course,
how do we um continually change that I'd love to
(19:00):
talk about your experience with four and five year olds. Actually,
if you don't mind, um, I read that you won
the twenty nineteen Linguistic Society of America Award for Linguistics,
Language and the Public for your influence on the classroom
experience of users of non standard varieties of English. So
here we are going really early and to four and
(19:23):
five years What was that, What was interviewing them like
and what did you learn? So it's so amazing because
children are experts at language, but the thing that they're
really expert at is language acquisition, learning language, and so
what was really amazing with working with four and five
year olds is you could see them actively trying to
learn language, trying to figure out what's going on in
(19:45):
a learning situation, and use the cues to still develop
their language skills in a way you just adults do it,
but just not as actively, not as quickly, and not
as necessarily. Right, we already speak our language, You've already
figured out some things about the world, and so it's
really interested in how black children in particular do this
(20:06):
in a school setting and what does it mean for
their acquisition of both their language but also their achievement
in school, all with the mind of thinking about how
is this socializing these kids to the world. Um So,
the way that the thing that I did that was
a little different was really start to look at them
not just as speaking in one variety of the other,
(20:27):
but their transitions really using experimental methods, mostly sentence imitation,
where you have a kids tell a story or say
a sentence or a mix and have them repeat it
back to you, so you can see how they process
on the difference between like what they would say naturally
and what they really see is something that they are
probably in a situation that they need to learn in
the school setting. And then using ethnographic methods to really
(20:51):
look at that whole situation, which kids were really struggling
and how could you really see it not just in
what they said, but through their whole body, their emotions,
which one's really into it and saw more as a game,
and which other students really were stressed out by it
and really had already a sense of how school was
going to define whether or not they were a good
or bad person. Right. So, along with those language pieces
(21:13):
that we saw, we could really see like the cultural
range and how black children, um we're trying to make
sense of their world, their identity, but also what school
was going to mean for them in the short and
long term. So that was really important, not just for
you know, learning about the children, but why I was
doing it is to share those experiences with the teachers
(21:33):
and their educators, policymakers, curriculum people who designed curriculum, so
they can have a better insight on how school has
an impact on black students overall. Through those language and
communication inter changes, I was really struck with, Um, you
wrote about this in Slate and you said, Um, many
of them were worried that just talking to me would
(21:56):
somehow cause them to be held back a grade if
they did not do well in conversations. You got it.
And so that already showed that they were really aware
of the vital difference in their language and the expectations
of school, and they were already aware of the ramifications
that it could have for them. And I would argue,
I saw and continue to see that they could not
(22:17):
figure a way out right, So without the teachers knowing
what was going on. They are smart language learners. The
younger kids were already figuring out that they were in
a situation that they could not win. Yeah, Okay, we're
gonna take a quick break and we're gonna come back
and talk more. I want to talk a little bit
(22:42):
more about you, because you know this conversation about four
and five year olds acquiring language. I wonder how you
think about your own voice story. Yeah, that's a good one.
So I am. I was born to African me Or
parents who grew up in the segregated South. My dad
(23:03):
was from Virginia outside of Richmond. My mother was from
Weston Salem, North Carolina, and they decided that what they
would do with their lives. Basically, I don't know if
y'all know this term. It is called well, they used
to be called race men. But it's like race people
to basically pick a topic and try to integrate something.
So for them it was medicine. For us as kids,
(23:23):
it meant neighborhoods and it meant our school. So um.
For basically all of my life, I hadtend it white
elite private institutions are independent so K through twelve and
then Harvard undergrad and then University Pennsylvania, and then I
did fellowships at Dartmouth and Yale. But I still lived
in this neighborhood. Do you have what do you have
(23:45):
against Princeton? My brother I went there, a clear cut,
clear cut because he was, like I told him, I
was a you so excited because he read about you
in the alumni magazine. Yeah, it was like I wanted
(24:09):
a different school than my brother. Yeah, I mean, and
you're that's how you think at seventeen, right, Like, I
don't think I have to justify that anymore than that. Um,
But I was the community that we grew up in,
which was was really where my grandmother was from, was
mostly all white, but the community's next to her were
all black. So we grew up in veryan of Virginia
(24:32):
and eastern Henrico, which at the top at the time
was mostly white. Now it's a lot of black people,
but Richmond, the city, and then the surrounding more rural
areas were black. So I was constantly hearing changes between
language in with respect to race and geographic location. Right,
I could quickly hear the difference between city and country
(24:52):
and the comments that were going back and forth, both
across groups and within groups. And as a child, that
really just fascinated me. I just could hear it and
sometimes I wouldnick comments and other people like didn't seem
to hear it the same, right, So are noticing that
it wasn't just me as a linguist, but that I
had an ear for language. And then I realized I
had an ear for music, right, for singing in particular,
(25:13):
and how the singing styles kind of mimicked what I
was hearing. Uh, And so that's really always informed me
as a scholar. It's like the differences that are like
really small. And then noticing in my own voice, I
guess probably by the third grade that I sounded more
like the kids in my school just about default. Over time.
(25:35):
Then I did my own community, even though I still
lived there, and you know, participated fully in other social
and cultural and family activities. And I was really interested
then and why that happened, even though it wasn't like
I was living in isolated existence. My parents were still
black doctors with black patients, and you know, church was black,
girl scouts are black. You know. It wasn't like I
(25:56):
was like someone who moved off to some suburb suburb
and never saw people at in especially as I saw
where I was living become more black in real time,
which was the point of them moving there. It wasn't
to escape, it was to include. And so I was
really interested in like you know, people would say things
would be more about just your disposition. Oh, you're trying
to get away from black people, and I'm like, no,
there's something else going on here. That's not just me
(26:18):
trying to get away from people, right. It has to
do with like how I'm being conditioned in school to
be successful. And then I realized more about what people
call code switching. It's like, oh, I could actually really switch,
but for me, it is really primed by who I'm
talking to. So that really got I guess me on
my path to focusing in linguistics and in my teaching,
(26:41):
first at the College of William and Mary and then
here at you see Santa Barbara on teaching linguistics to
large numbers of black students to help them learn about
language and to do this type of research, but also
as it lends to help them navigate their own experiences
and the world. You have this quote that I know
a few people have quoted you for saying, Uh. When
(27:02):
I was a grad student, I talked a lot about inequality.
When I was an assistant professor, I talked a lot
about diversity. When I was an associate professor, I talked
a lot about inclusion. I'm so excited to finally become
a full professor this week so I can talk a
whole lot about white supremacy. Yeah, it's been three years
of white supremacy the week three years ago today. That
what you know, my real focus now is thinking about
(27:24):
if we want to get a real you know, using
this particular moment in time, when people have been brave
protesting again during pandemics, to really get at their sys
systemic structural issues. We got to think about the ways
that we use language still to promote white supremacy in
all forms. Who sounds educated, who is able to apply
(27:46):
to different colleges and universities, who gets what particular jobs?
But unfinished business of the work that segregation and racial
oppression does is allows people to internalize those messages so
that they are not confident in the true sound of
their own voice. So that's what I've really been working on,
(28:09):
is really thinking about the externalized structural discrimination and what
that does to the black psyche, the black linguistic imagination. Right,
how do we think we're supposed to sound and why.
And I think if we really want to change things,
we've got to look at both sides of that at
the same time, Like, we don't want a whole another
generation of black students and people to be ashamed of
(28:31):
how they communicate and not even know that it's an
amazing object of study, primarily because it's mostly study in
elite institutions that they don't attend. Right, So there's this
weird thing in linguistics is that it's mostly at elite institutions,
not at places where black people actually go to college,
and larger numbers say that, again, what's it the what's it?
(28:52):
The elite institutions? Linguistics is taught primarily more higher resourced institutions.
So you get this weird situation where white people will
be like, oh, I know about African American English, and
I know about code switching, like in more elite circles.
But Black people tend to go to community colleges, to
(29:12):
your colleges, regional universities, historically black colleges, universities where they
are far fewer linguists and far fewer opportunities to learn
this information at all, just because of the history of
structuralized racism. And the history of like what was taught
basically at different places. So what are you doing about
all of this, because I know you're doing a lot.
(29:34):
The way that I think right now is the answer
is partnerships between linguistics departments and programs and then universities
that might not be able to completely fund like having
a whole ring was there, but having students work together
work online. We were working and doing this online model
before the pandemic. Now everyone's online, so every university could
(29:55):
be partnering in your online space to both teach students
UM but also to share information with educators, especially black
scholars who would love to learn more about this and
have a conversation about how does our information about African
American language and culture really practically and truly relate to
speech and hearing, education, communication, journalism, broadcasting, all these things
(30:20):
that we know our strengths, particularly at historically black colleges universities,
so that we can learn from each other about you know,
how how can how can we really do this UM
in a way that makes sense? But it's really just
that goes beyond just code switching models into the real
integration of the black voice, black sound, black communication into
(30:40):
our our daily lives, and then on an individual level,
for white listeners to start to notice the ways that
we accidentally, you know, when we're doing anti racism work,
to look at linguistics as well, to look at how
we hear people when we accidentally, you know, make either
judgments or just you know, in have internal biases that
(31:01):
we haven't excavated. I think it's important to really think
about how we make those judgments. But I think the
one that you can really immediately do is think about
the rational is the reasoning that you're giving for excluding
different people from situations, and those are personal situations like
if people feel like intimidated, or how do you decide
(31:24):
if someone's friendly, how do you do side as someone? Um,
it's kind of worthy of being your friend, all the
way through the ideas you give about why a piece
of writing or a piece of communication is either interesting
to you, worth your time to read, or worthy of
if you're in a hiring position able to hire someone,
like what are the rationales why you pick a particular
(31:45):
candidate or not? But I do think it starts on
the individual level. Um, if we're serious at all about
kind of thinking about real repair racial repair, we've got
to really examine how we're talking to each other in
real space and also right now in virtual space. Yeah yeah,
I was thinking you. You mentioned in one of your
YouTube videos hiring admissions and this great phrase gate keeping ideals,
(32:09):
but also, as you say, it comes down to who
gets interrupted, it does? I think, you know, the bigger
ones are these, you know, admissions and hiring, But I
think the way that we've kind of developed those criteria
are through our interpersonal relationships. Who do who do? Who
do we feel like we trust when someone's speaking or interacting?
Who do we you know, the ways that we think
about who would you like to who would you feel
(32:30):
comfortable being your neighbor? And why? Right, We're gonna really
start looking at the linguistic aspects of how those judgments
form just as much as these larger ones, because the
reality is most people out there are not necessarily hiring
or admitting people. Right, that's a small group, but the
larger societal decisions about how these things happen, we all
(32:51):
have a stake in that. And so why I like
to focus on that someone is so that no one's
left off the hook and like what they can do
well and actually the metaphor for admit day, like that
idea of like who you're letting in, You're right, is
that that's all of us could be personal and interpersonal. Yeah,
and also like I want to add into this because
I do some work for women who are running for
(33:13):
office for the first time. Also, like what our models
are of who a leader is and looks like and
can sound like. What's so ironic about that is that
there's really great research to show that if you're African
American and you are trying to break into especially white
kind of judgment circles of any type friends, right as
(33:34):
a teacher, as a colleague, as you know, a leader,
a politician, your verbal skills are over criticized versus what
we do for white candidates in that same position. Right,
So classic paper um out of Vanderbilt, Ebony g and
her team really look at this from the sense of
(33:54):
like Black people must sound educated, but we must still
be performers and people are really hyper critical. Whereas you
will look in any industry, not just politicians, but white
men don't necessarily have to have that same verbal rep parte,
meaning the expectation is not that they command the room
and be able to organize it basically as a function
(34:15):
of their being right. So if you think about these
linguistic ideals, you know, other linguists have really talked about
how there's not really room for quiet black people, or
more nerdy black people, or just ones who don't necessarily
have the same level of black elocution or rhetorical styles.
(34:36):
It's not to say that those aren't valued in the
black community, but what is also to say that those
are the ones that white people respond to, that make
them more comfortable, or make people have the sense of, oh, well,
this person is acceptable because they seem to be like
super intelligent, right right, right. I actually it makes me
think about this question that UM people have been listening
(34:56):
to the podcast for a while might have noticed and
I haven't und aligned it, but I have noticed it
myself that when I ask my guests, regardless of what
my guests own, you know, identity is to bring in
somebody for this third act, for where where we're about
to get to with UM, with somebody whose voice you admire.
A serious majority have been black women. It's the expectation
(35:20):
from Michelle Obama to Oprah, to my Angelou, to Alicia
Garza to Alicia keys. I guess I'm wondering if you
have if you have a response to that, because a
lot to say about that. Yeah, please, Okay. So there's
the good aspect of it. The good aspect is that
black women value verbal What I can think about in
(35:45):
terms of internal Black society, we value the verbal arts
using your language, using your communication to navigate a very
unwelcoming world externally, but then using language to nurture community
and sense of identity and since a purpose within the
black female groups. Right. So it's taking something that really
(36:07):
has it's like a it's amazing, wonderful thing that I
was trained and learned and you know, from an early age,
but really being able to also see what something that
is so good and invaluable as like a double edged sword, right.
And I think that's where the linguistics needs the performance
kind of thinking about this such that those ideals um
(36:27):
can also be relabeled or reinterpreted or reseen through larger
white society who have looked to Black people for both
comfort and caregiving roles traditionally, right, the tradition of the
southern black mammy and yep, and entertainment. Right. So this
is the whole thing of you know, why there's prominent
(36:49):
actors and prominent singers that you know, black people are
proud of. But then we also look at how white
people are interpreting the same music or the same actor
and seeing a very dear friend or having a very
different interpretation of like not as empowerment but as consumption
of entertainment. That goes back to the history of minstrreulty.
So I think all black people in the public eye
(37:11):
have really had to think about how they are walking
that line and how they are kind of interpreted across
groups but within groups. And I feel like Dave Chappelle
more than anyone, has really talked about that same sense
of thing. Look, I am, he's black from DC, totally
valued within the community, but started to get a lens
of like he wasn't how he was portraying his art
(37:32):
was not how other people were seeing the art, right,
So I think that's it's a good thing and a
bad and a bad thing because it's not really solvable
without a lot of a lot of distinct discussions. So
people like Michelle Obama, Oprah Winfrey, I think they really,
you know, they walked that line too, just in terms
of that interpretation Beyonce, I was staying there, but they
(37:56):
all give us a sense of hope, a sense of
something that could be for more people. Lizz Out to Lizza.
Lizzo was brought in as well recently. Yes, exactly, Lizzo
definitely isn't that same category right now where it's like
both sides like you can agree, so like let's agree,
and then those people really really give, like lift it up,
(38:16):
which is great by me. I'm like, I'm all for it,
but I just think it's interesting in the the complex
nature of how that's happened. There's this amazing Nell Painter quote,
yes that you recently threw out uh in your in
your YouTube video that said, um that that quotes her
as saying, what we can see depends heavily on what
our culture has trained us to look for. You got it,
(38:39):
and that's why you know you can see the same
thing and have totally different interpretations. And as black women,
we have to always be in conscious of double vision,
like how we're being seen and hurt in different ways.
But the key work that I think we have to
do if you really want things to change in this movement,
is to help people understand that on an interpersonal level
(39:00):
has to be change structure and policy, because as we see,
the United States tends to swing back and forth between
political leadership every eight years between hopefulay for But what
what we've never done is get at a larger sense,
Like the first civil rights movement in the sixties really
(39:23):
empowered black people right to have hope that it could
get better for white people. It was like a lens end.
But the next wave, if we want this to be serious,
we have to do the humanization on a more interpersonal level,
as we now actually live in in closer proximity and
can do that work. So it's not a critique of
what happened in the past. That was what needed to happen.
(39:45):
What I'm saying now is we have to put in
the next level of work. We can't just be kind
of slightly interacting each other with each other in the
workplace and in jobs and have a real expectation that
like policy is real, but policy comes from people's ideas
and ideals and comes from people decided to be in power,
and so to do one without the other, it's just
gonna leave like we're going to kind of be in
(40:06):
the same place. And I think that's why everyone's so confused,
is like, how are we in this place? It was like, well,
individuals have to decide to do that work, and that's
not what happened. Individuals didn't do that work. We just
hope that the policies would give enough economic stability that
we can overlook it. And I just don't think it
works that way. What's really valuable for me, and this
mal Painter quote is there's two things going on. What
(40:29):
we can see depends heavily on what our culture has
trained us to look for. Means we've got to continually
disrupt that. Yes, that's exactly it. And I realized as
I was thinking this over, the other part of it
is what our culture has trained us to look for.
Some of us are culture makers, you got it. All
of us are culture makers if we think about social media.
(40:50):
That's what's so exciting right now is our ability to
be those culture makers in a way that it's publicly
consumable without peer review or it. So it's really interesting
to see who people listen to him? Why? Yeah, and
what each of our responsibility is to, you know, bend
the culture towards justice. Okay, we're gonna take a quick
(41:11):
break and then we're gonna come back and find out
who you brought it for us to listen to. Okay,
we are back with dr and Charity Hudley and we
were talking during a short break, and I wanted to
(41:31):
bring the conversation here because you mentioned that the other
side of the celebration of black women speakers is more
complicated one when it comes to black men. Yes, I
think as soon as you have the blackmail voice producing
their own content, so when it's not an actor, right,
people like the voices of people like James L. Jones,
(41:53):
Morgan Freeman, in particular Samuel Jackson, but most of the
time they're listening to them and they're acting role. But
what black men have to say about us society is
much more realistic and much more threatening to a general
white ideal for many people. And then that that that
that wouldn't necessarily be their number one choice. Obviously, President
(42:16):
Obama is a broker of an exception and a broker
of that, but I think he at all times was
always thinking about this idea of how he's being viewed,
how he's navigating as a black man, but also as
a multi racial individual, someone who did not grow up um,
you know, in a solidly black kind of community in
that traditional way that a lot of those other figures did, right.
(42:39):
So that's a very different kind of performance style and quality.
Whereas the women, Black women have always been those who
broke it with whiteness, both for jobs. Historically, before you know,
black men were in any kind of real capacity is
able to work in white environments, black women went into
work as housekeepers or maids, as cares or children. Um.
(43:03):
And so we're always really conscious of this history as
computers of NASA exactly well they're in and when they're
not in a in a contact rule, I'm talking about
the first contact rules where they are talking to white people.
I think black women learned how to do a linguistic
style that is at the same time authoritative and definitive
(43:24):
and maintains their dignity and their humanity, but also had
to broker these economic and social realities. Right. They do
it for their children in schools, and I think now
obviously everyone's doing it um in terms of black community
and proximity to whiteness. But at the same time, how
do you do this in a way where you don't
(43:45):
you don't like lose your own self and you have
your own community practices. And I think people like Michelle
and Obama and Oprah or Masters are doing it where
it's understandable to all groups and makes people have a
sense of hope and dignity. But I do still think
there are people out there who are kind of consuming
them in the historical tradition of how black women's have
(44:06):
been consumed for entertainment or even for hope, right, to
make yourself feel better about yourself, like, oh, there's this
one black woman I like, right, we always think about
this notion of being someone's one black friend. Yeah, the tokenism,
And so it'll be interesting going forward. Whereas, whereas it's
not just people who have traditionally identified as women in
these roles, who will those voices d in the next generation,
(44:29):
I think will be really telling of if there's real
change in this area or not. So if you ask
non you know someone a black person saying their own
words mostly And that's why I picked today. I think
Martin Luther King because that's still mostly who people will say.
It's my argument outside of Oprah, Obama and Beyonce and
(44:52):
I think there are lots of local heroes and our
job is to like amplify those voices and think about
the linguistic and retort traditions that they come from and
how people are breaking new ground as well. I'm going
to actually link because you said that, I'm going to
link to Killer Mike. Also that the speech he gave
Killer Mike is an interesting example. The speech was amazing,
and then I went to go watch Killer Mike show
(45:14):
on Netflix and it was full of like strip clubs
and Atlanta. So already Killer Mark got gun from the
one speech to like a whole another persona. Now that's
gonna call into question all kinds of people's ideas, respectability politics,
both in general US society and black people. Um so
it'll be interesting to see will Killer Mike you know,
and marry as the voice of a generation or as
(45:36):
of other stuff going on there. Also hopefully that he
doesn't have to be responsible for being a you know.
But I mean, I wonder I didn't know that second part,
but it makes you think about like the code switching
part of it, like you don't know your room. I
was like, okay, this is really different than the speech, right, Okay, Well,
so thank you so much for for setting us up
(45:58):
with the with your Martin Luther King, but that you've
asked us to play. You know, we're only legally allowed
to play thirty seconds, and unfortunately his amazing you know
UM section that you referenced is longer than that. So
we're going to see what we can do. But here
it is. This is Martin Luther King's final address before
he was assassinated. We've got some difficult days ahead, but
(46:22):
it really doesn't matter with me now because I've been
to the mountain to live. Everybody I would like to
live a long life. Long tivity has its place, but
(46:43):
I'm not concerned about that now. Yeah, m thank you
for bringing this piece in. Well. I think it's particularly
relevant right now with a pandemic and the reality of
the immediacy of both the need for hope but also
of the fragility of life. I mean, many communities are
(47:03):
being devastated um in especially Black communities, Latin nege communities.
But everybody UM that I mostly know has lost one
or more people UM from coronavirus. Just depends on where
you live in the country. But it's spreading and I
think what we learned from this moment in particular, is
how do you use a voice, the sound of the voice,
(47:25):
and what the words mean. Two not just inspire hope,
but almost forced hope into situations where it's hard to
find some Can you talk more specifically as a linguist
about when when you say that that his that his
language is a language of hope, can you point us
to what you mean? So there's two things I think
(47:46):
as a linguist, for me, the multiple skills that Martin
Luther King had, but one that really resunds to me
in this moment is using a Black linguistic tradition of compelling,
using a voice to compel. So there's a couple of things.
It's the way that the rhythm goes for the voice,
but it's also if you notice there's a growl that
(48:08):
happens at the bottom of it that to me and
I think for any others, cues a sense of urgency
that is not just oh, let's hope and let's think
that things get better. But it is your job in
this moment to be a part of this and you
have a responsibility that I think again, and taking the
Painter model, if you've been trained to hear that you
(48:29):
know that that speech is also a call to action
and a call to a media action, and that's done
as a cue mostly in that speech to other Black
people in a very linguistic way. The other aspect of
that is um using a rhetorical style that indicates the
ritual of the black church experience. Right, So I'm gonna
use something that's familiar and real and in many ways
(48:52):
predictable to now take you into new territory and new ground. Um.
So you have to do that to me on the
linguistic level, but then that also has to be on
that emotional level. From the way that the voice sounds.
That's such a gorgeous closing from what you talked about
up top with uh standardized English coming from the churches. Yes,
(49:13):
and here is this other model that's coming from Black churches.
And when we hear this kind of litany, this kind
of list building that grows where the energy grows and grows,
and the momentum you know, gets gets written and the
audience feels it and grows with you. Yes, that is
from that tradition. And if you watch the speech, at
the end of it, the momentum he grows so much
(49:35):
that he actually jumped off the stage into the arms
of you know, some of his colleagues. Right, So this
is a call to action, that is a physical call
to action because in that moment and then those religious experiences,
it's never just about the sound. It's about the movement
of your whole body um and so it's like forcing
you forward. It felt like a whole body mic drop. Yes, exactly,
(49:57):
before that was a thing. He's like, I will do
it with I mean, everybody has to watch that. It's
it's just a four minute clip and at the end, yeah,
And I think that's kind of what you know, many
of us right now are paralyzed, right, We're kind of like,
what do we do when we go outside? You don't
know even what you can do in a day. And
then people are brave and they've compelled themselves through that
fear into protests that just grow and that that keep
(50:21):
going in physical space and cities, but now in people's
everyday lives. And so that same momentum I think that's
embodied in that speech is now palatable in the country.
And so the question is what kind of voices, what
kind of momentum, will keep that going forward. And I
think if you are in a moment where you need
to think about that that's a good speech to listen
to help you make a plan. Well, thank you, Anne
(50:44):
than such a delight. Thank you so much for going
to all these places with me. Good questions yeay yea.
And again for any Californians listening, we are going to
link to some info about a C A five on
the ballot this November and it needs a yes s
y s y s yes. Thank you and this is fun.
I can't wait to hear you. Thank you to Dr
(51:12):
and Charity Hudsley for joining me. You can find out
more about her in the show notes or on our
website Permission to Speak pod dot com. I don't know
if any of you guys have joined me yet, but
I am doing i G lives every Thursday morning, California time,
so join me tomorrow. Permission to Speak Pod on Instagram.
(51:33):
It's Q and A style, So send me questions about
this episode, about anything that's going on with your voice,
anything that doesn't make sense to you that we've been
talking about. I really really want to hear from you,
and in fact, we are going to do a mail
bag episode very soon, so I will answer your question
(51:54):
on the air. Thanks to Sophie Lichterman, and the team
at I Heeart Radio, my family and co Wort and
all of you. We are recording this podcast at various
locations around Los Angeles on land that is the historic
gathering place for the Tongva indigenous tribe, and you can
visit U S d A C dot us to learn
more about honoring Native land. Permission to Speak is a
(52:18):
production of I Heart Radio and Double Vision, Executive produced
by Katherine Burt Canton and Mark Canton. For more podcasts
from my Heart Radio, listen on the i Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite shows.
Today's quote is from Kristen link Later, the famous voice
coach who just passed away a week or two ago.
She says in her book Freeing the Natural Voice two
bullet Points, She says the following two maxims should underlie
all work on the voice. One blocked emotions are the
fundamental obstacle to a free voice, and two muddy thinking
(00:25):
is the fundamental obstacle to clear articulation. Welcome to Permission
to speak. The podcast about how we talk and how
we get ourselves hurd with me, Samarbe. Today's guest is
(00:50):
Dr Anne Charity Hudley, a linguist and a scholar who
teaches at University of California, Santa Barbara. Now, some linguists
spend their entire careers tracking dying languages on remote mountains,
and God bless someone should do it. Glad they do.
But but Anne, she told me to call her. Anne.
(01:12):
An focuses on how the ways each of us communicates
shapes and forms society, and how society shapes and forms
the way each of us communicates, with a special emphasis
on the Black experience in America, what it is to
grow up with different dialects for different scenarios and an
inherent sense of hierarchy from good English quote unquote at
(01:38):
the top down, even though good English is arbitrary, which
we talk about here, and how this hierarchy is both
personal and systemic when it comes to hiring practices and
admissions and what she calls our cultures quote gate keeping ideals.
I wanted to have an on because you know, this
(02:00):
is part of the national conversation that we have to
have if we are serious about doing anti racist work.
There's a chance that we all all have biases around
accents of African American English. Whether you're a speaker of
it yourself and you have some you know, internalized ship
that Anne has done studies to track and talks about
(02:21):
in our conversation starting with four and five year old
black kids all around the US, or you're a listener
of African American English making snap judgments that you may
not even notice. This is the episode for noticing and
for thinking big about why exactly we love listening to Michelle,
(02:42):
Obama and Oprah and what to make of our own
it ellects, which is the very fancy word for how
each of us sounds different from every single other person
on earth. And how we got that way. Also, I
have to say, if you're a Californian to the show notes,
read up on a C A five. It's an amendment
(03:02):
to the California Constitution that is going to be on
the ballot this November and is wildly important to vote
yes on. This is dcor and Charity Huddley. Since you're
the first linguist on, there's a little bit of a
(03:25):
discussion that needs to happen of like, literally, what is linguistics?
Would you talk to me about who gravitates towards linguistics? Yeah?
So what is linguistics is something that I think about
a lot because I've been a lot of my life
teaching first year students, and if you teach first year
students linguistics in particular, it's often something they've never heard of,
(03:46):
and then you've got to make it sound interesting and cool.
So one of the ways that I really like to
think about what is linguistics is thinking about it as
the study of the faculty of the mind. So the
ability of the mind to understand and process language in
all of its forms. So that's communication expression, right, just
part of what it means to be a human through
(04:07):
spoken forms, written forms, sign forms, gesture, the body, messaging, signaling.
That whole thing kind of encompasses what we think about
is the study of cognitive linguistics traditional um kind of
the Chomsky and tradition of generative linguistics, right, focusing on
what does it mean to know a language? On into
(04:30):
modern ideas about language and human and digital expression and
the internet. Right, So like the linguistics of things as
you kind of think about it, then along with that
and equally important are things to me my interests have
lined in the second part is also language as a
social institution. So the ways that we then take that
(04:52):
faculty of the mind and organize it along individual and
community and societal kind of aspects such that they reflect
our communities and they reflect ourselves as an individual, the
ways we communicate. But they also because language is so
central to everything we do, and communication is really how
we form those social organizations. It's looking at how they
(05:14):
inform each other. How is the society reflected through the
way it communicates, But how do modes of communication also
shape and form a society. So that's kind of how
I think about linguistics, and the coolest part of what's
going on right now is the social cognitive overlap? How
do we then think about the ways that we know? Um,
(05:35):
I just know anything as human beings tell us, like,
how did you find linguistics? How did it feel like
that was what you were going to dedicate your life to.
So when I was young, I realized that I picked
up language and language varieties pretty quickly. So I was
more like into singing and acting and performing. And then
(05:55):
I was really fortunate to go to an independent school
to how Throns in Richmond, Virginia that offered a lot
of languages as just part of the culture of educating
right and um, you know, international focused southern women. That
was like what they did at the top now it's people. Um.
So then I was there and I was fortunate enough
to have a teacher there who was really more of
(06:17):
a professor. He had a PhD in Semitic philology, so
the study of like Semitic languages um from Harvard, and
I just really like got into it and decided that
I really I was interested in the languages, like studying
languages or something I love, but it was interested in
the way languages worked. And I didn't even have a
word for it outside of philology, which is a more
(06:38):
traditional way of doing that until one day I went
into an independent bookstore in downtown Richmond and I found
this book called How Languages Work. Basically the title was
like the Encyclopedia of Language by David Crystal, of course
David Crystal, and I was like, oh, this is what
I want to do. So, like my teacher was amazing.
It was totally supportive, but he was like more pushing
(06:59):
me in towards a philological way of thinking about it.
What is philological actually mean? The study is of the
sounds and like how it relates to literature and understanding
like the patterns. But I think the part that was
in the How Language Works for me was tying that
to today's culture and then the you know, back in
the nineties, like really when neuroscience was taking off. So
(07:23):
I realized like my interest was in that science culture
overlap well, which is so interesting because it feels like
that's so where you are today. It was amazing because
I was like, Okay, I'm gonna do this, and that's
like I don't care what y'all call it, right, because
people didn't go back and forth, Oh you should go
into neuroscience you should go into reading education, you should
go in to linguistics, you should go into literacy studies.
I was like, I don't care what we call it,
(07:43):
but here's this piece that's interesting to me. And the
practicality because I didn't really care which disciplined and I
was able to keep the practicality because I just used
what I needed to and you know, like I went
a different path because honestly, to be fair, I did not.
I went to Princeton undergrad that has a pretty good
linguistics department, and I did not know it. You know,
I didn't know when I was twenty that I was
(08:05):
going to end up in this realm uh bummer. But um,
you know, but I've tried to sort of like, you know,
followed pop linguistics since then to sort of fill in
the gap. But equally, you know, my in was like
getting an m f A In acting and wanting to
do regional Shakespeare. But nonetheless, since I was fourteen and
had a had a university level shakespeare teacher explained to
(08:27):
me how I ambic pentameter works and how that's sort
of the heartbeat of language. I've been in the you know,
different way in but same thing of like how we
talk is so revelatory of what is going on with
us emotionally, and we can sort of reverse engineer how
humans are and think based on what's coming out of
their mouth to some extent, yeah, and think about who
(08:48):
we want to be as humans. Right, it's allowing us
to expand ideas of the human imagination, the human possibility,
and the more that we had tuned to language and
communication about that, I think it has the ability to
not just say who we are, but change society for
the better. So this is interesting because part of the
interesting and complicated aspect of talking about language and how
(09:10):
we talk is this idea that, um, I guess what
I want to know how much you think of how
we talk is fixed versus always malleable and changing. Well,
I think that you know there. It's really an open
question still because we know that it's hard to change
the way that you speak without some type of effort.
(09:33):
Is the way that I like to describe it. All Right,
So language occurs naturally in context, So you're learning from
your verse, your your family, and then whoever your caregivers
are and your friends, and even that changes. So young
babies we know when they're babbling there at first it's
like all the sounds of the world, but even by
like six months, they're already restricting their babble to the
(09:55):
sounds of the languages of the people who are caring
for them. Yeah, so that's the early So if you
look at something like that, you're saying, look, your sound
inventory is restricted pretty early. But if it we also
know that if other like other languages, other people come
around them, children are very adept at then picking up
other sounds, other languages, and that really goes on through
(10:18):
what we call kind of the critical period through about thirteen.
You know, pretty naturally, if the conditions are right, kids
can learn language. But we also have much better evidence
these days about how to really effectively teach languages in
school environments and bilingual education and dual language education that
(10:39):
really extends people's ability to learn language, you know, for
a lot later. We also know that if conditions are
right for older people, if they are in multilingual, multicultural
environments where the language is valued, they're allowed to make
mistakes as they learn, and they're learning is celebrated. That
language learning can go on you know, much later and
(11:00):
even later in life and on an individual level. This
idea of an idiollect that all of us, I mean,
I'm always saying, because especially because I came out working
with actors, I'm always saying that our voice reflects our
life experience. And then you know, this word idiolect seems
to suggest that that's that every individual sounds different from
every other individual because of all the what you said,
(11:20):
all the picking up, all this, all the you know,
And I think those of us who are interested in
in performance or voice, singing, acting and linguistics, that idiollect
as a study of an indiellect is so important. So
I actually did my master's thesis on the idio elect
of Bessie Smith was a blues singer and really chasing
her performance styles, her singing styles as well as her
(11:43):
speech styles over the cross of her career. So one
of the things we can really see an indiollect is
how a person changes in both the short term and
the long term, but the ways that they communicate differently
to different people based on who the audience or who
they're speaking or communicating with is. But also how performance
theory comes in right, So I can intentionally change things
(12:04):
about the way that I'm singing in before I'm doing
based on who's who's coaching me, who is hiring me, Right,
Those types of things that that really help us see
that we actually acquire language naturally, but there's a lot
we can do to change them, manipulate both how we
sound and how we sounded different situations. And I think
that's really important is we kind of think about how
(12:25):
we co construct like our identities, right, is that it's
not all just natural and what goes in comes out
input in or input out models. But humans actually have
a lot of command over the big aspects like learning
a language, but a huge command owned the little aspects,
and that even includes like who you're talking to and
what you're saying and why we talk about code switching
(12:45):
a lot on this podcast, and I'm always, you know,
interested in helping people who don't have any of this
kind of background and aren't necessarily conscious of all the
stuff that's going on, about just how many different ways
each of us responds to people and communicates with people
based on the stimulus we're taking in on what's needed
in that moment. And I think thinking about that in
terms of what do we perceive as changing versus all
(13:08):
the layers of what's actually changing. That's why to me,
code switching is the parts of it that we notice,
either the speaker or the listener or someone else who's overhearing.
I do a lot with in African American culture about
not just who you're speaking with, but who else is listening,
right in terms of like that notion of being surveiled
or being watched or listen to in different ways. Um,
(13:30):
And I think what it's so interesting is that for me,
the cool thing about linguistics is I can analyze that
layer that's perceptual, but like the layer that I can
hear how I sound different when I'm talking to you
versus when I'm not doing a podcast. But there's a
whole lot of other linguistic detail that it takes. Um.
You know, you can measure that someone who's trained to
(13:51):
listen forward or thinking about different things can hear sound
changing in progress over time that even the listeners don't
recognize eyes and even the speakers don't hear. What's so
fascinating And like on pitch I'm sure also comes into play.
We're always you know, we go up and pitch when
we want to be unintimidating, and you know, like there's
so many little pitch like how much of a pause
(14:15):
we leave between speaking to people, or if we overlap.
I think it's a really cool one. The amplitude or
the loudness of our voice. I think it's really something
that we can all pay more attention to. And I
know we all hear what we think of as an accent, right,
So those kind of sound differences. But there's so much
going on. Even word choice. I'm really myself have been
(14:36):
always fascinated with which word we choose to use in
a given moment, depending on who we're speaking to, to
either kind of make ourselves more understood, sound more friendly,
or sound more educated in a particular situation. Total one
and one of the one of the aspects of English
that I hear is different from a lot of languages
is that we do have, you know, like four options
(14:57):
for every word, or at least two, you know, the
dramatic and the romantic, and then and then there's and
then there's others, and then you know, yeah, what gets
chosen in the moment. How much is it just about
trying to be as clear as possible versus trying to
you know, perform some aspect of your status or your identity. Yeah,
and I think that's what that performance is just for
me is so big with the lexicon. As you watch
(15:17):
people try to sort that out in real time, you
can kind of see it happen depending on what people
are talking about. So this ties in though, with some
of the more problematic aspects. You know, when I talk
about this with actors, when I get hired for a
TV show, what I'm hired to do is help. In
my mind, they don't producers don't talk in these terms,
but in my mind, I am there to help quote
(15:39):
unquote tell the story of these characters. So what is
revealed by how they're sounding? But obviously, um we can
also make assumptions about people's story based on how they sound.
So I'd love to talk about standard versus non standard
with lots of scare quotes around all those words. Can
you talk to us about what what this means and
how you think of these concept Yeah. I think it
(16:01):
is a continual social process that's happening again, and this
layer of either community or individual ideas about what sounds
either correct in an educational or professional sense or acceptable
in a more social sense. And I think it's a
process that will be going on till the end of time.
(16:24):
But I think about what what we really think about
is I call it standardized English, right, to really help
people understand that it's a constant process that you're you're
involved in yourself. You're making these choices as an individual,
and your your choices are also contributing to society. But
I do think this idea of what why we have
this idea is really important. Um as when religious groups
(16:49):
and organizations and the churches and the synagogues and the
mosques right and all the people who are in them
and lead them still can really control both language and education.
Um you saw a real fixed sense of to know
language and to understand it in a particular way was
(17:09):
to be more like holy. Right. This is a tradition
we see particularly in today Christian tradition that then led
into schools when schools were still run by religious organizations.
And so there's the sense is that the more perfect
your language, the more you're able to read the Torah
or the Bible in or or the Koran in particular language,
(17:33):
it made you more holy, more learned, and therefore more
closer to God. So the sense of what we're thinking
about in terms of standardized is then that Church interpretation.
That interpretation matched up with the rise of modern capitalism,
where in a sense, with modern capitalism you had to
make very quick choices about who was going to be
(17:54):
able to fully participate in that capitalist society and who
would be excluded. And so we see that along you know,
racial line, social class, gender, every kind of geographic location.
And one of the best ways to capture that is
through language use, so privileging the language of the people
who you wanted to privilege, usually white men, straight men,
(18:17):
especially on the East Coast in the beginning, as linguistic
standards UM. And so when you got those two things
going together, that's why people have such fixed ideas about
what standard English is, even though we know that those
narratives are false. Right, It's just as false as believing
that you would ever really fully be able to participate
(18:37):
in the capitalist system if you already aren't wealthy. And
so that's the trick of the process, right, So you're
always going towards something that is not real and that
you can also never acquire fully. So it's a lot.
So I mean the question is, you know, of course,
how do we um continually change that I'd love to
(19:00):
talk about your experience with four and five year olds. Actually,
if you don't mind, um, I read that you won
the twenty nineteen Linguistic Society of America Award for Linguistics,
Language and the Public for your influence on the classroom
experience of users of non standard varieties of English. So
here we are going really early and to four and
(19:23):
five years What was that, What was interviewing them like
and what did you learn? So it's so amazing because
children are experts at language, but the thing that they're
really expert at is language acquisition, learning language, and so
what was really amazing with working with four and five
year olds is you could see them actively trying to
learn language, trying to figure out what's going on in
(19:45):
a learning situation, and use the cues to still develop
their language skills in a way you just adults do it,
but just not as actively, not as quickly, and not
as necessarily. Right, we already speak our language, You've already
figured out some things about the world, and so it's
really interested in how black children in particular do this
(20:06):
in a school setting and what does it mean for
their acquisition of both their language but also their achievement
in school, all with the mind of thinking about how
is this socializing these kids to the world. Um So,
the way that the thing that I did that was
a little different was really start to look at them
not just as speaking in one variety of the other,
(20:27):
but their transitions really using experimental methods, mostly sentence imitation,
where you have a kids tell a story or say
a sentence or a mix and have them repeat it
back to you, so you can see how they process
on the difference between like what they would say naturally
and what they really see is something that they are
probably in a situation that they need to learn in
the school setting. And then using ethnographic methods to really
(20:51):
look at that whole situation, which kids were really struggling
and how could you really see it not just in
what they said, but through their whole body, their emotions,
which one's really into it and saw more as a game,
and which other students really were stressed out by it
and really had already a sense of how school was
going to define whether or not they were a good
or bad person. Right. So, along with those language pieces
(21:13):
that we saw, we could really see like the cultural
range and how black children, um we're trying to make
sense of their world, their identity, but also what school
was going to mean for them in the short and
long term. So that was really important, not just for
you know, learning about the children, but why I was
doing it is to share those experiences with the teachers
(21:33):
and their educators, policymakers, curriculum people who designed curriculum, so
they can have a better insight on how school has
an impact on black students overall. Through those language and
communication inter changes, I was really struck with, Um, you
wrote about this in Slate and you said, Um, many
of them were worried that just talking to me would
(21:56):
somehow cause them to be held back a grade if
they did not do well in conversations. You got it.
And so that already showed that they were really aware
of the vital difference in their language and the expectations
of school, and they were already aware of the ramifications
that it could have for them. And I would argue,
I saw and continue to see that they could not
(22:17):
figure a way out right, So without the teachers knowing
what was going on. They are smart language learners. The
younger kids were already figuring out that they were in
a situation that they could not win. Yeah, Okay, we're
gonna take a quick break and we're gonna come back
and talk more. I want to talk a little bit
(22:42):
more about you, because you know this conversation about four
and five year olds acquiring language. I wonder how you
think about your own voice story. Yeah, that's a good one.
So I am. I was born to African me Or
parents who grew up in the segregated South. My dad
(23:03):
was from Virginia outside of Richmond. My mother was from
Weston Salem, North Carolina, and they decided that what they
would do with their lives. Basically, I don't know if
y'all know this term. It is called well, they used
to be called race men. But it's like race people
to basically pick a topic and try to integrate something.
So for them it was medicine. For us as kids,
(23:23):
it meant neighborhoods and it meant our school. So um.
For basically all of my life, I hadtend it white
elite private institutions are independent so K through twelve and
then Harvard undergrad and then University Pennsylvania, and then I
did fellowships at Dartmouth and Yale. But I still lived
in this neighborhood. Do you have what do you have
(23:45):
against Princeton? My brother I went there, a clear cut,
clear cut because he was, like I told him, I
was a you so excited because he read about you
in the alumni magazine. Yeah, it was like I wanted
(24:09):
a different school than my brother. Yeah, I mean, and
you're that's how you think at seventeen, right, Like, I
don't think I have to justify that anymore than that. Um,
But I was the community that we grew up in,
which was was really where my grandmother was from, was
mostly all white, but the community's next to her were
all black. So we grew up in veryan of Virginia
(24:32):
and eastern Henrico, which at the top at the time
was mostly white. Now it's a lot of black people,
but Richmond, the city, and then the surrounding more rural
areas were black. So I was constantly hearing changes between
language in with respect to race and geographic location. Right,
I could quickly hear the difference between city and country
(24:52):
and the comments that were going back and forth, both
across groups and within groups. And as a child, that
really just fascinated me. I just could hear it and
sometimes I wouldnick comments and other people like didn't seem
to hear it the same, right, So are noticing that
it wasn't just me as a linguist, but that I
had an ear for language. And then I realized I
had an ear for music, right, for singing in particular,
(25:13):
and how the singing styles kind of mimicked what I
was hearing. Uh, And so that's really always informed me
as a scholar. It's like the differences that are like
really small. And then noticing in my own voice, I
guess probably by the third grade that I sounded more
like the kids in my school just about default. Over time.
(25:35):
Then I did my own community, even though I still
lived there, and you know, participated fully in other social
and cultural and family activities. And I was really interested
then and why that happened, even though it wasn't like
I was living in isolated existence. My parents were still
black doctors with black patients, and you know, church was black,
girl scouts are black. You know. It wasn't like I
(25:56):
was like someone who moved off to some suburb suburb
and never saw people at in especially as I saw
where I was living become more black in real time,
which was the point of them moving there. It wasn't
to escape, it was to include. And so I was
really interested in like you know, people would say things
would be more about just your disposition. Oh, you're trying
to get away from black people, and I'm like, no,
there's something else going on here. That's not just me
(26:18):
trying to get away from people, right. It has to
do with like how I'm being conditioned in school to
be successful. And then I realized more about what people
call code switching. It's like, oh, I could actually really switch,
but for me, it is really primed by who I'm
talking to. So that really got I guess me on
my path to focusing in linguistics and in my teaching,
(26:41):
first at the College of William and Mary and then
here at you see Santa Barbara on teaching linguistics to
large numbers of black students to help them learn about
language and to do this type of research, but also
as it lends to help them navigate their own experiences
and the world. You have this quote that I know
a few people have quoted you for saying, Uh. When
(27:02):
I was a grad student, I talked a lot about inequality.
When I was an assistant professor, I talked a lot
about diversity. When I was an associate professor, I talked
a lot about inclusion. I'm so excited to finally become
a full professor this week so I can talk a
whole lot about white supremacy. Yeah, it's been three years
of white supremacy the week three years ago today. That
what you know, my real focus now is thinking about
(27:24):
if we want to get a real you know, using
this particular moment in time, when people have been brave
protesting again during pandemics, to really get at their sys
systemic structural issues. We got to think about the ways
that we use language still to promote white supremacy in
all forms. Who sounds educated, who is able to apply
(27:46):
to different colleges and universities, who gets what particular jobs?
But unfinished business of the work that segregation and racial
oppression does is allows people to internalize those messages so
that they are not confident in the true sound of
their own voice. So that's what I've really been working on,
(28:09):
is really thinking about the externalized structural discrimination and what
that does to the black psyche, the black linguistic imagination. Right,
how do we think we're supposed to sound and why.
And I think if we really want to change things,
we've got to look at both sides of that at
the same time, Like, we don't want a whole another
generation of black students and people to be ashamed of
(28:31):
how they communicate and not even know that it's an
amazing object of study, primarily because it's mostly study in
elite institutions that they don't attend. Right, So there's this
weird thing in linguistics is that it's mostly at elite institutions,
not at places where black people actually go to college,
and larger numbers say that, again, what's it the what's it?
(28:52):
The elite institutions? Linguistics is taught primarily more higher resourced institutions.
So you get this weird situation where white people will
be like, oh, I know about African American English, and
I know about code switching, like in more elite circles.
But Black people tend to go to community colleges, to
(29:12):
your colleges, regional universities, historically black colleges, universities where they
are far fewer linguists and far fewer opportunities to learn
this information at all, just because of the history of
structuralized racism. And the history of like what was taught
basically at different places. So what are you doing about
all of this, because I know you're doing a lot.
(29:34):
The way that I think right now is the answer
is partnerships between linguistics departments and programs and then universities
that might not be able to completely fund like having
a whole ring was there, but having students work together
work online. We were working and doing this online model
before the pandemic. Now everyone's online, so every university could
(29:55):
be partnering in your online space to both teach students
UM but also to share information with educators, especially black
scholars who would love to learn more about this and
have a conversation about how does our information about African
American language and culture really practically and truly relate to
speech and hearing, education, communication, journalism, broadcasting, all these things
(30:20):
that we know our strengths, particularly at historically black colleges universities,
so that we can learn from each other about you know,
how how can how can we really do this UM
in a way that makes sense? But it's really just
that goes beyond just code switching models into the real
integration of the black voice, black sound, black communication into
(30:40):
our our daily lives, and then on an individual level,
for white listeners to start to notice the ways that
we accidentally, you know, when we're doing anti racism work,
to look at linguistics as well, to look at how
we hear people when we accidentally, you know, make either
judgments or just you know, in have internal biases that
(31:01):
we haven't excavated. I think it's important to really think
about how we make those judgments. But I think the
one that you can really immediately do is think about
the rational is the reasoning that you're giving for excluding
different people from situations, and those are personal situations like
if people feel like intimidated, or how do you decide
(31:24):
if someone's friendly, how do you do side as someone? Um,
it's kind of worthy of being your friend, all the
way through the ideas you give about why a piece
of writing or a piece of communication is either interesting
to you, worth your time to read, or worthy of
if you're in a hiring position able to hire someone,
like what are the rationales why you pick a particular
(31:45):
candidate or not? But I do think it starts on
the individual level. Um, if we're serious at all about
kind of thinking about real repair racial repair, we've got
to really examine how we're talking to each other in
real space and also right now in virtual space. Yeah yeah,
I was thinking you. You mentioned in one of your
YouTube videos hiring admissions and this great phrase gate keeping ideals,
(32:09):
but also, as you say, it comes down to who
gets interrupted, it does? I think, you know, the bigger
ones are these, you know, admissions and hiring, But I
think the way that we've kind of developed those criteria
are through our interpersonal relationships. Who do who do? Who
do we feel like we trust when someone's speaking or interacting?
Who do we you know, the ways that we think
about who would you like to who would you feel
(32:30):
comfortable being your neighbor? And why? Right, We're gonna really
start looking at the linguistic aspects of how those judgments
form just as much as these larger ones, because the
reality is most people out there are not necessarily hiring
or admitting people. Right, that's a small group, but the
larger societal decisions about how these things happen, we all
(32:51):
have a stake in that. And so why I like
to focus on that someone is so that no one's
left off the hook and like what they can do
well and actually the metaphor for admit day, like that
idea of like who you're letting in, You're right, is
that that's all of us could be personal and interpersonal. Yeah,
and also like I want to add into this because
I do some work for women who are running for
(33:13):
office for the first time. Also, like what our models
are of who a leader is and looks like and
can sound like. What's so ironic about that is that
there's really great research to show that if you're African
American and you are trying to break into especially white
kind of judgment circles of any type friends, right as
(33:34):
a teacher, as a colleague, as you know, a leader,
a politician, your verbal skills are over criticized versus what
we do for white candidates in that same position. Right,
So classic paper um out of Vanderbilt, Ebony g and
her team really look at this from the sense of
(33:54):
like Black people must sound educated, but we must still
be performers and people are really hyper critical. Whereas you
will look in any industry, not just politicians, but white
men don't necessarily have to have that same verbal rep parte,
meaning the expectation is not that they command the room
and be able to organize it basically as a function
(34:15):
of their being right. So if you think about these
linguistic ideals, you know, other linguists have really talked about
how there's not really room for quiet black people, or
more nerdy black people, or just ones who don't necessarily
have the same level of black elocution or rhetorical styles.
(34:36):
It's not to say that those aren't valued in the
black community, but what is also to say that those
are the ones that white people respond to, that make
them more comfortable, or make people have the sense of, oh, well,
this person is acceptable because they seem to be like
super intelligent, right right, right. I actually it makes me
think about this question that UM people have been listening
(34:56):
to the podcast for a while might have noticed and
I haven't und aligned it, but I have noticed it
myself that when I ask my guests, regardless of what
my guests own, you know, identity is to bring in
somebody for this third act, for where where we're about
to get to with UM, with somebody whose voice you admire.
A serious majority have been black women. It's the expectation
(35:20):
from Michelle Obama to Oprah, to my Angelou, to Alicia
Garza to Alicia keys. I guess I'm wondering if you
have if you have a response to that, because a
lot to say about that. Yeah, please, Okay. So there's
the good aspect of it. The good aspect is that
black women value verbal What I can think about in
(35:45):
terms of internal Black society, we value the verbal arts
using your language, using your communication to navigate a very
unwelcoming world externally, but then using language to nurture community
and sense of identity and since a purpose within the
black female groups. Right. So it's taking something that really
(36:07):
has it's like a it's amazing, wonderful thing that I
was trained and learned and you know, from an early age,
but really being able to also see what something that
is so good and invaluable as like a double edged sword, right.
And I think that's where the linguistics needs the performance
kind of thinking about this such that those ideals um
(36:27):
can also be relabeled or reinterpreted or reseen through larger
white society who have looked to Black people for both
comfort and caregiving roles traditionally, right, the tradition of the
southern black mammy and yep, and entertainment. Right. So this
is the whole thing of you know, why there's prominent
(36:49):
actors and prominent singers that you know, black people are
proud of. But then we also look at how white
people are interpreting the same music or the same actor
and seeing a very dear friend or having a very
different interpretation of like not as empowerment but as consumption
of entertainment. That goes back to the history of minstrreulty.
So I think all black people in the public eye
(37:11):
have really had to think about how they are walking
that line and how they are kind of interpreted across
groups but within groups. And I feel like Dave Chappelle
more than anyone, has really talked about that same sense
of thing. Look, I am, he's black from DC, totally
valued within the community, but started to get a lens
of like he wasn't how he was portraying his art
(37:32):
was not how other people were seeing the art, right,
So I think that's it's a good thing and a
bad and a bad thing because it's not really solvable
without a lot of a lot of distinct discussions. So
people like Michelle Obama, Oprah Winfrey, I think they really,
you know, they walked that line too, just in terms
of that interpretation Beyonce, I was staying there, but they
(37:56):
all give us a sense of hope, a sense of
something that could be for more people. Lizz Out to Lizza.
Lizzo was brought in as well recently. Yes, exactly, Lizzo
definitely isn't that same category right now where it's like
both sides like you can agree, so like let's agree,
and then those people really really give, like lift it up,
(38:16):
which is great by me. I'm like, I'm all for it,
but I just think it's interesting in the the complex
nature of how that's happened. There's this amazing Nell Painter quote,
yes that you recently threw out uh in your in
your YouTube video that said, um that that quotes her
as saying, what we can see depends heavily on what
our culture has trained us to look for. You got it,
(38:39):
and that's why you know you can see the same
thing and have totally different interpretations. And as black women,
we have to always be in conscious of double vision,
like how we're being seen and hurt in different ways.
But the key work that I think we have to
do if you really want things to change in this movement,
is to help people understand that on an interpersonal level
(39:00):
has to be change structure and policy, because as we see,
the United States tends to swing back and forth between
political leadership every eight years between hopefulay for But what
what we've never done is get at a larger sense,
Like the first civil rights movement in the sixties really
(39:23):
empowered black people right to have hope that it could
get better for white people. It was like a lens end.
But the next wave, if we want this to be serious,
we have to do the humanization on a more interpersonal level,
as we now actually live in in closer proximity and
can do that work. So it's not a critique of
what happened in the past. That was what needed to happen.
(39:45):
What I'm saying now is we have to put in
the next level of work. We can't just be kind
of slightly interacting each other with each other in the
workplace and in jobs and have a real expectation that
like policy is real, but policy comes from people's ideas
and ideals and comes from people decided to be in power,
and so to do one without the other, it's just
gonna leave like we're going to kind of be in
(40:06):
the same place. And I think that's why everyone's so confused,
is like, how are we in this place? It was like, well,
individuals have to decide to do that work, and that's
not what happened. Individuals didn't do that work. We just
hope that the policies would give enough economic stability that
we can overlook it. And I just don't think it
works that way. What's really valuable for me, and this
mal Painter quote is there's two things going on. What
(40:29):
we can see depends heavily on what our culture has
trained us to look for. Means we've got to continually
disrupt that. Yes, that's exactly it. And I realized as
I was thinking this over, the other part of it
is what our culture has trained us to look for.
Some of us are culture makers, you got it. All
of us are culture makers if we think about social media.
(40:50):
That's what's so exciting right now is our ability to
be those culture makers in a way that it's publicly
consumable without peer review or it. So it's really interesting
to see who people listen to him? Why? Yeah, and
what each of our responsibility is to, you know, bend
the culture towards justice. Okay, we're gonna take a quick
(41:11):
break and then we're gonna come back and find out
who you brought it for us to listen to. Okay,
we are back with dr and Charity Hudley and we
were talking during a short break, and I wanted to
(41:31):
bring the conversation here because you mentioned that the other
side of the celebration of black women speakers is more
complicated one when it comes to black men. Yes, I
think as soon as you have the blackmail voice producing
their own content, so when it's not an actor, right,
people like the voices of people like James L. Jones,
(41:53):
Morgan Freeman, in particular Samuel Jackson, but most of the
time they're listening to them and they're acting role. But
what black men have to say about us society is
much more realistic and much more threatening to a general
white ideal for many people. And then that that that
that wouldn't necessarily be their number one choice. Obviously, President
(42:16):
Obama is a broker of an exception and a broker
of that, but I think he at all times was
always thinking about this idea of how he's being viewed,
how he's navigating as a black man, but also as
a multi racial individual, someone who did not grow up um,
you know, in a solidly black kind of community in
that traditional way that a lot of those other figures did, right.
(42:39):
So that's a very different kind of performance style and quality.
Whereas the women, Black women have always been those who
broke it with whiteness, both for jobs. Historically, before you know,
black men were in any kind of real capacity is
able to work in white environments, black women went into
work as housekeepers or maids, as cares or children. Um.
(43:03):
And so we're always really conscious of this history as
computers of NASA exactly well they're in and when they're
not in a in a contact rule, I'm talking about
the first contact rules where they are talking to white people.
I think black women learned how to do a linguistic
style that is at the same time authoritative and definitive
(43:24):
and maintains their dignity and their humanity, but also had
to broker these economic and social realities. Right. They do
it for their children in schools, and I think now
obviously everyone's doing it um in terms of black community
and proximity to whiteness. But at the same time, how
do you do this in a way where you don't
(43:45):
you don't like lose your own self and you have
your own community practices. And I think people like Michelle
and Obama and Oprah or Masters are doing it where
it's understandable to all groups and makes people have a
sense of hope and dignity. But I do still think
there are people out there who are kind of consuming
them in the historical tradition of how black women's have
(44:06):
been consumed for entertainment or even for hope, right, to
make yourself feel better about yourself, like, oh, there's this
one black woman I like, right, we always think about
this notion of being someone's one black friend. Yeah, the tokenism,
And so it'll be interesting going forward. Whereas, whereas it's
not just people who have traditionally identified as women in
these roles, who will those voices d in the next generation,
(44:29):
I think will be really telling of if there's real
change in this area or not. So if you ask
non you know someone a black person saying their own
words mostly And that's why I picked today. I think
Martin Luther King because that's still mostly who people will say.
It's my argument outside of Oprah, Obama and Beyonce and
(44:52):
I think there are lots of local heroes and our
job is to like amplify those voices and think about
the linguistic and retort traditions that they come from and
how people are breaking new ground as well. I'm going
to actually link because you said that, I'm going to
link to Killer Mike. Also that the speech he gave
Killer Mike is an interesting example. The speech was amazing,
and then I went to go watch Killer Mike show
(45:14):
on Netflix and it was full of like strip clubs
and Atlanta. So already Killer Mark got gun from the
one speech to like a whole another persona. Now that's
gonna call into question all kinds of people's ideas, respectability politics,
both in general US society and black people. Um so
it'll be interesting to see will Killer Mike you know,
and marry as the voice of a generation or as
(45:36):
of other stuff going on there. Also hopefully that he
doesn't have to be responsible for being a you know.
But I mean, I wonder I didn't know that second part,
but it makes you think about like the code switching
part of it, like you don't know your room. I
was like, okay, this is really different than the speech, right, Okay, Well,
so thank you so much for for setting us up
(45:58):
with the with your Martin Luther King, but that you've
asked us to play. You know, we're only legally allowed
to play thirty seconds, and unfortunately his amazing you know
UM section that you referenced is longer than that. So
we're going to see what we can do. But here
it is. This is Martin Luther King's final address before
he was assassinated. We've got some difficult days ahead, but
(46:22):
it really doesn't matter with me now because I've been
to the mountain to live. Everybody I would like to
live a long life. Long tivity has its place, but
(46:43):
I'm not concerned about that now. Yeah, m thank you
for bringing this piece in. Well. I think it's particularly
relevant right now with a pandemic and the reality of
the immediacy of both the need for hope but also
of the fragility of life. I mean, many communities are
(47:03):
being devastated um in especially Black communities, Latin nege communities.
But everybody UM that I mostly know has lost one
or more people UM from coronavirus. Just depends on where
you live in the country. But it's spreading and I
think what we learned from this moment in particular, is
how do you use a voice, the sound of the voice,
(47:25):
and what the words mean. Two not just inspire hope,
but almost forced hope into situations where it's hard to
find some Can you talk more specifically as a linguist
about when when you say that that his that his
language is a language of hope, can you point us
to what you mean? So there's two things I think
(47:46):
as a linguist, for me, the multiple skills that Martin
Luther King had, but one that really resunds to me
in this moment is using a Black linguistic tradition of compelling,
using a voice to compel. So there's a couple of things.
It's the way that the rhythm goes for the voice,
but it's also if you notice there's a growl that
(48:08):
happens at the bottom of it that to me and
I think for any others, cues a sense of urgency
that is not just oh, let's hope and let's think
that things get better. But it is your job in
this moment to be a part of this and you
have a responsibility that I think again, and taking the
Painter model, if you've been trained to hear that you
(48:29):
know that that speech is also a call to action
and a call to a media action, and that's done
as a cue mostly in that speech to other Black
people in a very linguistic way. The other aspect of
that is um using a rhetorical style that indicates the
ritual of the black church experience. Right, So I'm gonna
use something that's familiar and real and in many ways
(48:52):
predictable to now take you into new territory and new ground. Um.
So you have to do that to me on the
linguistic level, but then that also has to be on
that emotional level. From the way that the voice sounds.
That's such a gorgeous closing from what you talked about
up top with uh standardized English coming from the churches. Yes,
(49:13):
and here is this other model that's coming from Black churches.
And when we hear this kind of litany, this kind
of list building that grows where the energy grows and grows,
and the momentum you know, gets gets written and the
audience feels it and grows with you. Yes, that is
from that tradition. And if you watch the speech, at
the end of it, the momentum he grows so much
(49:35):
that he actually jumped off the stage into the arms
of you know, some of his colleagues. Right, So this
is a call to action, that is a physical call
to action because in that moment and then those religious experiences,
it's never just about the sound. It's about the movement
of your whole body um and so it's like forcing
you forward. It felt like a whole body mic drop. Yes, exactly,
(49:57):
before that was a thing. He's like, I will do
it with I mean, everybody has to watch that. It's
it's just a four minute clip and at the end, yeah,
And I think that's kind of what you know, many
of us right now are paralyzed, right, We're kind of like,
what do we do when we go outside? You don't
know even what you can do in a day. And
then people are brave and they've compelled themselves through that
fear into protests that just grow and that that keep
(50:21):
going in physical space and cities, but now in people's
everyday lives. And so that same momentum I think that's
embodied in that speech is now palatable in the country.
And so the question is what kind of voices, what
kind of momentum, will keep that going forward. And I
think if you are in a moment where you need
to think about that that's a good speech to listen
to help you make a plan. Well, thank you, Anne
(50:44):
than such a delight. Thank you so much for going
to all these places with me. Good questions yeay yea.
And again for any Californians listening, we are going to
link to some info about a C A five on
the ballot this November and it needs a yes s
y s y s yes. Thank you and this is fun.
I can't wait to hear you. Thank you to Dr
(51:12):
and Charity Hudsley for joining me. You can find out
more about her in the show notes or on our
website Permission to Speak pod dot com. I don't know
if any of you guys have joined me yet, but
I am doing i G lives every Thursday morning, California time,
so join me tomorrow. Permission to Speak Pod on Instagram.
(51:33):
It's Q and A style, So send me questions about
this episode, about anything that's going on with your voice,
anything that doesn't make sense to you that we've been
talking about. I really really want to hear from you,
and in fact, we are going to do a mail
bag episode very soon, so I will answer your question
(51:54):
on the air. Thanks to Sophie Lichterman, and the team
at I Heeart Radio, my family and co Wort and
all of you. We are recording this podcast at various
locations around Los Angeles on land that is the historic
gathering place for the Tongva indigenous tribe, and you can
visit U S d A C dot us to learn
more about honoring Native land. Permission to Speak is a
(52:18):
production of I Heart Radio and Double Vision, Executive produced
by Katherine Burt Canton and Mark Canton. For more podcasts
from my Heart Radio, listen on the i Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite shows.
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