Your voice is what betrays you

HSBurke--
of course what I like most here is you decision that--since you don't talk much in class--you could "jump on the opportunity" offered by this web event to talk to us for 15 minutes straight. Yeah!

I also think that this web event forms a very striking response to your last one, on being silenced by a lack of silence.  Here--frustrated by the static quality of writing, unable to put all these complex ideas on paper because doing so couldn't do them justice, and also feeling silenced by your inability to draw--you chose direct speaking as "a proper medium to display your ideas"--which seems very appropriate.

The account you give, in this extended speech, is (most appropriately!) about the power voice has to distinguish us from one another. The examples you offer range widely--tongues cut out in a sic fi story; the visual indistinguishability of native-born and immigrant women; the ways in which a strong accent is "heard" as representing illegality; the assumption of a "fake" accent; the ways in which, to fit in, people choose silence--a powerful (if negative) representation of the power of voice to distinguish us from one another; to, finally, your own experiences of being marked by your voice, and training yourself to speak "East Coast," in order to mitigate that difference.

I hear echoing, behind all your words, the horrific story you told in your first web event,  of people who silence themselves because they think others will speak up. All your counternarratives here are examples of refusing to speak, lest doing so betray us.

P.S. Don't miss the other video that went up yesterday, which does something directly counter to yours: Jo's Silence and (Not!) Understanding.