Let’s Stamp Out Accentism
March 23, 2007
I recently wrote my first protest-letter to the American-based FOX Network. No, I didn’t rail against the network’s conservative bias. Rather, my ire focused on a cartoon-character: The Simpsons’ Indian American Quik-E-Mart manager, Apu.
I suppose I could have protested Apu’s stereotypical occupation, but I (reluctantly) gave FOX a pass on that. Instead, I singled out a more glaring prejudice: Apu’s exaggerated accent, I wrote, could only serve to fuel cheap ethnic ridicule.
One would think that this sort of stereotype — the verbal version of Jolsonian blackface — would have died away in our multicultural age.
But then I watch The Simpsons, That ‘70s Show, and the ream of “jokes” told at Gov. Schwarzenegger’s accented expense. No, for all of America’s multiculturalism, I’m sad to say that we haven’t (yet) closed the door on laugh-tracked “foreign” accents.
The truth be told, I wish I’d penned my protest-letter years ago. Inexcusably, I’d procrastinated. It finally took a sobering firsthand experience to break my inertia, plant my fingers on the word processor, and press a stamp to my FOX-bound envelope.
Just over a year ago, I signed a consulting contract with a large Korean conglomerate. Because the position involved vetting an English-education program, I needed to brush up on my linguistics. And because I’d be the only native English-speaker at the site, I had to steep myself in studying the Korean language.
It was this mix of theory and practice that finally drove home the cruel folly of “accentism,” which I define as “the act of singling out a person’s accent for unwelcome attention.”
My studies of how children learn language (”developmental linguistics”) turned up a striking, if unsurprising, fact.
As we all know, children are veritable sponges, absorbing everything they see, feel, or hear. But the converse is just as true. Thus, a child who never hears robust distinctions between “r” and “l,” or “p” and “v,” will find it well-nigh impossible to voice these consonants distinctly.
Hence, the common conflation of “r” and “l” in East Asia. And hence, to borrow an example I witnessed, a careless listener might think a Korean is asking about a “pizza,” when they really want to inquire about their “visa.”
But the phonetic sword cuts both ways. As a child, I was never exposed to the difference between a forceful (”aspirated”) “ch,” and a non-aspirated one. Nonetheless, this small-seeming nuance makes a world of difference in Korean: It makes the difference between saying “The cat slept,” and “I kicked the cat”! (I blushingly learned this lesson the hard way.)
Of course, I laughed at my error once I realized it. But I have to confess that it was a pain-tinged chuckle. It’s a dicey matter to master another language, after all; so it’s only human to want the errors we might make to be corrected with sensitivity.
And that’s when it struck me. How many hours have Indian Americans, Latin Americans, and other immigrants invested in mastering English?
Such efforts warrant our considered respect — not cheap “Apu-style” guffaws.
Now please don’t misunderstand my proposal: I’m emphatically not demanding that “Apu” or “Fez” be portrayed as speaking English like Tom Brokaw-clones.
After all, to homogenize non-natives’ English-voices would be a “remedy” as ethnocentric as the malady I’m targeting. But there’s a conspicuous difference between realistic characterization and mocking caricature.
Can anyone honestly believe that FOX’s producers don’t realize that their characters flagrantly cross the line?
I harbor no illusions, though, so I know that my plea will fall on deaf ears. But I nonetheless yearn for the day when an “Apu” or a “Fez,” can grace American television screens without being targeted for accent-based punch lines. Because racist ridicule, of any stripe, just ain’t funny.
Timothy Chambers is a professor of philosophy at the University of Hartford.
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