Black writer objects to white voice actor

A publisher’s neglect to listen to the final audio recording of a Black scholar’s essay kindled accusations of minstrelsy and ended in an apology for what “basically amounted to auditory blackface.”

“Da Art of Speculatin’,” written by Regina Bradley and published in Fireside Magazine, is about how acclaimed hip-hop duo Outkast blended

Black Southern life of the past and present in their music to paint possibilities of their lives in the future. The first line identifies the writer as a “southern Black woman who stands in the long shadow of the Civil Rights Movement.” The essay appeared Nov. 24 in Fireside, with the audio version alongside it.

Despite the topic and its author, the person who narrated the audio recording was a young, White male voice actor who spoke in an accent that listeners interpreted as something that would appear in a minstrel show.

Bradley shared a clip on Twitter of the narration of her work after hearing it for the first time earlier this week. She asked Fireside and the voice actor in the tweet if it’s what they thought what Black women sound like.

Bradley, an assistant professor of English and African Diaspora Studies at Kennesaw State University, said in an emailed statement to The Washington Post that she questioned the choice of narrator.

“Why is this man doing terrible Jamaican patois?” she said. “And then he started my actual essay, and I felt anger and betrayal. Is this how illegible southern black women are to white folks, especially white men,” she said, expressing her disbelief that the vocal artist could have been comfortable with his performance.

She immediately contacted the Black editor who worked on the story with her, who was equally disappointed by the choice of narrator, she said.