JPB Gerald, our first guest blogger of 2022, is an EdD candidate at CUNY – Hunter College in Instructional Leadership, and a theorist seeking justice for the racially, linguistically, and neurologically minoritized. He identifies as Black and neurodivergent, though he spent most of his life unaware of the latter. He hosts a podcast called Unstandardized English, and has had his writing published in academic journals, practitioner magazines, and national newspapers. His first book, on the harm caused by the centering of whiteness in language education, will be published by Multilingual Matters in early 2023. He lives with his wife, young son, and dog in New York, on stolen Munsee Lenape and Canarsie territory.
Much research has been done into the way that raciolinguistic ideologies (Flores & Rosa, 2015) seep into how spoken accents are perceived. Workers who do not fit the visual image of the white native speaker are forced to perform the aesthetic labour of attempting to look and sound the right way (Ramjattan, 2019a; 2019b), while they are often doomed to be viewed as less valuable because of the bodies they inhabit, even if they would otherwise be categorized as a “native speaker” (Faez, 2012). Indeed, relying upon this native/non-native binary allows the fiction of supposedly inferior accents to persist, and there are a great deal of companies that prey upon the genuine fear and pain of potential clients. In this blog post, excerpted from a book to be released next year, I will look at the way a few of these companies market their offerings, in the hopes that I can demonstrate the deceit and the harm at the heart of the accent reduction industry. In researching this work, what I found was that not only was accent reduction expensive, but that it reveals the false premise on which it is built as soon as you look beneath the surface.
