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Yikes. The accents here are grievous offenses to my ears. I usually can get over it on the Australian accents. They hark up "obnoxious" and "shallow" too quickly, generally, but that connotation is pretty easy to bat off. Not so with the Cockney or North London or whatever the hell you call this aural incarnation of "dirt ignorant thug". Still, I keep hollering at you not to ignore people for their hillbilly accents and the same applies here, but, holy soapsuds! WHAT a struggle. It was WORTH it, but it was very hard for me. My arm kept shooting out to snap it off before my head exploded, but I stopped myself and kept on. I don't think I managed to even absorb what the interviewer was saying because of this battle against the repeated impulses to turn off the noise, but Igan says some very good stuff in here. More food for waking up.
Everything in my experience, and most particularly movies and TV, bid me associate that accent with "lowlife" and "moron" and I goddam do NOT want to remain a SLAVE to mental conditioning, to my life in the Matrix, so I'M FUCKING WELL PUTTING MYSELF THROUGH IT.
I'm not asking you to do anything I'm not prepared to do as well.
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Don't conclude that I support things like elevating Ebonics to respectable, or even that I will ever be able to stifle the urge to ask people to TRY not to sound like these prefab prejudices, but that still doesn't excuse me from the duty to overcome my programming.
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