Let’s talk about VP Kamala Harris & code switching pic.twitter.com/vEwkpXvD4g
— 2RawTooReal (@2RawTooReal) September 4, 2024
Columbia professor John McWhorter, in the NYTimes, “Harris Gonna Code Switch” [gift link]:
… Twenty years ago I never thought I would hear the term “code-switching” used as widely as it now is beyond the halls of academe. Code-switching is perhaps best known in reference to alternating between different languages, such as English and Spanish. However, the same concept applies to different dialects of the same language, such as between a standard dialect and a colloquial one. But as glad as I am to see this, my heart sinks at the way people are mocking Vice President Kamala Harris for code-switching according to the audience she is speaking to. Barack Obama attracted criticism for doing the same thing back in the aughts; I hoped we had gotten past this…
A lot of people think there is something wrong with her doing this. “Harris seems to put on an accent for Atlanta rally,” read one chyron on Fox News. One take on X, typical in its tone on the issue, displays familiarity with the term “code-switching” but frames it as a cynical act: “Code switching is a convenient way to describe blatant pandering.” Of course, Trump has joined in, asking “Did you hear a new accent?” with his running mate, JD Vance, right behind him claiming that Harris is using a “fake Southern accent.”
First of all, Harris is not doing a “Southern” accent. She is not summoning Jeff Foxworthy, the comedian Fortune Feimster or Rue McClanahan’s Blanche Devereaux. What people are hearing as Southern is Black English, with which white Southern English overlaps only partially. Black English has a great many traits alien to white Southern English.
More to the point, language is about reaching into another mind. It’s about connecting. Code-switching is one of the ways that humans use language to connect. Using the colloquial dialect of a language serves the same function as drinking or getting a mani-pedi together. It says, “We’re all the same.” It is especially natural, and common, when seeking connection about folksier things or summoning a note of cutting through the nonsense and getting to the heart of things in a “Let’s face it” way. This is why many of us readily say “Ain’t gonna happen” even if we aren’t given to saying “ain’t” regularly…
Harris grew up among Black kids in Oakland, Calif., and went to Howard University, an HBCU, where she was a member of a sorority. I have never met Harris, but in my California days I spent a good deal of time in Oakland, and my sister went to an HBCU around the same time Harris was at Howard. I feel quite confident that Harris was richly immersed in code-switching between standard and Black English in her formative years. Today she is faking neither a “Southern” accent nor a Black one, but bringing to a national audience the sincere and effortless linguistic versatility that most Black Americans possess…
It is interesting that people find this more intuitive when her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz, does it. In his debut speech as Harris’s V.P. pick, Walz mainly used standard dialect but often code-switched richly into colloquial ’Murrican. He referred to his “summers workin’ on the family farm” and how “Muh dad was a teacher, muh brothers and sisters and I followed in their footsteps.” And announced that as a nation “We aren’t goin’ back,” “We got 91 days” and “We just gotta fight.” Apparently, it’s OK to summon a bit of pickup truck, but to summon a bit of, say, “urbanity” makes one a vulgar poseur.
But there is all reason to suppose that she will continue to do this regularly over the next few months — Harris gonna code switch — and that the usual suspects will roast her for it. Whether knocking her for code-switching is racist, prim or politically desperate is up for debate. What is certain is that these critiques, from the perspective of how language and communication work worldwide, are naïve.
Sidebar:
Are we talking about switching accents? pic.twitter.com/Fu1IBlYQKo
— Mueller, She Wrote (@MuellerSheWrote) September 3, 2024
Ruckus
It’s sort of like speaking more than one language. The fact that a lot of people can only speak one and sometimes not even all that well seems to bring out the negatives to someone that speaks multiple languages and/or dialects.
JoyceH
She may not even be code-switching deliberately. When I was stationed in Hawaii I was taking a course and a fellow student was native Hawaiian. We were talking in a bar and he’d talk standard American to me, and pidgin to the bartender. I said, “It’s so cool the way you do that”, and he said “do what?”
redoubt
Reminder that John McWhorter is also the author of Woke Racism: How A New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.
SpaceUnit
Christ, they’re desperate.
And clearly they’ve got nothing.
MattF
There’s also a ‘right-wing techbro’ accent, but no one notices that.
SpaceUnit
Oh, and I saw my first Cybertruck in the wild today. It was parked at the local Safeway. Seems like a BJ thing that you have to announce it. It’s like confessing that you’ve lost your virginity, only in this case it’s like getting fucked in both eye-sockets. Goddamn it was ugly.
bjacques
Having an Oxford education but putting on a cornpone accent for the rubes back home or acting stupid so they’ll think you’re one of them is also code-switching.
Chet Murthy
@redoubt: haha indeed. I thought to myself: has McWhorter managed to say something truthful, managed to be decent? Wonders never cease!
Anne Laurie
@redoubt: Exactly! Professor McWhorter is not only a ‘verified’ expert, but one of the last people who might be credibly accused of chasing after the ‘woke’ vote.
If *he* is telling the wingnuts to knock it off, they have truly been reduced to a state of ‘having nothing useful to declare’.
R-Jud
@SpaceUnit: I was in New Jersey last month for a family reunion. A cybertruck rolled past the house where many of us were staying. About a dozen of us were out on the porch when it passed, and we all simultaneously burst into loud, hearty Italian-American laughter.
I hope the driver heard.
Speaking of code-switching, my mother and father did it all the time: generic Eastern Seaboard white-person voices for customers at the inn they ran in the Poconos, normal Noo Joisey voices for us kids.
John Revolta
So in other words, it’s using different vernaculars when you move among different groups of people. Huh. Well I do declare.
The trouble with Trumpf and Vance and the rest of the GOoPers is, they never move among different groups of people. Really, they ought to try it sometime.
SpaceUnit
@R-Jud:
I now comfortably assume that everyone who owns a Cybertruck also has a YouTube channel about UFO’s.
Steve in the ATL
@SpaceUnit: ha!
Baud
@SpaceUnit:
They don’t have nothing. This is their standard thing that often works. It just isn’t working this time
ETA:.
2007
2015
SpaceUnit
If I were a fourth grader and making a volcano out of modeling clay for a science project I would make sure that that the jungle surrounding my volcano included both a tiny plastic dinosaur and and a miniature Cybertruck.
HinTN
@Baud:
FTFY – Good morning, late night crew
satby
@HinTN: early morning crew mostly 🌄
And the homogeneity of most conservative people’s lives is why they’re so befuddled by this whole discussion about accents, as @John Revolta: points out. And lack of imagination, they know to not swear in church even if they usually say “pass the butter” with extra adjectives, but they don’t realize that’s the same as code switching.
hueyplong
Big picture, it looks as though they’ve reached the “uppity” stage of their attempts to knock down Harris’ appeal and numbers, and have arrived at a term for it to use as a “shocked” response to charges of racism.
We said “inauthentic,” not “uppity.” You “woke” libz always want to call authentic America’s criticisms “racist.”
“And that also goes for fake Everyman Tim Walz. We all know who the Real Merkins are.”
It goes without saying that they aren’t niCLANG bitchez or liberal white males.
MagdaInBlack
@satby: I would ask these oblivious people if they speak the same in a business meeting as they do watching football with their friends.
It’s just not the big mystery they seem/pretend to think it is.
Baud
@MagdaInBlack:
I do. It may explain my lack of professional success. And friends.
satby
@MagdaInBlack: Agree, though for some of them (fundie Xtians in rural areas especially) it is; think about the “Mike Pence” church types. They’re prissy little speakers everywhere they go. They pride themselves on not fitting themselves to others in speech or behavior. And they’re the ones this attack on Harris is designed for.
satby
@Baud: you’re adorable 😘
Gvg
When I visited family in the much more “southern” Gainesville as a kid, I would gradually start speaking with a more southern accent like my cousins, and it happened faster as I grew up. I grew up in Orlando which was full of people from all over the country who moved there after Disney and after the space race for the defense industry. It was full of tourists from all over the world and the English was not very accented there. We kids used to laugh about my accent changes and thought it was just something that happened.
At work and in college there are courses about how to give speeches and lectures or write papers that are aimed at specific audiences. They always start with know who you are writing for. They spell out you can’t communicate effectively with the same speech/whatever to different audiences. You must Taylor the message. It’s considered basic competence.
You speak differently to interested amateurs versus professionals, kids versus adults and lots of other situations. I don’t want to hear a speech for a professional something I am not and won’t be insulted to get a reasonably intelligent but simplified explanation that is done well.
MagdaInBlack
@Baud: You may be on to something there. Or its the lack of pants thing. 😊
David Collier-Brown
I did’t know about code-switching until I was in my teens, and my cousin Elthea said about our adjutant, “she speaks perfect white-boy”.
(As it happens, I misunderstood and replied “well,she is white, but I don’t think you could ever call her a boy” (:-))
Matt McIrvin
My white school-psychologist mom, a lot of whose job was really social work, did this without realizing or admitting it. I’d notice when she was talking on the phone that her cadence and dialect would shift depending on who she was talking to–she grew up in Davenport, Iowa but her speech would take on Appalachian characteristics.
Soprano2
My dad did this all the time. He spoke differently to the farmers at the Derby station than he did to the school board as a school superintendent. They’re pretending to not know what she’s doing.
kalakal
I do it all the time and not deliberately.
eg When I’m speaking English/English and US/English. The language/vocabulary/idiom and pronunciation all change.
Also depending on the audience. It’s not mocking or phony, it’s so I can communicate to many varied people I interact with.
As personal attacks go this is pathetic. Weak stuff MAGAs
TBone
I was born in Brooklyn Jewish Hospital and lived on Long Island for the first few years of life, so I came to PA with a built in accent. When we moved in with my WASP grandparents, my brother and I lost the accent very quickly. To me, it’s merely a “reading the room” kind of thing.
Speaking of code switching, Hannity mirrored Donvict’s speech weirdnesses last night. It was a stark change in speech pattern and seeing him go so far off the rails to appease his Russian master was very unsettling. I had to apply medical help to get to sleep last night.
Baud
Via reddit, I had never seen this before.
Matt McIrvin
@Gvg: I’m a Midwesterner by birth and acquired much of my accent during the brief period that we were living near Cleveland, Ohio. So I still have a lot of what linguists call the Northern Cities Vowel Shift. “I ceeyan’t steeyand it.”
But I suppressed it a bit after moving to Northern Virginia, where the main accents are a mixture of a middle-East-Coast dialect close to Midland broadcaster-American, and Southern American. And I probably picked up aspects of a more Northeastern dialect (vocabulary, certainly) after moving to Massachusetts as an adult. None of this happened by conscious effort, of course.
A Harvard student once told me I had the same accent as the people in “Fargo”. I don’t (I think it’s closer to Great Lakes metropolitan people like Michael Moore or Hillary Clinton), but he was picking up on my regional roots in a vague way.
different-church-lady
In the end it’s about “othering” her to Trump’s white base, since white “doesn’t have an accent.”
Meet the new shit. Same as the old shit.
Baud
Trump understands code switching.
Ken
@SpaceUnit: They may also have a YouTube or TikTok channel where they talk about their cybertruck’s problems, because they don’t (can’t) do that on X-Twitter.
NotMax
@SpaceUnit
Speaking of unusual car sightings, one of these $150k+ beasts trundled by in a large shopping mall complex parking lot in suburban NY yesterday.
What a fuel hog. Estimated 13 mpg for the V-8 engine. In low speed stop and go parking lot conditions, running full air conditioning, I’d guesstimate maybe 9 mpg.
What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?
I could see Trump being completely ignorant of code switching because he’s never had to. Born rich with everyone catering to him, everyone around him had to code switch to interact with him rather than vice versa. If there’s any truth at all to his book though, I guarantee Vance code switches all the time. I bet he spent most of his college years hiding his hillbilly vernacular and I guarantee he didn’t get a job in the venture capital industry speaking hillbilly. When he goes home though, if he ever does, I bet he slips back into it in certain contexts.
And yeah half the GOP does this – they’re invariably rich guys, but pretending to be good ol boys with the truck, trucker cap and other trappings of white rural culture to signal to their voters. E.g. the guy currently running for Senate in Montana. I guarantee he cosplays as a Montana rancher but I think he lived somewhere out East (maybe Maryland?) until a few years ago. So it’s all just a show for the rubes.
lowtechcyclist
@Gvg:
Especially when speaking to an audience of Swifties.
MagdaInBlack
@different-church-lady: Yes, this.
MagdaInBlack
@What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?: I was just thinking about that last bit, the maga hats etc. All of us are saturated in “code” and we are so used to “reading” it we are unaware of it.
Baud
@lowtechcyclist:
I wonder when she’ll join Liz Cheney in endorsing Kamala.
Bruce K in ATH-GR
@NotMax: Yuppie tanks, I called them when I saw them while growing up in New Jersey. Nowadays, steroid sedans. Not that there’s anything wrong with them that couldn’t be fixed by three or four passes through a car crusher.
MagdaInBlack
@NotMax: I see those quite often, because I commute thru a high $$ area. My latest sighting is a Ferrari Portofino, base price $214k, or thereabout. Nice little commuter car, dontcha think?
Eta: what coded message is the Ferrari owner sending us?
Baud
@MagdaInBlack:
Ferraris aren’t ugly.
MagdaInBlack
@Baud: Nope. It was NIIIIICE. ( yes, I get your point 😉
satby
So, interesting post by Ruth Ben-Ghiat for today: The real reason why Trump insults the US military.
Ken
“Ladies, look at how much money I can waste.” Peacock behavior, primate style.
lowtechcyclist
@satby:
How did I not see this before? :headslap:
different-church-lady
@MagdaInBlack: But have you seen how much eggs cost?!?
MagdaInBlack
@different-church-lady: 🤭😉😊😊
Kristine
@MagdaInBlack: Reminds me of the Bentley convertible I saw a few days ago. Attractive car. Base price a bit more than the current value of my house.
Geminid
@What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?: Tim Sheehy grew up in a nice house on a lake 20 minutes from Minneapolis. After retiring from the Navy in 2014, Sheehy moved to Bozeman, Montana. A Montana Democratic Party spokesman claims that “John Tester has farm equipment that’s been in Montana longer than Tim Sheehy.”
Tester’s 2018 opponent Matt Rosendale was originally from Maryland, so naturally Tester’s campaign called him, “Maryland Matt.”
JWR
@different-church-lady:
Was it here, or some other, more “reputable” site, (hee-hee), where somebody suggested that the only way for Trump to win now is to tear Harris down, not build himself up?
In any case, I still wonder about Don Jr., Eric and JD Vance, who all seem to have taken on, what is it, “Tech Bro” accents? Or is Tech Bro the way Elon Musk talks? I dunno.
As an aside, I’d never heard of the RW characters swept up in the latest RU investigation, and for that, I am glad.
Spanish Moss
I grew up in the deep South, but I have lived in MA for the past 30 years, and I gradually lost most of my Southern accent. However, some of it comes right back when I talk to friends and family from back home. It happens without me realizing it, and the effect seems to linger for a few hours. Occasionally my husband has come home from work, heard me speak, and asked if I had been talking to my family earlier.
Ken
Ditto. Though given that Russia appears to have been paying them $400K a month, each, either they’re major influencers in the RW sphere or Russia is terrible at this.
Geminid
Mick Jagger has got to be one of the most successful code-switchers of all time.
Maxim
I liked the last video in the post, so I went to the site listed onscreen during the spot. I thought I might throw him a few bucks.
It’s not a campaign website; it’s a blog about Louisiana politics. I could not find any information about the man who says he’s running against Kennedy. I did find two ads at the bottom of the main page for different gambling sites.
File under “Tell me you’re not ready for prime time without telling me you’re not ready for prime time.”
lowtechcyclist
@Ken:
All I can think is, if I’d ever had a gig like that, I’d have done it for a year or two, and then would have retired to live the good life.
I wouldn’t do it now, because I’m already retired and living the good life. But it took me the usual working lifetime to get there, rather than a matter of months.
Rusty
@Ken: I suspect they are influencers of a narrow target segment. There are all kinds of influencers most of us have never hear of because we aren’t in that slice pf demographics, but within those communities they are well known. It’s just another part of our continuing fracturing into smaller and smaller enclaves. Oh, and I had no idea who they were either.
Scout211
From what I can tell, he ran for Senate in 2022. He had an ActBlue donation site that is now inactive.
TBone
Pooty sarcastically “endorsed” Kamala Harris. I’m guessing that hit dog hollered not from the stance of a victor, but from a place of desperation deep within that dialed up his false bravado. What a putz.
I’d like to see him in a cage match with Liz Cheney. She’d kick his ass with a quickness.
satby
@lowtechcyclist: @Rusty: @Ken:
Unfortunately, he’s well known in his niche:
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Duke of Clay
Excellent article! I am originally from rural Mississippi, I‘ve earned two Master’s degrees and a doctorate, and have lived in the Midwest and New England. I have subconsciously code switched my entire adult life. I only know this because my wife points it out to me. She says that when I get a phone call, the first sentence out of my mouth after hello tells her the caller is a Mississippi relative.
SFAW
@Baud:
And pants? Or is that a reality unto itself?
Msb
Exactly. After I studied in the UK for a year I started talking about taking a “bahth” or adding “tomahto”. It stopped pretty quickly after I got home. And my original Southern accent reappears when I visit my family; after a day or two, the doorbell rings and I say, “Ah’ll git it.” And “ y’all” reappears – such a useful second person plural.
Maxim
@Scout211: Ah, okay. Thanks.
MinuteMan
The essence of modern GQP rhetoric is bullying. They’ll grab onto anything that is slightly different about a target and use it as a taunt and build a cloud of insult around their taunt. Look at the many petty mole-hill scandals that have been created and then propogated through the duplicity of the lemming, billionaire owned media. For Obama there was the tan suit, Dijon mustard, putting his feet on his desk, etc. For Hilary Clinton it was her laugh, her pantsuits, etc. For Harris it’s her accent switching, her laugh, her “convenient blackness” and there’s sure to be more to come. If these tactics don’t bring back poignant memories of unpleasant, sadistic people in your past you are quite fortunate indeed. Definitely not the sport of people we want to put in power.
StringOnAStick
I was born and raised in western Colorado and there was a distinct “hick” accent depending on your social class; once I went to grad school and got a job in the Denver area, a admin person pointed out my “strong western slope accent” so I worked hard to get rid of a lot of it.
It came right back when I was working with well drillers or similar rural types because it helped that the short woman boss running the show sounded like one of them; I could successfully speak Good Ol’ Boy as needed. That wasn’t a conscious choice, it just happens; it’s called mirroring and It’s something humans seeking connection normally do. “Normally” , so wingnut don’t get it. It’s become such wingnut territory now though (I blame wingnut radio as the tip of the spear for workers who spent a lot of time driving like they did) that I don’t think I could “pass” anymore.
Uncle Cosmo
Oligarch potlach.** And relatively harmless to the greater society. I have no gripe with whatever way bazillionaires want to spend their bazillions – unless they do it knowingly*** to immiserate, humiliate and in general fuck over those with much less.
I give (F)elon Skum credit for two things – Tesla, which did a lot in its early years to promote EV development, and SpaceX, which is doing a lot to advance the technology of multi-engine spaceflight with reusable hardware using methalox fuels that in principle could be produced with environmentally friendly energy sources. (Please to note the verb tenses.) Beyond that, Apartheid Clyde ain’t nothin’ but a Dunning-Kruger techbro.
** One o the few things I retain from Mr Vrachos, who taught the Sociology segment of Social Studies 12 lo these meny years; along with the name of the Kwakiutl Indians of the PNW who practiced it.
*** Or would be knowingly if they’d thought about any particular course of action for half a second in advance.
H-Bob
@StringOnAStick: Going the other way on code switching, there is a story about Henry Kissinger (who had a very thick accent). Someone met his brother, who had an American accent, so the brother was asked why Henry had such a thick accent while the brother didn’t. The brother responded “Henry never listens to anyone else”!
Uncle Cosmo
I’d never heard of “code switching” before this thread but it’s a good phrase to know.
I grew up fluent in at least four dialects: Standard English, which my folks spoke in spite of being Italian by descent and Appalachian by birth[1]; North Central Redneck, from vacations visiting Mom’s people mostly still in WV[2}; Noo Yawk, learned by Dad’s side after they lost the family farm & moved with a married daughter to North Jersey[3];; and finally, Middle High Bawlmerese, which everyone else around (except for our teachers) spoke[4,5].
[1] Southwesternmost PA and north-central WV, moved to Baltimore in their late 20s. But don’t take my word for it, One day I dropped by their house with one of my HS friends who’d never met them. Her folks were very Baltimorean in speech. She turned to me on the way out and said perplexidly, Your parents have no accent! I guess she was expecting Beverly Hillbillies out of Hee-Haw (which FTR Mon & Dad watched religiously in the afternoons). -laughing at the way the cast spoke.
{2] From Mom’s favorite sister (also my godmother) who we stayed by (SWIDT? ;^D) most summers, I learned her go-to term for people she loathed (“shit-ass”) and the collective “yinz” (which I always heard as “yoonz”, which I later figured out was short for “you’uns” and originally “you ones”) Remember this was <100 miles south of Pittsburgh. I used to hear my uncles talk about “goin’ feeshin’ downa crick” and “didja hear the Parts game last night?” – “Parts” being the name of the team that played MLB in Forbes Field. Frankly I blame KDKA, first commercial radio station in the US, and “they who were approved in the offense,” Westinghouse,
[3] Scusami, Nort Joyzee. More precisely, Boygin County, I grew up hating NY sports teams (always the Yanks; the Jets and Mets and Knicks after the disaster that was 1969) but I never begrudged my uncles and cousins their fandom – these were their hometown teams. Typical comment from my cousins: Youse guise from Bwolteemwah twok real funny.
[4] I made good use of this in grassroots politics days hanging out with the high muckamucks, scratching my belly button & allowing as “I’s jess a po’ boah fum Dundalk.[6]” Yeah, with a graduate degree in math and an IQ north of 150. Keep shooting your mouths off, fuckheads!
[5] Baltimore – more properly,”Balmer Merlin Hon” – is the only place in the multiverse where “Baltimorons” lock their paramour in the grodge for two weeks at a stretch and only comes out when it’s time to cut the grass…
I have to tell this story, paraphrased from a long-lost pamphelt on Baltimorese written by “Mr Peep” who wrote a diary for the Baltimore Sun when it was a highly respected fishwrap (back around the time of the Thirty Years’ War):
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