Black performers use the ‘white voice’ to great satirical effect
Sorry to Bother You taps into a comic tradition that goes back centuries
In Sorry to Bother You, the wily satirical debut feature from Boots Riley, Cassius Green (Lakeith Stanfield) lands a job at a telemarketing company, where the first rule is “Stick to the script.” He stumbles during his first few calls, unable to connect with the strangers on the other end of the line — that is, until an older colleague named Langston (Danny Glover) shares some advice: “Use your white voice.”
Riley renders this affectation literally in Sorry to Bother You, dubbing white actors’ voices over the Black faces onscreen, including David Cross, of Ar
rested Development fame, for Stanfield.
In doing so, Riley offers a zany twist on the performance of whiteness by Black actors, a tradition stretching back hundreds of years.
As long ago as the New World, enslaved and free Black people participated in dramatized communal appropriation of “white-identified gestures, vocabulary, dialects, dress, or social entitlements,” as Marvin McAllister writes in his book Whiting Up: Whiteface Minstrels and Stage Europeans in African-American Performance. These performances were in public and private spaces, sometimes on a theatrical stage or in the form of a leisurely stroll in the street alongside white people.
Vocal imitation in particular has proved an especially fruitful creative choice and is often as subversive as it is in Sorry to Bother You. Below, a look at some of the notable ways Black performers have used the “white voice” in popular culture. “I can tell ya, I’m a white man!”
In an episode of the 1990s sitcom Martin, a plumber dies suddenly while fixing Martin’s toilet. The plumber remains in the bathroom for hours because the authorities do not view the incident as an emergency and Martin (Martin Lawrence) believes the reason is that he lives in a less affluent, predominantly Black part of town. After exhausting all other options, he tries calling 911 again, this time in a manner connoting whiteness (overenunciation; emphasis on a hard “r”), giving his name to the operator as Thurston O’Reilly III.
The person on the other end of the line asks Martin to prove that he is white, quizzing him on topics that only white people are supposed to know: America’s favourite pie, Barry Manilow song titles, the ideal sandwich condiment. With help from his friends, Martin supplies the appropriate answers to the first two questions, but the guise is ruined when Cole (Carl Anthony Payne II) snatches the phone and responds to the third query in his “Black” voice, with a “Black” answer. The operator promptly hangs up. “Life at the beach is, like, party, party, party, OK?”
In a 1984 Vanity Fair profile, Whoopi Goldberg talked about her difficulties getting cast in dinner theatres early in her career. In the interview, she said she was often told, “You are good, but our economy rides on people coming to see what they expect. And they are not expecting you.” This is what led her to create The Spook Show, her breakthrough one-woman act that eventually found its way to Broadway retitled as Whoopi Goldberg.
In it, she subverted expectations of the kinds of characters a Black actress could portray, morphing into 13 different personalities, including “the surfer chick” who talks in an exaggerated California teenager style.
Goldberg would adapt this character for NBC’s short-lived 1985 variety series Television Parts. “She’s just so … Black!”
What it means to be Black has frequently been defined and scrutinized by those who are not Black, particularly through the performance of blackface. Adapting a white voice as a Black performer, then, is sometimes a deliberate attempt to turn the gaze back on white culture. In her viral video “S--White Girls Say … to Black Girls,” the comedian and activist Franchesca Ramsey dons a blond wig and talks like Goldberg’s surfer chick, calling attention to the uncomfortable interactions she has had with white women. “I didn’t know I couldn’t do that.”
In his 2000 comedy special Killin’ Them Softly, Dave Chappelle uses observational humour to point out how whiteness translates to an exclusive version of freedom. He describes how his friend Chip manages to get out of a speeding ticket — or potentially worse fate — because he is white. Chappelle has two distinct voices for Chip and the police officer who pulls them over: The officer gets a highpitched, nasal Southern drawl reminiscent of cinematic small-town sheriffs.
Chip, on the other hand, evinces a calm, if slightly nerdy, demeanour when he tells the officer, “I didn’t know I couldn’t do that.”
Chip embodies Langston’s definition of the white voice in Sorry to Bother You. That voice, he explains to Cassius, is not so much about timbre as it is about a feeling: a carefree nature that comes with having your bills paid. “You’ve never been fired,” Langston says. “Just laid off.”