Scattered thoughts about Whiteness
Yes, it's still International Blog Against Racism Week. :-) Check out ibarw for info and links.
"White" is, of course, a race too. It can be educational for White people like me to turn and look back at ourselves - to see our invisible Whiteness.
My ancestry is British and my language is English. Now, here in Australia, people sometimes incorrectly use "Australian" to mean "White"; but I call myself Anglo, which is short for Anglo-Celt-Franco-Norman-Frisian-Jute-Saxon. :-) My ethnic group, like my language, are fantastic mongrels, vigorous hybrids of genes and words.
My red hair must make me look uber-Anglo, because bus drivers, little old ladies, White supremacists, etc, apparently feel comfortable bitching to me about Asian immigrants or Will Smith being cast in the Wild Wild West movie. You have to have your snappy comeback(s) ready ahead of time, because the sheer gall of it always catches you off-balance. The simplest thing is probably to say: "What did you say?" And then move pointedly away.
I've been racking my brains to see if I could think of any times I've been the subject of someone else's racism. The only instance I could come up with which even would even vaguely count were the girls in junior high who would cry, "Tally ho!" at me in bizarre "English" accents. I doubt they could've found Australia on a map. Mind you, I do have a "cultivated" Australian accent. In fact I once wrote a Lemniskate column about that - I think I'll paste the text in here in case my old Yahoo! group ever vanishes. :-)
Talking the Talk, October 2000
For my whole life, I've had a strange accent. To Australian ears, I sound English; people ask me all the time which part of England I'm from and when I came to Oz. To British ears, of course, I sound thoroughly Australian - although I did once fool an expat selling me a train ticket in the freezing cold. "This weather doesn't bother you or I, does it?" he joked. I said, "Oh, are you from Canberra too?"
Naturally, my forrin accent was a regular target at school, along with my red hair and IQ with more than two digits. Whether here in Australia, where all things posh are despised, or in the United States, where the kind of high school jackals so accurately portrayed in "Buffy" would cry "Ay sayeh! Tally hew!" when they saw me. Even fans have slagged me off for my "pseudo-English" voice.
For most of my life, I've been puzzled about why on Earth I'd have an English accent. Like most Australians, my family has British ancestors, but generations back in the mists of time. I concocted various theories to explain myself to curious hairdressers and physiotherapists. Perhaps it was because my family visited the UK for a month after our two-year stay in the US; part of losing my American accent might have been gaining a British one. I quite seriously wondered if my steady diet of British TV as a child - "The Goodies" and "Doctor Who", "Pot Black" and "The Two Ronnies", "Dave Allen" and "Are You Being Served", "The Tomorrow People" and "Blakes Seven" - might have somehow affected my budding speech.
The explanation, of course, is much simpler. I hit on it while reading travel writer Bill Bryson's "Mother Tongue", a book about the English language. I don't have Tom Baker's accent; I have my mum's accent. And my mum has what used to be called a "cultivated" Australian accent. It's just an old-fashioned way of speaking used by educated or well-off Australians. It must have once been a bit like the "BBC accent", aka "received pronunciation" - in fact, a lot like it, given my British-sounding pronunciation of certain words. (At one Oz convention I caused much hilarity by pronouncing "auction" as "awk-shun" rather than "ok-shone".) Mum, like me, also enunciates clearly - not a renowned feature of Australian English. :-)
A knowledge of the differences in English usage around the world is very handy when you're an Australian co-writing with an American for a British publisher. Jon and I haven't always been successful in that regard, with rough colonial expressions slipping through. In an earlier message I posted URLs for some resources on British usage; I'm currently reading the Lonely Planet guide to British English, an intriguing little book which has cleared up a number of mysteries for me, such as what CAMRA is (mentioned in "Battlefield").
It's marvellous to at last have an explanation for a part of myself I've had to excuse and explain for my entire life. Fans of all kinds will be familiar with that problem - having to constantly explain ourselves to others puzzled by or contemptuous of our interest - and the pleasure of *not* having to explain yourself when you're with others who share that interest. I don't think I'm going to find a club of people speaking with "cultivated" Australian accents, but at least now I know all those "Doctor Who" repeats aren't to blame!
___
ETA: I just looked up the genetics behind freckles. Turns out they're linked to mutations in the "red hair gene" that makes the receptor for the "tanning hormone" MSH (see my earlier posting). Hence the association between red hair, sunburn, and freckles.
"White" is, of course, a race too. It can be educational for White people like me to turn and look back at ourselves - to see our invisible Whiteness.
My ancestry is British and my language is English. Now, here in Australia, people sometimes incorrectly use "Australian" to mean "White"; but I call myself Anglo, which is short for Anglo-Celt-Franco-Norman-Frisian-Jute-Saxon. :-) My ethnic group, like my language, are fantastic mongrels, vigorous hybrids of genes and words.
My red hair must make me look uber-Anglo, because bus drivers, little old ladies, White supremacists, etc, apparently feel comfortable bitching to me about Asian immigrants or Will Smith being cast in the Wild Wild West movie. You have to have your snappy comeback(s) ready ahead of time, because the sheer gall of it always catches you off-balance. The simplest thing is probably to say: "What did you say?" And then move pointedly away.
I've been racking my brains to see if I could think of any times I've been the subject of someone else's racism. The only instance I could come up with which even would even vaguely count were the girls in junior high who would cry, "Tally ho!" at me in bizarre "English" accents. I doubt they could've found Australia on a map. Mind you, I do have a "cultivated" Australian accent. In fact I once wrote a Lemniskate column about that - I think I'll paste the text in here in case my old Yahoo! group ever vanishes. :-)
Talking the Talk, October 2000
For my whole life, I've had a strange accent. To Australian ears, I sound English; people ask me all the time which part of England I'm from and when I came to Oz. To British ears, of course, I sound thoroughly Australian - although I did once fool an expat selling me a train ticket in the freezing cold. "This weather doesn't bother you or I, does it?" he joked. I said, "Oh, are you from Canberra too?"
Naturally, my forrin accent was a regular target at school, along with my red hair and IQ with more than two digits. Whether here in Australia, where all things posh are despised, or in the United States, where the kind of high school jackals so accurately portrayed in "Buffy" would cry "Ay sayeh! Tally hew!" when they saw me. Even fans have slagged me off for my "pseudo-English" voice.
For most of my life, I've been puzzled about why on Earth I'd have an English accent. Like most Australians, my family has British ancestors, but generations back in the mists of time. I concocted various theories to explain myself to curious hairdressers and physiotherapists. Perhaps it was because my family visited the UK for a month after our two-year stay in the US; part of losing my American accent might have been gaining a British one. I quite seriously wondered if my steady diet of British TV as a child - "The Goodies" and "Doctor Who", "Pot Black" and "The Two Ronnies", "Dave Allen" and "Are You Being Served", "The Tomorrow People" and "Blakes Seven" - might have somehow affected my budding speech.
The explanation, of course, is much simpler. I hit on it while reading travel writer Bill Bryson's "Mother Tongue", a book about the English language. I don't have Tom Baker's accent; I have my mum's accent. And my mum has what used to be called a "cultivated" Australian accent. It's just an old-fashioned way of speaking used by educated or well-off Australians. It must have once been a bit like the "BBC accent", aka "received pronunciation" - in fact, a lot like it, given my British-sounding pronunciation of certain words. (At one Oz convention I caused much hilarity by pronouncing "auction" as "awk-shun" rather than "ok-shone".) Mum, like me, also enunciates clearly - not a renowned feature of Australian English. :-)
A knowledge of the differences in English usage around the world is very handy when you're an Australian co-writing with an American for a British publisher. Jon and I haven't always been successful in that regard, with rough colonial expressions slipping through. In an earlier message I posted URLs for some resources on British usage; I'm currently reading the Lonely Planet guide to British English, an intriguing little book which has cleared up a number of mysteries for me, such as what CAMRA is (mentioned in "Battlefield").
It's marvellous to at last have an explanation for a part of myself I've had to excuse and explain for my entire life. Fans of all kinds will be familiar with that problem - having to constantly explain ourselves to others puzzled by or contemptuous of our interest - and the pleasure of *not* having to explain yourself when you're with others who share that interest. I don't think I'm going to find a club of people speaking with "cultivated" Australian accents, but at least now I know all those "Doctor Who" repeats aren't to blame!
___
ETA: I just looked up the genetics behind freckles. Turns out they're linked to mutations in the "red hair gene" that makes the receptor for the "tanning hormone" MSH (see my earlier posting). Hence the association between red hair, sunburn, and freckles.
