This is something white people say a lot more often than black people. Who experiences race?
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Um, okay. Is someone trying to make this a âthingâ?
White guy gets mugged and when the police are taking the report he says âHe had on white sneakers, blue jeans, a red and white plaid shirt and a black baseball cap.â And the police officer asks him âWhat was his race?â to which the white mans says âI donât see color.â
Panthers arenât black though.
Black Panthers are black - tautologically so - but they are called black panthers because panthers come in many different colours and designs. A Black Panther from Africa isnât even the same species as a Black Panther from South America - they are actually just black coloured leopards and jaguars, respectively.
The North American Panther - the cougar - isnât even available in black at all.
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Sure, there are stereotypical black voices, but that doesnât mean they accurately represent anyone. When I was a kid I would occasionally wonder why Cleavon Little sounded so much like some members of my Scandinavian-white family, and it was only later that I found out that he grew up in San Diego just like I did, and that seemed to color his speech inflections more than any racial factor.
But accents and inflections and dialects and speech mannerisms are all simply tools in a versatile actorâs toolbox. I donât think that voice alone gives any indication of a speakerâs race or ethnic background.
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If you hand a set of lines to a group of competent voice actors of many races, and ask them to all read the lines using the same diction, inflection and tone as each other (have them work it out), theyâll be able to all sound essentially the same.
Now, with film and tv actors, I donât know if this is true. But from watching a lot of documentaries on voice acting, and knowing some voice actors, they all seem to say that all âstereotypical voicesâ are the first ones you learn to copy. Because theyâre strained and highly inflected.
Itâs easy to copy a strained voice. Thatâs why everyone can do Arnold Schwarzenegger from T2. Thatâs why Spongebob is easy to copy. Thatâs why URLâs voice from Futurama is so easy to copy (in fact URL who sounds like Barry White, is voiced by John DiMaggio, one of the whitest men to walk the Earth.)
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Panthroâs coding comes from early on, too; per Hear the Roar! The Unofficial and Unauthorised Guide to the Hit 1980s Series Thundercats by David Crichton, Len Starrâs original production notes state that âHis voice should be deep and dignified while suggesting the black culture.â Not sure if the broader facial features Ms. Jones describes were present on Ted Wolfâs initial sketch or not, but one assumes, as other commenters have already noted, that Panthro is black because panthers are black.
(Actually, as FirstLast notes, âpantherâ is a blanket term used for multiple different kinds of big cat, but itâs most commonly used to refer to âblack panthersâ, which can be either jaguars or leopards. I suppose we can assume that Panthro is a leopard, since thereâs already a Jaga.)
The Crichton book is highly recommended to all Thundercats fans, by the way; as far as I know it was only ever published in the UK (hence the spelling of unauthorised), but itâs not hard to find an imported copy on Amazon or wherever. Itâs as thorough a history of the show as anybodyâs ever written, and has interviews with as many primary sources as Crichton could get ahold of.
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I afraid this thread just took a hard turn into serious racial identity, albeit with cartoon feline hominids and big cats. In this context, I immediately drew parallels between what youâre saying about genus panthera and when white people that say, âwell Iâm an an Anerican, and all humans came from Africa, so Iâm African-American too,â or âWhy does Obama say heâs white? Heâs equally white.â (Not that I have any reason to believe that you would actually say these things, but I couldnât help but draw parallel to the patently trivial racial identity of a fictional non-human character.) In both cases, the statements are undeniably technically true, but also entirely irrelevant. No one outside of a biologist studying genus panthera, or a bar trivia participant thinks this way. When the average person hears âpantherâ they donât think âtigerâ or âleopardâ, they think âlarge black cat.â
Google proves this https://www.google.com/search?q=panther .
The fact that this is a common misconception proves this.
Itâs this visceral connection of âPantherâ 
ď¸ âBlack panther (cat)â ď¸ âBlack Panther (political)â ď¸ âBlack manâ is what the cartoonists were going for, and thatâs what they got.
The fact that panthers are not all black is not irrelevant to the statement that âof course Panthro is black, heâs a pantherâ because it is one predicated on false assumptions of an othered group, and the fact that you retort with âwell most people think that so itâs obviously true enoughâ just highlights the absurd parallel with racial identity that youâve drawn.
Yes, Panthro is an obviously coded black character based on a black panther in the decade following the Black Panther Partyâs height of cultural impact. Yes, you can get a large amount of Google hits showing that most people believe all panthers to be black (the top links for me are the Wikipedia page saying itâs a cougar, and National Geographic saying itâs just a term for a large black cat in their blurbs) - What does the average person think about when hearing âterroristâ or âthugâ?
None of that means all panthers are black. Stop enforcing your species normative agenda and check your privilege. You can be an ally or an opponent - either way you donât get to decide how panthers self-identify.
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Stop being pantherist.
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But only some lion gets to command the Sword of Omens.
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Inflections and accents and mannerisms aside, black men do tend* to have deeper voices. Larynxes, sinuses, etc., exhibit differences among âraces,â and why wouldnât they? Skin and hair and facial dimensions obviously do. Thereâs not that much difference between identifying someoneâs race based on visual markers and identifying it by aural qualities or DNA analysis.
*Tend - it should go without saying that this is a generalization.
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Hmm. I read the headline as âPanthro is backâ. This is somewhat disappointing, though I guess itâs more informative.
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Shake: âCâmon dog. Youâre into this. Youâre blackâ
Frylock: [silence]
Shake: âYou sound black.â
Frylock: [silence]
Shake âWhere are you from?â
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Isnât there? Iâd be interested to see how much those factors differ in reliability of prediction. No doubt both fall short of DNA analysis, and I have no doubt that both can be reasonably strong indicators, but how one speaks is, Iâve always assumed, more environmentally-influenced than how one looks. I get the biological factors like timbre and pitch, but otherwiseâŚ
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Just look at Key and Peele. Theyâre black guys who can imitate practically anyone. While they may have particular acting talents that makes it an easier task, I have a hard time believing itâs entirely a genetic trait. Iâve known too many black people who can imitate my own personal voice to a high degree to believe itâs even mostly genetic.
I think a lot of what makes âblack people sound blackâ or âAsian people sound Asianâ or âwhite people sound whiteâ is an affectation caused by environmental factors during language development. Just listen to podcasts.
I listen to The Scathing Atheist podcast, and have been for about a year now, but my mental images of Heath Enright and Noah Lugeons were completely different from what I saw when I watched their Roast of God a few days ago. While I couldnât have gotten their race wrong (they both mention their pasty complexion), I did get other factors of their appearance incredibly wrong.
Same goes for Garrison Keillor, who I actually did think was black until I saw the Prairie Home Companion movie.
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I think itâs as much cultural as anything else - genetics doesnât explain why Liverpudlians get squeakier the more working-class they are.
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Iâm pretty sure thatâs why Schizz posted it, isnât it?
