Dialect, Affect, Culture, and Racism

I was delighted to see this observation from James McWhorter at Atlantic:

Many will answer with what can be summed up with the grand old mantra, “If you’re white, you’re all right, if you’re brown, stick around, but if you’re black, get back.” The idea is that animus against black Americans—as opposed to Latinos or Asians—is so profound as to stanch striving. But that line is a tad elderly now, and the success since the 1970s of so many Caribbean and African immigrants—richly familiar with racism—has shown its obsolescence. In Ivy League institutions, typically almost half of black students come from immigrant families, despite such students representing less than 15 percent of the general black population of people their age.

That is the dirty secret of racial set-asides and preferences. Rather than going to the inner city or rural American blacks for whom they were presumably intended, far too frequently the beneficiaries of those programs have been Caribbean or African blacks. White Americans have enough sins of their own ancestors for which to atone. We should not feel that we are responsible for the sins of the English, French, and Spanish as well.

This is not a new observation. Those on the front lines of integration and desegregation pointed it out 40 years ago and were frequently shouted down.

But I was mortified to see this:

Okay, first-generation Americans have, as it’s often phrased, a “pluck” one can’t expect native-born blacks to have as often. But to insist that native-born blacks require whites’ love in a way that Nigerian newcomers do not would seem to claim weakness as a birthright.

How an intelligent, well-educated American black man can write such drivel in the 21st century baffles me. Immigrant pluck as an explanation for why some Caribbean and many African blacks prosper here while American blacks, the descendants of Southern slaves, so frequently do not is BS. The reality is that that dialect, affect, and culture make a difference. There are still some knuckle-dragging whites for whom skin color alone is all that matters but many, many more white Americans find black folk with British or Jamaican or Nigerian accents charming, superior even.

It’s not merely speech. The metalinguistic features of communication—certain non-verbal signals—that accompany Standard Black English are well-known. Things like communication distance, volume, pitch, and eye contact. And they keep black folk down.

That’s why I weep when I hear people being denounced for “acting white”. I don’t ask that American blacks act white but in order to prosper they need to communicated effectively with white folk who may have visceral reactions to SBE and its metalinguistic features.