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…
Open Thread: The Ancient & Honorable Art of Code SwitchingPost + Comments (70)