No, the word she was looking for was caucasian. Sounding educated doesn’t mean sounding white. You can sound educated and still have aspects to your voice that reads Black, which will then close doors to you.

Not at all, for example, you sound like an uncouth, uneducated fool. You also sound very white.

Cool article. As a child of the 70s, I chowed down a lot of tater-tot casserole. My mom did rather standard Southern fare (every meal was a version of meat-and-three, she did fried chicken quite well and the inevitable Sunday joint for lunch after church) and though she was pretty into cooking, practically every…

“In spades.” You couldn’t help yourself, could you? Just because you don’t understand AAVE doesn’t mean it’s not English. AAVE is not the “expressions of slaves and poverty,” it’s a cultural dialect. There’s a rich guy—you’ve probably heard of him—who can’t speak English worth a goddamn, and he’s literally the…

This is a perfect example of racial bias. You just equated “sounding Caucasian” with speaking “properly.” “Speaking properly without give-away intonations, expressions and speech patterns which allow people to...discriminate against you....” also shifts the responsibility to not discriminate to the victim of the…

people who speak poor English typically stay poor

Counterpoint: “sounding white” doesn’t have to mean “speaking properly.” Plenty of white people fail to “speak properly without give-away intonations, expressions and speech patterns.” I would know — I grew up in the Boston area. My whole family sounds white, but they sure as shit don’t sound “proper.”

It does pay...in spades. Everyone should strive for excellence, that’s not a “white” value it’s a human value. Speaking properly without give-away intonations, expressions and speech patterns which allow people to automatically discriminate against you before they even see you is important...

Speaking properly: check

Hmmm, it seems to me that people like you are the reason the quote works so well...

You do realize that assuming people of color automatically speak improper English OR that poor people automatically have heavy accents and spew slang is from whence this problem comes, right? That it’s racist in and of itself?

So let me get this. It’s called a dialect when you are white but it’s “ghetto-speak” when it’s black. How’s your American?

No, this is not how language works at all, ChickenMcBooty.

Go fuck yourself. From deep down in the bottom of my very own whiteness, go fuck yourself.

It’s not necessarily, or at least not just “sounding white” it’s “not sounding dumb/backwards/like trouble” ... Personally, I’ve had to hide my fairly thick southern accent to be taken seriously in the tech world. When I speak in my normal drawl, the first impression I get is “I bet that guy can fix my…

You know, I see the point you are (somewhat poorly) trying to make, but that’s not the point of this article. The problem is that too many people see “speaking properly” not as a “human value” but as a solely WHITE value.

So.....

WHOA! I just had a HUGE argument with my little sister about this. I told her I was able to finally get a medical appointment for someone close who had been getting the run around. I told her, “I just used my White-girl voice...” She went BALLISTIC! She said there is “no such thing as a white girl voice! There is just…

Of course you equate excellence with being caucasian...