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I don't know enough about accents up North to talk about that. I was only referring to AOC's accent in the speech I heard. She had a plain Southern accent and that's it. She was not trying to "sound black."
LOL I don't know why you feel the need to suggest that I read an article talking about not all aspects of black culture being bad. LMAO.
She doesnt normally sound like that which is the point that people were making. She adjusted here accent for reasons best known to herself and it just didn't sound natural.
The reason I ask that last question is because I have seen New Yorkers (non-white) move/visit Southern states and be told by the people in the South that they don't sound American, which always baffles me.
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Well if we are talking ATL a good number of the non whites moving from NYC are either immigrants, or the kids of immigrants, so their accents might not be fully "American". I include Puerto Ricans as "immigrants" even though they are US citizens, unless they are at least 2 generations Stateside born. The reality is that PR is more like DR or Cuba culturally than it is like the 50 states and many speak English as a second language.
I don’t have a drop of that bloodline in me, but I’ll be an “evil white man” till the day I die because of an agenda that I refuse to capitulate to. Very few “white” people in this country have a large proportion of dna from the specific nationalities that benefited from slavery. Which 154 years later is moot anyway unless that living person is a practicing racist themselves.
Tell you what. Go to PBS and watch the "The Reconstruction". You will learn that life for blacks in this country didn't become easy when slavery ended. In certain respects Jim Crow was even worse than slavery. Jim Crow (de facto and de jure) really only ended about 50 years ago and I bet you were around then.
You will be amazed at the amount of black assets that were destroyed or taken away by whites, jealous of the limited success that some black communities enjoyed. Look up "black Wall St" and Rosewood, FL. And those were the narratives that were discovered but many more existed. Many black communities were chased off, losing property and livelihoods, and then forced into poverty and unable to recreate what was taken from them.
And yes when the blacks moved North they were blocked from getting the better paying blue collar jobs by the folks from Europe. Black entry into private sector trade unions was made extremely difficult until well into the 80s, at least in NYC. This is why blacks are over represented in the public sector, which is usually low paying with fewer transferable skills.
And with the GI Bill and FHA inspired red lining you/your ancestors definitely received benefits that people whose ancestors arrived 100 years BEFORE yours didn't get. And then there was the gutting of many black neighborhoods when highways were constructed right through the middle of them destroying many commercial corridors.
So yes white (male) privilege is real. I dont care whether you admit to it or not. An analysis of fairly recent US history will show this and most rational people will understand these facts.
They CLEARLY sound like black guys. But there's nothing wrong with that, and they do speak proper English.
These men sound like most educated US born black men above a certain age.
Maybe one can argue that among the Millennial generation speech patterns are less distinct. Firstly because many of these blacks grew up in largely white spaces and the second is that many younger white (males especially) incorporate aspects of AA speech, even when not speaking vernacular.
But among GenXers and older there are definite speech differences. Maybe less so in the South as much of "black speech" is derived from the South and is maintained to a degree by their descendants who live elsewhere.
I have been told by linguists that black men (regardless of ethnicity and accent) have certain similarities in tone, this being a remnant of West African linguistic patterns (just like the US heavy rhotic accent is derived from certain rural English accents, so its no wonder that it is more a part of "white" speech). This being a deeper and fuller tone and less nasality. Note that when whites mimic blacks they deepen their tone.
Asians and Hispanics have their own accents as American born citizens.
Have you not been to Southern California, Houston or Chicago?
Or not even that far....listen to youth on the train...
Kids of immigrants either pick up mainstream white accents or some variety of "urban" English, the exact type depending on their educational levels. Older people of PR descent sometimes have that "guido" accent.
Its not a matter of her not being black. J Lo's (pre celebrity) speech was "urban" as one would expect of a kid from the Bronx. The issue is that AOC is suburban. If the Obama girls tried that they might look equally silly.
Now Obama does accent shift but he probably spent years learning how to do this and was able to because he lived within Chicago's black communities and so was exposed to the full range of black speech (educated to deeply vernacular). Michelle had to accent shift in the other direction as she had to reduce implicit bias against her as she moved into the corporate world.
Clinton, coming from the South, does this too. Again being Southern he is culturally closer to that Southern black culture, so can pull it off. One of the oddities of the South is even though an odious pattern of legal segregation was installed there was tremendous cultural interchange (BOTH DIRECTIONS).
Maybe that is why the white oligarchs insisted in legal segregation as without it the racial hierarchy couldn't have been maintained, given that legions of whites were also poor. Its without a debt that Southern presidents like Clinton, Carter and even GW Bush moved more easily among blacks than do people like Elizabeth Warren or Kerry or Bush Sr.
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