Hi, my name is Marvin, and I’m a black guy with a white-sounding voice.
At least that’s what people have told me for so many years. So many, many years.
It’s OK. I’m aware of this. And hey, by now I have to agree that, no, I don’t have what would be considered a typically black voice.
Different folks sound different ways, but there’s nothing particular about my voice most times to illustrate my race.
It falls into a combination of grammar, diction and tone that the general public doesn’t associate with black men. Which is OK to discuss smartly. But there’s a thin line between frank discussions about race in our lives, and expressing bigotry.
The non-bigoted bit is about the tones of speech and generalities among specific people. The bigoted bit comes in when someone affixes value to one group over another based on that voice. Or when one voice is deemed more authentic than another.
A lot of comments I’ve heard about my voice fall on bigoted side. I’ve heard “You don’t sound black” from white people, as if I’m supposed to sound like 50 Cent or something. (No one ever thinks Paul Robeson, Don Cheadle or Neil deGrasse Tyson, right?) Even if the comment is good-natured, saying “He’s so well spoken!” and “He’s so articulate!” sound as if I’m supposed to be incapable of doing so. As if I’m lacking some amount of blackness based on grammar and diction choices.
What stung more, however, were comments from other black kids growing up who said I was “talking white.” It’s different hearing it from your own people, even if we were just a bunch of inexperienced kids. It was sadder because I was hearing prejudice and bigotry turned inwards. I heard people buying into a lie that was built to hurt them.
And that pressure doesn’t really go away, competing in this authenticity contest. Keegan Michael Key and Jordan Peele, blerds and white-sounding black guys themselves, joke about ratcheting up a more black-sounding voice around other black people.
Despite its satirical point of view, Spike Lee’s film Bamboozled has its race-dodging black male protagonist speaking in this cartoonish voice that’s meant to say from the get-go that he’s not comfortable being black.
About the tone of my voice, as usual when Americans discuss black-white racial comparison, it comes down to how much bass you use. Think of every time you’ve heard a white guy imitating a black man’s voice. Nine times out of 10, you’ve heard some extra bass thrown in there.
And when you hear a black man imitating a white man’s voice, the treble often goes way up, right? Just like our music!
For me, the bass just isn’t there most of the time. Sorry, folks. There are times that it is, and times that it’s not. I’m not Urkel pipsqueak-y or rocking a Professor Frink warbling, but I’m right in the middle.
One time in class at Harvard, Henry Louis Gates Jr. – the famed head of the school’s also-famed Afro-American studies department – told a story about how disappointed he was over hearing a recording of W.E.B. Du Bois.
He was so psyched to hear the W.E.B. Du Bois at last! The original scholar of black American history and people! Coiner of the double consciousness of black identity! Basically, one of the blackest dudes of all time.
And, lo and behold, he sounded less like James Earl Jones, and more like Teddy Roosevelt, his voice reedy and high-pitched. Of course he did! DuBois sounded like any Victorian-age educated man, which he was.
And so my voice is a product of my life. The West Philadelphia inner city that I came from then got mixed in with suburban prep school and an Ivy League education. From all-black to mostly white to everyone-in-the-mix, to a professional world that’s mostly white.
Is my voice any different than any other cross-cultural life where people don’t grow up in a homogenous fashion?
What of a Congolese man who grew up in England, a man of Chinese ethnicity from Jamaica, or Italian-Scotsman IndyCar driver Dario Franchitti?
So there it is. I’ll never have a more classically black voice. Just won’t happen.
But sometimes it would be cool to have one. I wish I could sound like Dennis Haysbert.
My brother does, lucky devil. Or the gleeful crustiness of Redd Foxx. The stentorian bite of Spike Lee or Stephen A. Smith. Charles Barkley’s throaty bear in the woods. Or the gentle smoothness of Raphael Saadiq. The crackle-and-pop of Katt Williams.
Bill Cosby’s normal speaking voice, which belies the same North Philadelphia neighborhoods in which my father grew up.
Or at the very least, be like Saturday Night Live actor Jay Pharoah, who has made a career out of replicating black men’s voices from Jay-Z to Obama to that school principal who sounds like every elderly black man rolled into one.
But I’ll just be me with my blerd voice. I’m happy with it. And at least these days folks tell me I have a voice for radio.
Maybe one day I’ll give that a shot.
