This morning I read this article about the Washington Redskins, and the lack of Native American voices in the media. And how, even though we have activists of color fighting for the right to be heard, there can still be lack of understanding within those ranks.
That got me thinking about accents, and how trying to speak another language is a lot like trying to understand and see from another cultural context. Even after a lot of study, it still isn't quite the same as being born inside that culture. (Alanna Shaikh expounds upon that similarly here.) Hence, the existence of accents. And not other people's accents but especially our own that we aren't even aware of, because even fluency will not give us the ability to hear ourselves from a native's ears, so we can't see what nuances we're missing.
When I studied French in college, I discovered I could affect the accent of a French person speaking English simply by holding my mouth in the French way. That is, to keep my mouth shaped the way I had to when I was trying to speak French. It was an interesting exercise. Realizing that mouth shapes existed surely helped me with my French pronunciation, for one, but I also realized what our cultural context gives us that we take for granted. That is, that there is an American mouth shape that we use when speaking, have always used when speaking, and would never realize we had unless we tried to speak another language and had to overcome that very mouth shape.
Perspective is so important. They say it comes with age and it makes sense, because all of those overcomings are necessary in order to see anything, least of all differently. We have so much to learn.