Yesterday I watched Trevor Noah’s Afraid of the Dark (available on Netflix – here’s a clip). It was amazing from start to finish. What I love about Trevor Noah is that while he is making us laugh, he is educating us as well. Afraid of the Dark is no exception. He covered colonization, being Black in America, immigration, and at the end, accents.
His point about accents is simple – that contrary to hearing someone speak their own language, an accent causes us to hear them trying to speak ours. Consequently, when we hear an accent, our brain immediately makes it mean something. That something could be (for example) about a person’s intelligence, trustworthiness, or whether we should fear them.
Think about it.
Accents create a direct line to a specific expectation in our mind.
Try it! See who comes to mind when you imagine a Nigerian accent, a British accent, an Indian accent, a French accent, a Jamaican accent, a German accent, a Spanish accent. Who gets what role in your mind because of how they sound?
Trevor Noah’s Afraid of the Dark provides more than laughs – you’ll be left with some things to think about. Among them, a reminder of how powerful the brain is; that because of the inflection and tone of someone’s voice when they speak a language we see as “ours”, we judge them differently, put them into a box, do them a disservice.
We do it with other things too, afterall: height, weight, gender, clothing, the way we do our hair, religious symbols, skin colour…
The brain is a powerful thing. But once we know what it’s up to, I believe that we have the opportunity to interrogate our thoughts, reconsider, ask questions, and perhaps…
…See more.
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