David Oyelowo apologized for comments tying Black Southern accents to slavery and subservience, walking back remarks he made days earlier on the One54 Africa podcast while weighing in on Druski's viral skit about Black British actors. The apology, posted to Instagram, came after swift backlash.
Druski's skit features a fictional British actor named Sampson DuBois, cast as an enslaved man in a film called Release the Shackles, who drops his polished American performance for a crisp British accent the second the director yells cut. The bit pokes at a years-long debate over Black British actors landing prominent African American roles. Asked about it in a One54 Africa interview, Oyelowo gave it a measured read. "I think it's funny, that skit," he said. "Do I think it's helpful? I don't." His point: the real problem is Hollywood making too few substantial roles for Black people in the first place, not which Black actor lands them.
That part landed fine. What came next did not.
On the One54 Africa podcast, hosted by Akbar and Godfrey, Oyelowo suggested the Southern Black American dialect was essentially a Nigerian accent reshaped by history. "If you take the Nigerian accent and slow it down, you put a lot of slavery in there," he said, "you put a little bit of subservience in there, this is what happens."
The reaction was immediate. Commentator Demetria L. Lucas argued that equating a Southern Black American dialect with subservience said more about how Oyelowo views Black Americans in the South than about the actual history of the dialect.
Two days later, Oyelowo addressed it head-on. "I want to apologize unreservedly to all those who were rightly offended by my comments on the One54 Africa podcast regarding Southern Accents," he wrote. "It was the wrong thing to say and it is not how I feel." He added that "reducing a dialect born from the richness and resilience of Black Southern culture to anything less was careless and wrong."
The irony wasn't lost on anyone. Oyelowo, who is British, gave one of his most acclaimed performances as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma in 2014, embodying one of the most revered Southern Black voices in American history.
