But mapping the contours of the women’s vocal performances does constitute one part of a broader skepticism about Insecure’s authenticity—fears or suggestions that the black lives the show depicts are not representative (enough) of the range of blackness the show claims to reflect. Whether it wants it or not, Insecure has been saddled with the responsibility of portraying the struggles and triumphs of young black people of different socioeconomic statuses and ethnic backgrounds. And at times, the show has leaned into its role as an arbiter of the black-Millennial experience. On the “Wine Down” segments HBO aired after each of last season’s episodes, Rae and another member of the cast or crew often made direct links between the show and what they deemed common facets of everyday black life (even when those didn’t quite resonate). Still, to be the voice of an entire community is an impossible feat; to have that burden thrust upon one piece—or body—of work is a hurdle that most of Hollywood’s white male showrunners have never shouldered. No one tells Aaron Sorkin that he doesn’t sound (or behave) white enough.

But what does it mean for an actor, or for anyone, to “sound” black—or at least black enough? Insecure isn’t the only recent work to raise the question, unwittingly or otherwise. Two recent films, Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You and Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman, play with vocal conventions as a means of drawing attention to the absurd but deeply consequential markers that delineate race. Insecure finds its thematic effects sometimes undercut by a lack of vocal “authenticity” only ever demanded of black actors; Sorry to Bother You and BlacKkKlansman pass black actors the mic and let them take aim at the notion of white purity, sonic or otherwise.

In the former, telemarketer Cassius “Cash” Green (Lakeith Stanfield) begins to achieve unimaginable success after he adopts a “white voice” at the behest of a longtime call-center employee named Langston (Danny Glover). But Stanfield doesn’t modulate his own vocals toward whiteness; rather, the comedian David Cross voices the “white” Cash. For his part, Lee conjures a more complex racial transmogrification. In BlacKkKlansman, which draws from real-life events, the newly hired black Colorado Springs police officer Ron Stallworth (John David Washington) infiltrates a local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan by befriending the chapter’s president over the phone and sending a white officer (Adam Driver) to play his in-person counterpart. The stunt requires Stallworth to speak in a voice “white” enough to woo people whose suspicions of his blackness could lead to the officer’s demise.





John McWhorter, an associate professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University and the author of Both films amplify one of the most literal (and personal) markers of race to ask salient questions about allegiance to whiteness. In both, the telephone acts as a tool of connection and transformation. It’s a deft plot trick. But more often, adopting vocal conventions most canonized by white Americans isn’t necessarily a conscious decision for people of color in the U.S. The notion of “talking white” is a reductive premise, a sweeping generalization that fails to account for the multitudes within Black English and black-American vocal inflections.John McWhorter, an associate professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University and the author of Talking Back, Talking Black: Truths About America’s Lingua Franca , has spent much of his career studying the development of black linguistic patterns. McWhorter, who wrote recently for The Atlantic about the stakes of the white poet Anders Carlson-Wee’s employing Black English in his work for The Nation, notes that “ code switching ”—the way people modulate their usage of slang, intonation, and dialect for different audiences—is often an instinctive act. “Today, most black people talk a certain way at the bank and then a certain way while they’re sitting down and talking to their family over dinner,” McWhorter said when we spoke last week. “And it would never occur to them that they’re doing anything.”

But for people whose voices find their way into the public sphere, choosing what registers and pitches to pull from can be more fraught. In a 2015 piece for Transom, the Uncivil podcast co-host Chenjerai Kumanyika wrote about the effect that the overwhelming whiteness of public radio had on his own vocal stylings. In tracing the way his voice changes when he is rapping, speaking “normally,” and speaking specifically for radio or podcasts, Kumanyika gestured at how sounds associated with whiteness form the vast majority of the public-radio chorus—even when the speakers may not be white:

“I’m not saying that voices and styles of speech map on to the ethnicity of the speaker in any simple way. There is no single ‘authentic’ African-American, Latino, Asian, Native American, or white way of speaking. To say otherwise would be to participate in a reductive and inaccurate essentialism of which I want no part. However, I do think that there is what Paulo Freire called a ‘dominant syntax’ and flowing from that is a narrow range of public radio and podcast host voices and speech patterns that have become extremely common.”

For actors whose primary years of language acquisition happened outside arenas where Black English was spoken, adopting Freire’s “dominant syntax” could very well have been an unconscious act—one that is nearly impossible to reverse later in life. To learn any language, even one that others presume you must know by virtue of your skin alone, is immensely difficult without conversation partners. To speak or write Black English with any level of fluency requires diligence and, more often than not, a familiarity that is both embodied and acculturated. The language ebbs and flows temporally, but also along lines of class, region, and even national origin (after all, Americans are not the only people—black or otherwise—to speak English). Black English is, like standard American English, a language worthy of both speech and study. It is distinct and recognizable, a code of speech that can function as much as a signal of authenticity or belonging as it does a way to relay words.