“White Voice”: Code Switching for Success

My mother named me Enjonai Jenkins. It's obvious that whenever my name has come across the desk of any employer, teacher, or Census worker, these people were not fooled into thinking my race was anything other than ‘Black, African American.’ I didn’t grow up knowing the lack of race anonymity in comparison to my peers due to my moniker, but once I grew to that conclusion, I simply utilized the resources that I had at my disposal to influence deceive those who I needed in my favor. My biggest weapon was my “white voice.”

It didn’t start off that way though. I didn’t particularly notice that I “talked white” until I was well into elementary school. Oddly enough, the first person to point it out was the same person who forced proper enunciation on me as I grew up, my dad. “Why do you talk so white? You talk so fast, just like a little white girl,” he would pester as my voice rang out in flute-like melodies and the words sprinted through my open lips. Apparently, the only comparable voice that my dad could associate with mine was that of a California valley girl – I always hated when he said it.

And it wasn’t my fault! For my entire educational career, I was surrounded by peers of many ethnicities – although each ethnicity, together as a group, still made up the minority population to the white students’ majority. I didn’t base the way that I spoke from one type of dialect or language for that matter, so when my fellow brown-skinned peers began to classify my voice as “white” as well, it hurt. I never understood how speaking eloquently equated to talking “white.” Did that mean that speaking in any other fashion diminish the quality of the conversation?  Did the dragging out of words while chopping off the -G’s in gerunds mean that one was talking “black” and therefore stupidly?

I became more aware of the way I would change the pitch of my voice and the elocution of my words whenever I was at school, more so around my teachers or authoritarian figures. It dawned on me that I might have been “talking white.”

It’s been dubbed “code-switching” – the practice of shifting the languages you use or the way you express yourself in your conversations. I felt more comfortable displaying the slow drawl of my Callahan lineage when around people of color, while I spoke with more precision around white folk. I found that people would receive the same information more pleasantly if it was delivered in my white voice. I realized that with the voice, I got my way, but without it, I was denied in most of my endeavors.

It was as if I was internalizing the notion that black people won’t get a fair chance – the less black I make myself sound, the better my chances were at getting anything that a white person could. And in a way, it’s a common theme in a black person’s life.

Sorry to Bother You examines that theme, along with countless others, in an attempt to show the many injustices that this world has to offer. While commenting on social issues like servitude, wage slavery, viral fame, corporate greed, and surface level admiration of rap music by white people, director Boots Riley pushes the “talking white” past its naïve principles.

Cassius “Cash” Green (Lakeith Stanfield) is a black man in dystopian Oakland, struggling to make rent for the space in his uncle’s garage. He’s hired for a telemarketing job but fails to find success until he listens to a company veteran: use your white voice. There’s a sense of ease and privilege that comes with the voice as if you don’t have a real care in the world. The vet describes the voice as oozing with an untroubled air – as if one’s livelihood didn’t depend on selling those wretched encyclopedias. The idea of a white voice delves a bit deeper into social significance.

Stanfield explained that a “white voice” is not the same as “talking white.” He describes one’s “white voice” as an extension of “one feeling at ease and comfortable in one’s skin. One feels as if they are part of the majority. It is something that is the opportunity mostly afforded in this country to white people.”

The performance of whiteness represents the opposite of, or in response to, the racist trope of blackness – white voice is everything that a stereotypical “black voice” isn’t. Sorry to Bother You considers what happens when black people take on that same performance and align with their oppressors, to succeed in a sinister capitalist system while maintaining their identity. The difference that we see when it comes to Cash is that he was attempting to make the people he called think that he was White to make his sales.

They say that Cash’s act in the movie is not exactly code-switching, but isn’t it? Code-switching is not only changing your voice to sound white because there is a purpose behind the intentional switch. What is anyone’s reason to change the way that they speak when around a certain group? To fit in. To be respected. To change how others perceive them. It’s not merely to sound white, it’s to be more relatable and to conform to the norm of each situation. Is that not considered hiding one’s true self for some sort of gain? Whether it’s wealth, fame, or popularity, “white voice” is practiced because other voices or cultures and practices are seen as less than by Whites and minorities alike – which makes code-switching a bit more dangerous than I initially believed. 

I’m slowly stepping away from it, consciously making sure that the quality of my conversation does not depend on how comfortable the sound of my voice makes others feel. Analyzing this phenomenon in-depth rather than rationalizing it in its simplest terms is the only way to begin to change the narrative of what is accepted as the norm or the favored in society. In that way, we can address yet another aspect of social unfairness in order to level the playing field.