The song of my people...

Here's a song for Music Thursdays. I love this song. I am going to post it twice, but the first time you only need to listen to it for about a minute and a half, so you can hear him singing. But it's such a great song, you may just want to listen to it the whole way through twice.



I first heard this song on one of my Pandora stations. I then went to youtube and found the official music video that you can watch below:



At about 23 seconds is when I yelled to my husband, "Wait, this is a white guy?!"

Did you have the same reaction? Sam Sparro sounds like a black guy to me.

So, what does it mean to sound like a black guy (or a black person?) I've been thinking about this quite a bit in preparation for writing this post, and I've narrowed it down to two things.

You can sound like a black person if you talk like our friend Antoine, meaning you pronounce your words a certain way or have a distinctive (usually Southern sounding) drawl. Click the link if you don't know who Antoine is. You can also sound like a black person if you structure your sentences in a distinctive way (think Ebonics.)

But, you can also sound like a black person even if you enunciate the endings of your words, and structure your sentences in the way that we are taught to in school. Black people's voices seem to be generally deeper than white people's. Or maybe they just have a different timbre. Maybe black people's vocal cords are longer or looser or something. I have a theory that some white women artificially increase the pitch of their voice in order to seem happy, non-threatening or something similar. Not basing that last statement on anything other than my own personal experiences; not trying to piss anyone off.

So, is it bad/racist/racish to think that you can tell a someone's race just from hearing their voice? Is it bad/racist/racish to say someone sounds black or sounds white?

Well, I wouldn't have a problem with someone telling me that I sounded black if it were for reasons related to the quality of my voice. And I don't think that anyone would ever say that I sounded black because I don't pronounce the endings of my words. As I wrote here before, I'm sure there are many people who think that I probably talk like a white person.

But this is the problem: a white person telling me that I sound like a white person is not a compliment, and a black person telling me I sound like a white person is not an insult (even though that is how each comment is intended.)

I talk the way that I talk. And since I am black, I would say that means I talk like a black person. Antoine talks the way that he talks, and since he's black, that means that he talks like a black person too.

Do more black people talk like Antoine than talk like me? I don't know. But I do know that Antoine's manner of speaking is much more commonly accepted as the black way of speaking than mine is. That is troublesome to me because it serves to create division among black people about who is truly black. Time spent on that is time not spent on changing the things in that documentary I shared my last post.

Are Antoine's professional opportunities limited by the way that he speaks? Probably.

And who shoulders the responsibility for that--Antoine? Or the person doing the hiring? Should he change the way he speaks (something that is a big part of a person's identity,) if he wants to get a job at State Farm? (that was just the first corporation that came to mind.) Or should corporations embrace a wider range of ways to speak, in an effort to celebrate diversity?

All right, I feel like I am kind of rambling now. But I wanted to leave you with a few more questions.

Do you feel like you can tell a person's race just from hearing their voice? Like, if two people read Mary had a Little Lamb, could you tell who was white and who was black?

If you're not white or black, can you tell if other people are the same race as you, even if they don't have a stereotypical accent? If so, how?

Have you ever thought someone was one race, and then met them in person, and found out they were another? What happened? How did you handle it?

Feel free to answer any, all, or none of my questions in the comments. You can even ask some of your own.

Laters.

Who owns the fisheries?

Hi y'all.

It's been a minute. I haven't been posting, and unlike most times when I haven't been posting, I also haven't been reading other blogs. So if I'm a regular commenter on your blog, don't worry. Your content didn't suddenly get super boring.

Today, I wanted to talk about an example from popular culture that I think is a good example of structural racism. Structural classism could probably apply too.

Like this previous post, the idea for today's post came to me as I was watching an episode of CBS Sunday Morning . Seriously, why I haven't I been watching that show my whole life? I really like it.

The segment in question was a profile on The Gregory Brothers. Even if that name doesn't sound familiar, it is likely that you have seen some of their work. This family takes news clips and then autotunes them and turns them into songs. They're really big on youtube. I was gonna put up one of their videos right now, but I think it would be better to first put up a news clip, so you can see the raw materials that they're working with:



Okay and now here's the song that they made:



Now here is the point in the post where someone is thinking, "Oh, I know what is going to happen next. Myblackfriend is going to tell us all about the evil white people and how bad they are for exploiting the black man from the projects."

WRONG.

Now, I'll admit I did think that was the direction we were going when I first started watching the segment on Sunday Morning. But then I heard the brothers say that they split the proceeds of all their song downloads with the person featured. I think that is honorable. Especially because there is probably a way that the siblings could have used some legal maneuvering to get out of paying the subjects of the videos anything. And it appears to be something that they really want viewers to know, because did you see how they made it very clear in the second video above?

So, I have to say I don't have a problem with them making money off the colorful characters from news broadcasts, primarily because they are splitting the profits 50/50.

However...

remember in this post when I said that black people own 1% of the wealth in the United States, which is the exact same percentage they owned at the end of The Civil War, 140 someodd years ago? The Gregory Brothers and Antoine Dodson are an illustration of one of the reasons that that is the case.

You see, The Gregory Brothers don't have this one song download that they're making money off of, they have hundreds of millions of views of their videos on youtube. They have an app for your phone that will autotune whatever you say. They also tour, and sell Gregory Siblings merchandise. They are working on a pilot for a show on Comedy Central. Something tells me they are not splitting the profits from all of these other revenue streams with anyone but people whose last name is Gregory.

So Antoine gets a nice chunk of change for being funny on the news, and the siblings get even nicer, even larger chunks of change for coming up with the whole idea.

Which leads me to my next point--how did they come up with this idea anyway? Realize the next paragraph is pure speculation. But if I can't speculate and put out potentially incorrect information on the internet--where else am I supposed to do it?

So my theory is that the brothers have been interested in computers and audio stuff for awhile, let's say starting in middle school. They had parents that had the means and/or went to schools that had the facilities to allow them to cultivate their talents. And since public schools are financed primarily by property taxes, people who live in housing owned by the government (like Antoine,) probably don't have schools with nice A/V departments. So people like Antoine aren't thinking "Hey, I'm gonna mess around with this soundboard, and 15 years from now I am going to think of something that's going to make me and my brothers a lot of money!"

I just want to be clear that I am not hating on The Gregory Brothers. They had an idea, and since they live in this great country that is the United States, they were
able to turn that idea into money.

What I am saying is that there were structures in place that made it much more likely that they would be the ones making the video and Antoine would be the one in the video, instead of the other way around.

Which leads me to the title of this post. You know that saying about give a man a fish vs. teach a man to fish? What happened in this situation?

I personally think it's somewhere in the middle. They didn't give Antoine a fish, because he did do something. But I don't think they taught him how to fish either, because the brothers are in the process of building an empire that Antoine is not a part of. I mean, Antoine wasn't the one being interviewed on CBS Sunday Morning.

I hope that Antoine is able to take the fame and money that he receives from the song and parlay it into financial security and for him and his family. And I also hope that we as a society can take a closer look at situations like this one, and figure out a way that generations from now we won't have a really good idea of who's playing what role based on the color of their skin.

There are a lot of other questions that can be discussed (this whole thing started because of an attempted rape--what's funny about that? Does Antoine make black people look bad because he's keepin' it real? The newsclip has way more views than the song--who's making money off of that?) But I am going to end it here.

As always, I would love to hear your thoughts. So don't be shy; leave me a comment.