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silveradept[O hai. It's December Days time, and this year, I'm taking requests, since it's been a while and I have new people on the list and it's 2020, the year where everyone is both closer to and more distant from their friends and family. So if you have a thought you'd like me to talk about on one of these days, let me know and I'll work it into the schedule. That includes things like further asks about anything in a previous December Days tag, if you have any questions on that regard.]
cosmolinguist has an interesting post titled "Accentism and the Standardized Language Ideology" which examines the underpinnings of people thinking things that may seem common sense to one group but are nonsensical to another, like Accentism (discrimination based on regional or dialectical speech patterns) is real, but so deeply embedded into a society that it can't be undone. To which Cosmo points out the research backs up the assertion that speaking with a regional accent or dialect results in discrimination, but the second part doesn't follow - it's not a deeply embedded thing in the culture that can't be unseated. Because, as it turns out, there's nothing intrinsic about any accent or dialect at all, and so any connotations that we make about a person's class, wealth, politeness, or any other aspect about them that's not "they have learned how to speak with this particular regional dialect", based on their accent or dialect are learned, not innate.
This leads to Cosmo mentioning James Milroy's paper on "standard language ideology", the idea that nation-states built themselves an identity around standardizing how the language sounds and what words and grammars it uses, and in so doing, have taken away the language from the native speakers to the point where there is such a thing as "bad grammar" or "low-class" or "high-class" accents and pronunciations. Because otherwise, it's spoken language, and whomever is speaking it is the authority on its usage. (This is a really wide-application point to pull out if someone is getting shirty about language usage, neologism, memery, the kids these days, language drift, language shift, or is being excessively pedantic and/or prescriptive about the use of the language.) So much of what is associated with a particular regional accent, or a dialect, or any other variation in language is ideologically loaded, but since we're taught that ideology in grammar school under the auspices of books and teachers and the assumption that there is such a thing as the right way to speak a language, those prejudices get ingrained as relating to language when they are instead relating to everything but language.
The most easy and immediate examples of accentism and things that are supposedly "common sense" are the long-standing insistence that African-American Vernacular English isn't real or acceptable English and that a strong Appalachian or Southern US accent indicates a lack of education, an unshakeable belief in Republican TurboJesus evangelical Christianity, and low economic status. AAVE is a dialect, and a perfectly-comprehensible one to anyone who knows how to speak it. It, and basically every other immigrant dialect, has been the subject of a systemic campaign to erase them in favor of what we usually call "broadcast" English in the States, the specific pronunciation and regional accent of a national newscaster, which is, generally speaking, a lower Great Lakes regional accent.
And I would like to think that all the people who are plugged in to watching the state of Georgia's Senate races in the States and wondering whether it will elect two Democrats and the closeness of how things turned out in much of the South would put the lie to the idea that everyone with a southern accent is a TurboJesus hick, but the struggle is not only real, it's still going on, in memes that talk about the "United States of Canada" versus "Jesusland", which are memes that I has seen around in 2000 and 2004 as well, with the election and re-election of the last Republican administrator. And as much as people try to design infographics that show how deeply intertwined voting is and the purple-y ness of it all and how much structural issues like gerrymandered districts and voter suppression laws and tactics determine the outcomes of elections in places with racists determined to uphold white supremacy, the belief that the South can be talked about monolithically persists. Because it is cognitively easier to believe the red and blue maps and to assume that the elected representatives of any given area actually reflect the viewpoints of the people that elected them, rather than having to stop and think about how everything is way more complex than that.
So, I suppose, this leads to an interesting question to ask.
The author of the piece about innate accentism also says that the gender pay gap is mostly explainable by motherhood, which is similarly Menckenian in nature, in my opinion. Yes, women leaving the workforce does have a lot to do with the gender pay gap, but usually, "motherhood" is used as a shorthand for the idea that those women willingly leave to raise their children. Only if you pay attention to any "feminist harridans" do you get the more complex view, one that points out that most men are going to expect women to raise the children, because that's what men say women do, that it's part of their nature, they're biologically more suited to nurturing, and women are just so naturally suited to it, among other things. Except that it's not intrinsic that women are any better at child-rearing than men are, or we would expect to see all single mothers thriving and all single fathers failing dismally.
We also haven't seen what the earning potential of men and women could be in a full career in the States because childcare is unsubsidized and really expensive to maintain all throughout a child's life. So there are a lot of women who are forced out of the workplace because someone has to stay at home and watch after the children. And when people make comparisons between the salaries of men and women, the women almost always earn less, so they're the logical choice to stay home so as to preserve the most earning power. (And also, sometimes, the women who do earn more are still forced out to stay home and take care of the kids, because standardized gender role ideology.)
But wait. We just used the idea that women make less as a justification to ensure that women make less by having less opportunities and working less years in the workplaces. That's circular logic. There's got to be some other reason that would set this idea in place so that it can be used as a justification instead. And there are! In addition to the "it's a woman's place to be in the home" being used as a reason, there's also the observation that women are socialized to accept whatever they are offered or suffer social consequences at the least. Any minority advocating for themselves is likely to receive pushback, up to and including some made-up but legal reason to fire them for being such an uppity whatever and not being appropriately grateful that they have a job that pays them, rather than believing some sort of nonsense about equal or appropriate pay for the work that's being done and having the temerity to insist that they receive that kind of pay. So women get paid less because there are very real consequences to trying to force your employer to pay you the same that they pay the people they think are worthy and geniuses and otherwise exactly like them.
There's also vocational awe that's been weaponized to think about here, as vocational awe tends to be deployed against professions that are highly feminized (because of that idea, again, that women are natural caregivers, nurturers, and raisers of children. That's standardized gender ideology for you.), insisting that people who are in those professions are doing it because it's noble, and helpful, and that insisting on being paid well enough for it is being selfish and putting yourself as more important than The Cause, so you clearly must not want this job at all because you're not burning yourself out over it for inadequate pay and insufficient protection. So, because it's not respected as a thing that someone should earn money at, the women who work at those professions, even if they stay in them all their lives, will earn less than some men do for considerably less taxing work. (And those men will receive far more prestige for their work than the women will, as well.)
So, no, the gender gap isn't explained by motherhood. Motherhood is often the final thing that pushes a woman out of the workplace, long after she's been offered a lower wage than the men around her, told when she asks to be paid in parity that she will accept what she's given and be publicly happy about it or she can go find someone else who is willing to hire a woman without using them as a reference, specifically put in places that will not do work that will advance her career or garner prestige that could be used later for tenure or promotion opportunities, and sometimes told that she isn't sufficiently devoted if she's thinking about such crass and terrible things as money or pay.
There are so many other things like these examples out there in the world, things that are incredibly arbitrary, like what counts as masculinity, who's part of being white and who's not, Western music theory and judgement on what is good music is based almost solely on the compositions and styles of white German men as extrapolated by on-the-page racists with specific, articulated, loud, racist intent and actions, and whether or not stocks go up or down based on what happens outside of the bubble that is Wall Street. All of these "standardized ideologies" work best, as Cosmo noted, when they're seen as immutable and irrefutable, things that just are, rather than things that were constructed, are being maintained, and can be deconstructed or changed into something else. One of my favorite fannish podcasts, Starship Therapise, talks about the "Westworld Construct" when they talk about the social contract, and that a significant amount of what we think of as always true is consensus, rather than having any sort of cosmic reality that persists when you stop believing in it. (The ep on the Westworld Construct links to this specific book called The Social Construction of Reality, so if you're looking for some light reading, here you are.) This has definitely been a year where we've seen a lot of incidents that remind us of the consensus nature of reality, even if most of those incidents reminded us how many people are willing to accept a sub-par reality instead of striving for one that's better for everyone.
Here's hoping that sooner, rather than later, we can deconstruct the harmful ideologies and put, in their place, ideologies that help everyone.
cosmolinguist has an interesting post titled "Accentism and the Standardized Language Ideology" which examines the underpinnings of people thinking things that may seem common sense to one group but are nonsensical to another, like Accentism (discrimination based on regional or dialectical speech patterns) is real, but so deeply embedded into a society that it can't be undone. To which Cosmo points out the research backs up the assertion that speaking with a regional accent or dialect results in discrimination, but the second part doesn't follow - it's not a deeply embedded thing in the culture that can't be unseated. Because, as it turns out, there's nothing intrinsic about any accent or dialect at all, and so any connotations that we make about a person's class, wealth, politeness, or any other aspect about them that's not "they have learned how to speak with this particular regional dialect", based on their accent or dialect are learned, not innate.This leads to Cosmo mentioning James Milroy's paper on "standard language ideology", the idea that nation-states built themselves an identity around standardizing how the language sounds and what words and grammars it uses, and in so doing, have taken away the language from the native speakers to the point where there is such a thing as "bad grammar" or "low-class" or "high-class" accents and pronunciations. Because otherwise, it's spoken language, and whomever is speaking it is the authority on its usage. (This is a really wide-application point to pull out if someone is getting shirty about language usage, neologism, memery, the kids these days, language drift, language shift, or is being excessively pedantic and/or prescriptive about the use of the language.) So much of what is associated with a particular regional accent, or a dialect, or any other variation in language is ideologically loaded, but since we're taught that ideology in grammar school under the auspices of books and teachers and the assumption that there is such a thing as the right way to speak a language, those prejudices get ingrained as relating to language when they are instead relating to everything but language.
The most easy and immediate examples of accentism and things that are supposedly "common sense" are the long-standing insistence that African-American Vernacular English isn't real or acceptable English and that a strong Appalachian or Southern US accent indicates a lack of education, an unshakeable belief in Republican TurboJesus evangelical Christianity, and low economic status. AAVE is a dialect, and a perfectly-comprehensible one to anyone who knows how to speak it. It, and basically every other immigrant dialect, has been the subject of a systemic campaign to erase them in favor of what we usually call "broadcast" English in the States, the specific pronunciation and regional accent of a national newscaster, which is, generally speaking, a lower Great Lakes regional accent.
And I would like to think that all the people who are plugged in to watching the state of Georgia's Senate races in the States and wondering whether it will elect two Democrats and the closeness of how things turned out in much of the South would put the lie to the idea that everyone with a southern accent is a TurboJesus hick, but the struggle is not only real, it's still going on, in memes that talk about the "United States of Canada" versus "Jesusland", which are memes that I has seen around in 2000 and 2004 as well, with the election and re-election of the last Republican administrator. And as much as people try to design infographics that show how deeply intertwined voting is and the purple-y ness of it all and how much structural issues like gerrymandered districts and voter suppression laws and tactics determine the outcomes of elections in places with racists determined to uphold white supremacy, the belief that the South can be talked about monolithically persists. Because it is cognitively easier to believe the red and blue maps and to assume that the elected representatives of any given area actually reflect the viewpoints of the people that elected them, rather than having to stop and think about how everything is way more complex than that.
So, I suppose, this leads to an interesting question to ask.
What other ideas in society have a "well-known solution" that is "neat, plausible, and wrong"? (H.L. Mencken, emphasis mine)
The author of the piece about innate accentism also says that the gender pay gap is mostly explainable by motherhood, which is similarly Menckenian in nature, in my opinion. Yes, women leaving the workforce does have a lot to do with the gender pay gap, but usually, "motherhood" is used as a shorthand for the idea that those women willingly leave to raise their children. Only if you pay attention to any "feminist harridans" do you get the more complex view, one that points out that most men are going to expect women to raise the children, because that's what men say women do, that it's part of their nature, they're biologically more suited to nurturing, and women are just so naturally suited to it, among other things. Except that it's not intrinsic that women are any better at child-rearing than men are, or we would expect to see all single mothers thriving and all single fathers failing dismally.
We also haven't seen what the earning potential of men and women could be in a full career in the States because childcare is unsubsidized and really expensive to maintain all throughout a child's life. So there are a lot of women who are forced out of the workplace because someone has to stay at home and watch after the children. And when people make comparisons between the salaries of men and women, the women almost always earn less, so they're the logical choice to stay home so as to preserve the most earning power. (And also, sometimes, the women who do earn more are still forced out to stay home and take care of the kids, because standardized gender role ideology.)
But wait. We just used the idea that women make less as a justification to ensure that women make less by having less opportunities and working less years in the workplaces. That's circular logic. There's got to be some other reason that would set this idea in place so that it can be used as a justification instead. And there are! In addition to the "it's a woman's place to be in the home" being used as a reason, there's also the observation that women are socialized to accept whatever they are offered or suffer social consequences at the least. Any minority advocating for themselves is likely to receive pushback, up to and including some made-up but legal reason to fire them for being such an uppity whatever and not being appropriately grateful that they have a job that pays them, rather than believing some sort of nonsense about equal or appropriate pay for the work that's being done and having the temerity to insist that they receive that kind of pay. So women get paid less because there are very real consequences to trying to force your employer to pay you the same that they pay the people they think are worthy and geniuses and otherwise exactly like them.
There's also vocational awe that's been weaponized to think about here, as vocational awe tends to be deployed against professions that are highly feminized (because of that idea, again, that women are natural caregivers, nurturers, and raisers of children. That's standardized gender ideology for you.), insisting that people who are in those professions are doing it because it's noble, and helpful, and that insisting on being paid well enough for it is being selfish and putting yourself as more important than The Cause, so you clearly must not want this job at all because you're not burning yourself out over it for inadequate pay and insufficient protection. So, because it's not respected as a thing that someone should earn money at, the women who work at those professions, even if they stay in them all their lives, will earn less than some men do for considerably less taxing work. (And those men will receive far more prestige for their work than the women will, as well.)
So, no, the gender gap isn't explained by motherhood. Motherhood is often the final thing that pushes a woman out of the workplace, long after she's been offered a lower wage than the men around her, told when she asks to be paid in parity that she will accept what she's given and be publicly happy about it or she can go find someone else who is willing to hire a woman without using them as a reference, specifically put in places that will not do work that will advance her career or garner prestige that could be used later for tenure or promotion opportunities, and sometimes told that she isn't sufficiently devoted if she's thinking about such crass and terrible things as money or pay.
There are so many other things like these examples out there in the world, things that are incredibly arbitrary, like what counts as masculinity, who's part of being white and who's not, Western music theory and judgement on what is good music is based almost solely on the compositions and styles of white German men as extrapolated by on-the-page racists with specific, articulated, loud, racist intent and actions, and whether or not stocks go up or down based on what happens outside of the bubble that is Wall Street. All of these "standardized ideologies" work best, as Cosmo noted, when they're seen as immutable and irrefutable, things that just are, rather than things that were constructed, are being maintained, and can be deconstructed or changed into something else. One of my favorite fannish podcasts, Starship Therapise, talks about the "Westworld Construct" when they talk about the social contract, and that a significant amount of what we think of as always true is consensus, rather than having any sort of cosmic reality that persists when you stop believing in it. (The ep on the Westworld Construct links to this specific book called The Social Construction of Reality, so if you're looking for some light reading, here you are.) This has definitely been a year where we've seen a lot of incidents that remind us of the consensus nature of reality, even if most of those incidents reminded us how many people are willing to accept a sub-par reality instead of striving for one that's better for everyone.
Here's hoping that sooner, rather than later, we can deconstruct the harmful ideologies and put, in their place, ideologies that help everyone.
no subject
Date: 2020-12-21 02:06 pm (UTC)The UK still has many. I grew up in Kent down in the southeast which has one but grew up around grandparents with northeastern, in one case and west midlands in the other which means I have a strange meld of dialect sounds and terms. I pronounce 'castle' with a short 'a' which is definitely midland and northeastern but 'bath' with a long 'a' which is southern (normally you'd do both the same wherever you come from).
I've been accused more than once of being Australian! :o)
no subject
Date: 2020-12-21 05:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-12-21 04:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-12-21 05:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-12-21 11:21 pm (UTC)see: computer programmers
no subject
Date: 2020-12-21 04:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-12-21 05:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-12-21 09:24 pm (UTC)"Because otherwise, it's spoken language, and whomever is speaking it is the authority on its usage." This is a really good quote. I should really try to live by it. I also listened to the podcast "Dolly Parton's America" the other day. People from Tennessee (where Parton is from) talked about being taught (often by their own parents) that the dialect they speak is wrong and they policed their own language use and got rid of their dialects. Heartbreaking.
no subject
Date: 2020-12-21 10:32 pm (UTC)And trying to train someone's accent out of them is also, regrettably, a true thing, because there's immense social pressure to do that, to stop looking and sounding unique in any way that might be threatening to the hegemon. I suspect if Dolly hadn't been so strongly associated with country music, she probably would have had to train her Tennessean out of her singing voice, at the very least, by producers who would tell her that she wouldn't sell if she sounded like that.
no subject
Date: 2020-12-23 10:00 pm (UTC)Oh yes, Dolly was interviewed in the podcast and she said, that in the country scene in Nashville everyone sounded like her when she started so it never came up (paraphrased).