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Seeming white

In the movie Sorry To Bother You, there is a reoccurring trope of the "white voice" in which the African-American characters speak in a manner that is stereotypically white in order to be more successful with their telemarketing. While this is a fairly unique idea within the books that we have read so far, it is by no means an idea that they made up themselves. One more example of this from pop-culture recently is a comedian named Josh-Johnson (I think he's come up in class before). He is an African-American comedian and one joke that he frequently makes is that he sounds white when he talks. One story he likes to tell about himself sounding white is about his search for a job. He says that when he is looking for jobs and doing interviews he always gets jobs when his interview is over the phone. Then he says that when he finally shows up to work his employers always give him a weird look, saying that he thinks "we both know what happened."
Anyways, this whole white voice situation just shows how much of an advantage being perceived as white can be in American culture. This is something that really has not been covered by the books we've read so far which have mostly focused on the way African-Americans are disadvantaged by American Society. Even books with prominent white characters didn't address white privilege in any significant way if they did at all. For example in Native Son some of the most important characters to the plot are white, however, the only mention of white privilege was from Bigger when he complains about white boys being able to do everything and the white characters in the story don't show very blatant signs of privilege (obviously they are still privileged: they have money, they're not discriminated against, they're safe pretty much wherever they go, etc. its just not as blatantly addressed as a lot of the other issues in the book). The only exception to this seems to be White Boy Shuffle that does seem to white privilege and especially how it is used by Gunnar because of the way his family is.  Maybe that means its something that people are only recently realizing (since White Boy shuffle is the most recently written of the book we read), or maybe it's just now becoming acceptable to talk about, maybe it's just not seen as an issue that matters as much, what do you guys think?

Comments

  1. Nina Galvez18 December 2018 at 18:15

    Good post! I agree with the fact that this movie has been the most explicit about white privilege. To address your questions, I think that people don't usually talk about it. If I had to pinpoint a time when people started recognizing white privilege would be when busing started. However, we saw the backlash that entailed. So I think it was known but people didn't like talking about it because in the past, there was a much larger group who supported the "whites have rights" movement.

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  2. Solomia19 December 2018 at 13:47

    Interesting post! We talked about this in junior history a little, but I think a lot of the conversation about white privilege began happening sometime after the Civil Rights era, as people realized that just because they were legally equal didn’t mean they would be treated the same way. We talked both in this class, and I think in junior history about this frustration boiling over and eventually causing the LA riots, and I think since then, people have been more cognizant of how privilege (or lack thereof) affects people’s everyday lives. I think now, thanks to the internet, people are much more aware of privilege in our society, and how much privilege white people hold.

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