Because accent has nothing to doing with "conducting oneself accordingly". Why is the onus on the victim of discrimination to align with your bogus, outdated way of thinking?
Everyone seems to understand what standard American spoken English sound like. If not, we would not have a concept of accents at all.
Perhaps one day all accents will be treated equally, but it won’t be this century. You can rage against the machine, but it will only hurt yourself.
The world doesn’t change at the pace people seem to want it to.
If one person has to change an accent to play at the same level as another who did not have to change at all - I wouldn't call it "leveling the playing field".
I grew up in Staten Island, the son of a couple of Brooklyn Italians. As a kid I had what I now hear as a comically heavy Brooklyn accent.
As a middle-middle class kid surrounded by other kids like me, I considered my accent normal. As I got older and was exposed to people from outside our little bubble, I began to notice their reactions to my accent, which were always in jest but affected me just the same.
Hearing their jokes and their own accents, I began associate the 'standard' American accent with upperclassness, which I wanted to achieve. So I consciously worked on my accent over a number of years. By the end of high school, my R's were nearly properly rounded. By the end of college, my accent had almost completely gone. Today, it is 100% gone. I speak like a journalist from Ohio, except with more swearing.
In many ways, I miss the accent. I feel like an outsider wherever I am, whether it's at work (where I feel like I'm playing a part to fit in) or at a deli, buying a mortadella sandwich, where it feels like returning to a place I've left. But 'fixing' the accent has undoubtedly made it easier for me to advance my career.
Me, an immigrant: :|