Who's Afraid of Ayesha Rascoe?

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• 00:04

  From Booksmart Studios, this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language.

• 00:08

  I'm John McWhorter,

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  and I want to do one of our very special episodes because of certain missives that I'm receiving and what they seem to spell and the fact that they are actually quite applicable to messages that I try to get across on this program,

• 00:25

  as people used to call such things.

• 00:28

  That is...

• 00:29

  that I get a lot of mail complaining about the voice of one person on national public radio.

• 00:37

  Yeah, I want to do this episode about this,

• 00:39

  because it really is a very interesting issue that takes us a lot of places.

• 00:43

  There is a national public radio voice.

• 00:48

  Now she hosts Weekend Edition on Sunday, so she's a high-profile voice at this point.

• 00:54

  And her name is Aisha Roscoe, and she is black.

• 00:59

  And every now and then I've gotten four or five messages like this.

• 01:02

  Somebody writes me, white I presume, asking whether it's racist that they don't like her voice.

• 01:10

  They don't think she should be on the radio.

• 01:14

  Now Roscoe is black and she has what we could call a black voice.

• 01:21

  There are many people who have a problem with that voice and we need to dig into why and whether it has to be this way.

• 01:28

  And so, for example, just as a kind of a preview,

• 01:30

  these people are asking, are they racist to not like her voice?

• 01:33

  And I would say, one, not necessarily.

• 01:36

  But two, we're at a point where in a more just America,

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