Why imitating others' accents is not ok (when you are white)

By Elsa Wiehe

June 19, 2021

It is not uncommon for whites -especially men- in Mauritius to imitate different accents. Recently, one famous case was of a white guy at a “partie de chasse” who made fun of Indians’ accent, and I can think of many, many examples of “soirées” where this kind of behavior routinely occurs at the (white) dinner table, fueled by alcohol. The range of humor goes from whites, who typically only speak French, speaking Creole, or making fun of French accents that are not the white franco-Mauritian normative accent. The targets of this “humor” are typically personas who are less educated, speak an approximation of a standardized version of French influenced by Kreol, or who are of an older generation with particularly strong Mauritian French nasalation, lexicon, and inflections. 

The main question here is: is the use of accents that are outside of one’s cultural identity, racist?

Within the context of the highly segregated white society in Mauritius, the performance of these accents is meant to make in-group whites, or others ethnicities assimilated into the same socio-economic cultural zone, laugh. The supposed humor is a clear reinforcement who is in the linguistic in-group and who is in the out-group, the group that does not linguistically, and culturally, belong. Connotations associated with these accents are of differential educational and class status, and of different racial positioning.

The identity, or positionality, of who produces these jokes matters. It is no neutral matter to be a white male in Mauritius and make fun of other people’s accents. When one locates oneself in a long lineage of cultural and economic dominance on the island, in a context where schools still deny the importance of the mother tongue Kreol as a medium of instruction, where only French or English are valid languages in parliament, where Kreol gets routinely attacked in the press, franco-Mauritians perpetuate their historical cultural and linguistic dominance. 

Deniers will say that it is an innocent joke, but fundamentally, this joke is disrespectful. Language is the one medium of producing and performing one’s self for the world. It is one’s core way of being. Having someone from a historic and current dominant group use one’s accent and manner is denigrating and demeaning.

On the other hand, non dominant groups who make fun of the jargon and manners of whites needs to be understood as a form of resistance to the cultural dominance imposed by franco-Mauritians. For example, Vincent Duvergé’s mocking of franco-Mauritian hunting men is not to be understood under the same light. As Aamer Rahman humorously explains, there is no such thing as reverse racism from people of color to whites when one considers the long durée of exploitation and colonization that characterizes whites’ relationship to people of color, including in Mauritius.

Further, if one were to transpose the situation for more perspective: when a man makes fun of women’s speech, it is easy to see this as sexist, or if a German were to make fun of Yiddish, it is equally natural to perceive this as anti-semitic. There is no debate around these situations, which are both deeply othering, from one historical dominant group to another. So is the use of accents by white males aa form of racism? The answer is a very simple, yes.