F ³: Soft-Spoken and Charming

I’ve been hanging on to this tweet from NPR’s Steve Inskeep because something about it bothered me.

Steve Inskeep: This conversation with Michele Norris on her book Our Hidden Conversations carried me away when I listened back to it. She is soft-spoken in real life—never needs to raise her voice because she chooses words that carry. 

Can you guess what it was? I’ll give you a hint. This is how I responded:

Great conversation. I’d like to add that, should she decide to raise her voice, I would have every bit as much respect for her as when she speaks quietly. 

I’m a big fan of public radio. I think Steve Inskeep does good work and takes the responsibility of his role as a journalist seriously. Yet here he is, a white man, praising colleague Michele Norris, a Black woman, for being soft-spoken. “Never needs to raise her voice.” 

That just doesn’t sit right with me. The dominant culture in the U.S. is driven by the power, money, and attitudes of whites, who gatekeep the behavior of nonwhites in more ways than I can count, both big and small. One of those ways is rejecting the message of non-whites because they are too loud. “Too loud, too aggressive, too angry, too threatening…” the list goes on and on.

Inskeep, who very likely has the best intentions, is nevertheless reinforcing those attitudes. I wonder if he has any coworkers who feel close enough to him to say, “Hey, Steve, you may not realize this, but…” Possibly he does not. In almost every newsroom in the U.S. there are woefully few journalists who don’t look like Steve Inskeep. When you aren’t exposed to other people’s views and lived experiences day after day - - in situations where the expectation is that you are peers, colleagues, and equals - - then you aren’t challenged to see beyond your own limited worldview.

No matter how smart or well-intentioned you are, you may still be missing out.

I’d been sitting on this quote for a while when an article about Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (of “Finding Your Roots”) brought it to mind.

Some public intellectuals win their places in society through fierce debate, showing off the sharpness of their minds during verbal attacks. But Henry Louis Gates Jr. took a slightly different path. He did it by being charming. - - Joel Stein, for AARP

There it is again. Just as Inskeep rewards Norris for being soft-spoken, Joel Stein (also white, like Inskeep) lauds Gates for being “charming.” Notice how the writer sets up the concept of being charming against the alternative:

• Not fierce
• Not a debater
• Not sharp
• Not an attacker

In short, Gates is being held up for praise because he is deemed to be a “likeable Black” He is to be admired not for his intellect, skills, experience, or persistence, but for his charm. 

That just galls me.

On July 16, 2009, Gates was accosted and harrassed by the police while in the act of entering his own home. Under these circumstances one wonders how much charm Gates was able to muster, or whether he even wanted to. Why would it be necessary to play the ever-smiling, accommodating Black man in order to justify one’s own existence in one’s own neighborhood?

He was arrested.  

Maybe he wasn’t charming enough. Maybe he wasn’t soft-spoken enough.

This week has brought a lot of layoffs in the world of journalism. Many of them were people of color, disproportionately so. Every time those voices are diminished we all lose opportunities to see better and understand more about people and communities different from the ones we know best.  If you have wondered why I am so adamant about supporting Baltimore Beat, this is why. White gatekeeping does not nor never will produce entirely truthful and balanced news coverage. 

Every time we reinforce the notion that what we want from the non-white people around us is their soft-spoken voices and their charm, we are strengthening that age-old gatekeeping attitude that maintains our power and weakens theirs. To be blunt: it is demeaning to them. It is demeaning even if we are nice people and have good intentions and think we don’t have a racist bone in our bodies. 

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