[SummerChild]

My sister called and my answering machine came on once and she said that she hung up b/c she thought that she had dialed the number of a white woman. It wasn't my English being proper (b/c my mother didn't raise any fools and she speaks proper English as well). It was the inflection in my speech. I can't deny that other races do tend to have a different inflection when speaking and more of a nasal way of speaking sometimes. Of course this does not go for everyone but I must admit that I understood why my sister mistook me for someone else. It's just like how I can tell if I'm talking to a black woman when I call the telephone company - and it's not a matter of her English being proper or not.

It may also be a regional thing b/c when I lived in Cali, quite a few times while riding the train, I thought that the person standing behind me talking was white and turned and the person was black. It was not a matter of proper English. It was the nasalness of it all.

SC