Articles like this give me worry. I'm a passant-blanc (white-passing) Creole from New Orleans, and I speak with a Creole accent. (Creole, like Chicano, can be any color -- it refers to ancestry, not race.) The New Orleans Creole accent sounds a lot like a New England accent, in that it's non-rhotic and has some of the same consonant sounds. This is because nuns from the Northeast came down to teach my ancestors English after the Louisiana Purchase. However, the vowels and prosody sound like AAVE, due to centuries of proximity. New Orleans has always been majority Black, and Creoles are generally mixed, due to the earliest European settlers being young single men.

I don't try to get rid of my accent because I relocated after Katrina and my accent is about all I have left of my New Orleans heritage. Also, as an autist, it's hard enough to make words come out my mouth much less try and change how they sound.

When I read an article like this, I worry that my accent may be offensive to my Black neighbors. No one has ever called me out on it, and a few have said they like the way I talk. Still, I worry.

Do you want me to try and get rid of my accent?