excerpt from No Accident, Multimedia, 2012

In my Black communities, a ‘neutral’ North American accent is either prized for the doors it might open, or reviled for its seeming alliance with whiteness. As a child I was admonished for adopting my parents’ Caribbean accents and made to repeat Ts, ‘th’, and other sounds precisely. Built from an alphabetized list of those primary words, words used in accent and stutter reduction classes, and my own word associations, the video installation piece No Accident examines accent as an embodiment of a Black middle class aesthetic.