Discovering Codeswitching While Christopher Columbusing AAVE

Peter Doocy, a uniformed white man and an unfortunate member of the Fox News press team, asked White House Press Secretary and a Black woman, Karine Jean-Pierre, why Kamala Harris sounded so “southern” when speaking to an audience in Detroit versus and audience in Pittsburgh, essentially accusing the vice president of co-opting the language pattern of her audience in order to pander to them; neither of those cities are in the South, by the way. It was not a zip code he was addressing but rather the type of people who lived in that “southern” house.

What he wanted to say (the thing about racism is that it is both bold and cowardly) is why does she sound so Black in front of a Blacker audience? Why does she speak with such comfort around people who look like her? Doocy can’t imagine that even a biracial woman, who presents as Black, grew up in Oakland, and went to an HBCU, could ever talk like a Black person. The same demographic that sees her Blackness when it is time to insult her cannot see it when it’s time to hear her. It is easy to surmise that any biracial person connected to both of their heritages is going to be doing a lot of codeswitching, in general. Those same nasty social media commentators who mimic Black speech while hurling racism and vitriol relegate AAVE to the Black people they view with the most contempt and view as the least intelligent, or as that White comedian Chris Rock would say, “I love Black people, but I hate n*ggas.”

They think only the realest of n*gga speaks AAVE, and surely not Aaron from accounting with the Black wife, who went to an HBCU and was a Kappa.

No, Aaron from accounting golfed with them twice at company sponsored events, so of course he does not talk like that, he is not one of them. They have no problem with codeswitching to mock Black people. Still, there is shock and awe when Black people do it out of a genuine familial exchange, and more importantly that educated Black people (whom they would have to admit are somewhat educated, according to their standards, because they talk in a way that White people have associated with intelligence) use AAVE at all. 

It is an interesting thing that the same people who like to co-opt AAVE or put on a blaccent when they are attempting aggression or humor do not understand that Black people talk differently around them. To fashion yourself as the most cultured, it is unfathomable to think there is a part of Black culture, let alone any culture, that you do not know about and is not catered for your understanding or consumption. Codeswitching, for Black people, was born out of the need to assimilate for housing, education and employment. For centuries, the way Black people speak has been mocked by white society but that does not mean that Black people did not find comfort in the way we communicated with each other, it just means that we did not find comfort communicating that way with those who mocked it. Most Black people do not speak the President’s English at home, even if that home is in a nice suburb. Codeswitching is not a new phenomenon and is not solely something only done by Black people, many cultures, including European ones have a way of speaking at home, and a more informal manner of communication but there is only classism and not racism and classism involved. 

Gen Z is not a generation any more innovative than any other.  Surely, they are more connected to the world because that is what happens when you grow up in a world that has always been engineered for the internet, but they are not any more innovative. Black Twitter’s extreme viability and virality have made the way Black people speak not only popular but cool enough to co-opt, so much so that Gen Z gets to take credit for many colorful sayings and even syntax that originated in Black communities and social circles. When white kids speak one way around their parents and another around their friend group, they are not accused of being “southern,” even though many of their sayings are lifted from Black southerners. 

Peter Doocy works for Fox News; his father is a co-anchor for Fox & Friends. He is a right-wing conservative white man—who somehow lived in both New York and Chicago—two cities heavily populated with Black people. It is probable that he would not know that a Black New Yorker does not sound like a White New Yorker, or even worse, this ‘journalist,’ would not have heard the “southern” dialect in many Black Chicagoans’ speech.

Some would argue that she was indeed pandering, some would argue that she is just being an effective communicator, speaking to her audience in the ways they understand and feel comfortable, but none of this invalidates that codeswitching is a normal practice for many Black people, and even without the presence of white ears, we still make a sound.