First published on the satire site Flexx.
Hi, I’m a Desi woman, and every day I struggle not to sound like my Black husband. He has learned a handful of Hindi words over the years and I find myself falling into the way he says things. For example, I can’t help but say “cat” when I used to say “cat” or “hat” when I used to say “hat” or “mat” when I used to say “mat.” Can you hear it?
We both grew up in the suburbs of New Jersey, lived in Philly and now NYC, so it could just all be regional. But I think I’m really picking up his Black accent or, as scientists call it, his “Blaccent.”
Take the other day. We were both teaching from home and I noticed that he happened to be lecturing on double consciousness in Nella Larsen’s Passing just as I was preparing my lesson plan on how W.E.B. DuBois coined the term and how it speaks to Asian America and the paradox of being a model minority and perpetual foreigner. See? Can you hear how we sound so alike? It’s like we’re sharing key terms and critical ideas and unpacking them together in ways that invite both comfort and discomfort.
You might ask me: but Nina…say what? Sure, the idea of a Blaccent is debatable. Sure, I grew up trying my best to sound white. Sure, my Blaccent is mysteriously nowhere to be found when talking to Uncle Kapal or Neelam Auntie. Sure, the idea of “standard” English is as weird and oppressive of a phrase as “Black husband” itself.
But like many South Asians who came to America through the 1965 Immigration Act, my parents moved here to pursue the so-called American dream. The process of assimilation was slow, painful and full of alienating moments: your name being butchered or made fun of; your landlord threatening to evict you because he didn’t like the smell of your cooking; your walk home in the 1980s turning into a run as “Dotbuster” white supremacists threaten to shoot you and your kind out of New Jersey. But at some point, you come out the other side as American as the next white man. Not to say we ever talk about any of this.
And if we did talk about this, what language would we use? For my parents, Hindi, Punjabi, English with a little bit of British inflection, because…colonialism. But for me, I always go with the Blaccent. And I know I’m not alone. Lots of South Asian celebrities, especially South Asian comedians, seemed to have picked up a Blaccent on their way to success, approaching every sentence with beat bass rhythm and every syllable with a swagger usually reserved for ’70s-era cop shows. Is this regional, a product of upbringing, or is every stage performance an echo of Justin Timberlake circa 2004? Ask your parents.
Like almost every older, South Asian brother in the tri-state area who grew up between Jay-Z’s Reasonable Doubt and Blueprint and of course many a wedding DJ (but only in the hours of 11pm and 1am), a Blaccent by South Asians really expresses one thing over and over: it’s okay, we are cool. Not to be mistaken for Gwendolyn Brook’s “We Real Cool.”
And a Blaccent is not to be mistaken for conveying an acknowledgment of how South Asians benefitted from the gains of the civil rights movement, that the model minority paradigm is a white supremacist construct that perpetuates the myth of Black Americans as problem minorities, that forced removal and 400 years of oppression is not the same as immigration, no matter how similar experiences of marginalization are. Perhaps Black Americans share words, phrases, rhythms; words that in their multitudes cannot be contained by so-called standard English; words that resist a so-called standard Black history that takes up a paragraph, if that, on page 75 of your 10th-grade history book. These words are as hard as the Sanskrit shlokas I stumbled through in my wedding vows, hard as my conversations with my “brown girls” about what to do in this time of public outrage over George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Elijah McClain, Rayshard Brooks, Riah Milton, Dominique Rem’mie Fells, Said Joaquin, James Scurlock, Tony McDade, David McAtee, Christopher Whitfield, Atatiana Jefferson, Botham Jean, Stephon Clark, Charleena Lyles, Philando Castile, Janet Wilson, Bettie Jones, Sandra Bland, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, Tanisha Anderson, Tamir Rice, Akai Gurley, Michael Brown, Victor White III, Eric Garner, Renisha McBride, Alesia Thomas, Chavis Carter, Jordan Davis, Rekia Boyd, Trayvon Martin, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, Sean Bell, LaTanya Haggerty, Amadou Diallo, Eleanor Bumpurs and countless others who don’t make a headline, as hard as…listening.
But I must #saysomething! So, Blaccent. But only around my husband. I don’t feel comfortable using it around other Black people. At least until I’m more famous!