Was Kamala Harris code-switching or pandering? We asked an expert.
A new “gate” just dropped.
Ever since a sitting president was accused of sponsoring a Washington, D.C., break-in (no, not that one), covering up a secretly recorded phone call of his attempts to interfere with a presidential election (no, not that one) and Congress filing articles of impeachment (calm down, bruh; I’m getting to it!) attaching the suffix “-gate” to a word transformed a benign word into a scandal.
The Watergate Hotel burglary was just a gateway drug to America’s “-gate” addiction. Hostagegate, Ronald Reagan’s deal to sell weapons to terrorists to delay the release of American hostages in Iran, was different from Contragate — when the Reagan administration simply ”overlooked” the CIA illegally bankrolling an international drug cartel. I will never forgive the person who named Crackgate, the scandal that started at the “front gate of the White House.” (Gategate was right there!). I understand why George H.W. Bush administration officials orchestrated a drug deal from 18-year-old Keith Jackson – they needed a prop for Bush’s Oval Office speech officially kicking off the war on drugs.
If you are too young to remember Debategate, Filegate or Lawyergate, don’t fret. Exactly 10 years after the Pulitzer Prize-losing reporters at Fox News exposed Barack Obama’s Nixonian involvement in the “Suitgate” conspiracy, Caucasian America’s favorite news channel recently uncovered a political scandal worse than terrorist fist jabgate and Arugulagate combined.
Welcome to Accentgate.
During a Tuesday briefing, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre gave Fox News Chief White House Troll Peter Doocy the opportunity to ask any question. Doocy – who apparently inherited the dimly lit bulb in his brain from his “wacky weatherman” father, Fox and Friends host Steve Doocy — didn’t want to ask the official spokesperson for the most powerful politician in the world about Biden’s recent criticism of Benjamin Netanyahu. He didn’t want to know more about the president’s reaction to the new jobs report. Instead, the nepo baby who President Joe Biden once referred to as a “stupid son of a bitch” decided to confront the person who does not work for the Harris-Walz campaign about Kamala Harris’ campaign stops in Pittsburgh and Detroit. And rather than focusing on the content of Harris’ remarks, the Fox’s DEI heir was only interested in how Harris sounded.
“Since when does the vice president have what sounds like a Southern accent?” asked Doocy, douchely. “She was talking about unions in Detroit, using one tone of voice. Same line … She used the same line in Pittsburgh and it sounded like she at least had some kind of Southern drawl.”
As usual, Jean-Pierre laughed off the question as another example of Doocy’s duplicity. However, some keen-eared social media users heard the same thing Doocy heard, accepted his premise and accused Harris of engaging in linguistic pandering. Many, citing their own fundamental misunderstanding of the term “code-switching,” recognized the slight difference in accents as something they regularly do. A few people translated Doocy’s accusations of a “southern accent” to Caucasian American Vernacular English as: “Kamala Harris is doing a fake blaccent.”
And of course, many dismissed the entire conversation with an age-old African-American aphorism.
“White people be tripping.”
Still, we had some questions: Was Harris actually using two different speech patterns in each city? If so, was she code-switching or pandering? If not, then what was she doing? Is it possible that white people are just tripping? If so, why?
Answering these questions requires an expert. Unfortunately, the researchers at the Doocy Institute of Caucasian Knowledge and White American Dialect (DICKWAD) would not return our phone calls to answer these questions. We needed the expertise and ears of someone who actually knows about the intersection of culture, language and dialect. Thankfully, we knew a guy.
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You may recognize social linguist, cultural advocate and educator Sunn m’Cheaux from TikTok or Instagram. While his videos dissecting language and culture have been shared by millions, m’Cheaux also serves as the Gullah-Gechee instructor at Harvard University’s African Language Program. According to the world-renowned professor who actually analyzes, studies and teaches the history, nuances and variations in language and speech, the debate around Doocy’s dumb question is based on four separate but commonly misunderstood concepts:
- Accents: Regional and cultural variations in pronunciation Or, in this case, a particularly Black speech affect commonly known as a “Blaccent.”
- Code-switching: Switching between two different languages or dialects
- The chameleon effect: Subconsciously mimicking or mirroring verbal and nonverbal behaviors
- Informed behavior: Intentionally adjusting one’s behavior based on the information available.
White people be wrong.
Let’s get this out of the way: Kamala Harris was not code-switching.
One of the most common misunderstandings of the nuances of Black dialect and African American Vernacular English is non-Black people’s mistranslation of the “invariant be” (Even the attempts by language scholars at Yale and Merriam-Webster whitesplain it wrong). For instance, native AAVE speakers understand that “he be tripping,” “he is tripping” and “he tripping” are three completely different sentences (No, I will not explain. What’s understood don’t need to be said).
Similarly, people who are not Black mistakenly use their personal experiences as a culturally analogous reference point for the Black American experience. However, as m’Cheaux noted, it is impossible to understand cultural behavior if you don’t include the history and social influences that created the behavior. This is why, before m’Cheaux even waded into the conversation, m’Cheaux wanted to clarify that many social media users (Black and white) were conflating code-switching with the commonly used speech modifications that he called “the chameleon effect.”
“That’s not code-switching,” m’Cheaux told theGrio. “Human beings are pack animals. And, to some extent, unanimity — or being in the pack and doing as the pack does — has been a matter of survival for thousands of years. Most people subconsciously or consciously model their behavior after the behavior that’s in their presence. No one talks to their mother the same way they talk to their friends in the lunchroom or on the basketball court. Code-switching or code-meshing, on the other hand, requires an actual code.
“Most people alter their speech based on the listener or the audience,” m’Cheaux added. “But in order for code-switching to be in effect, there has to be some sort of social context, historical context or a power disparity of some kind. Gullah-Geechee and Jamaican patois are both English-based languages and, to the untrained ear, sound similar. But the thing that makes them different is the history and social context of slavery. That’s why most Black people are, at the very least, bilingual – they have different modes of speech in each language.” The professor also noted that code-switching is not exclusive to minority groups nor is it uncommon to white Americans. For instance, the people who think they can fluently converse with their Mexican friends because they took Spanish in college are no different from the Caucasian colleague who adopts a “Blaccent” when you talk to them at the water cooler.
In fact, according to m’Cheaux: “White people be doing it all the time.”
In fact, after listening closely to Kamala Harris’ two speeches, m’Cheaux placed the vice president in a different linguistic category altogether. Slipping into his Lowcountry accent, m’Cheaux laughed and explained in the language with which we were both familiar.
“Dem people just wrong.”
Kamala be pandering
Let’s get this out of the way: Kamala Harris was not using a “blaccent.”
Using his “professional ear,” m’Cheaux listened to Harris’ speech multiple times. He conceded that Harris altered her delivery during the two campaign appearances. However, in his expert opinion, her actual accent was nearly identical in both clips. However, m’Cheax understood why smart, informed people (and Peter Doocy) might mistakenly confuse Harris’ variations in cadence, tone, volume and body language for an entirely different accent.
Most people people can’t do that.
“First and foremost, people have to remember that Kamala Harris is a professional politician,” m’Cheaux explained. “There are tools of her profession that most people don’t have access to. Every person who graduates from high school learned the same rules of grammar you did. But can they write like you? Why not? Why can’t people who speak correct English get in front of a camera and sound like a professional newscaster? Is the way that you see them when they’re casting the news the same speech they use when they’re speaking in their everyday language? They’re just using the tools that come along with the job you have chosen.
“We’ve seen Ed Sheeran, do this when he collaborates with a ‘street’ dude,” m’Cheaux explained. “We’ve seen Hillary do it. We’ve seen Bill Clinton do it. We’ve seen Barack Obama do it. We’ve seen all of these politicians roll up their sleeves or wear flannel shirts to pander to Midwest voters, so it’s not unheard of.”
But was Kamala Harris pandering?
Probably.
As m’Cheaux noted, pandering is part of effective communication. A third-grade teacher sounds different in the classroom than in a parent-teacher conference. Job candidates talk differently at job interviews because they’re pandering to their potential employer. Voters are essentially potential employers and appealing to the widest swath of voters is literally the only way Harris will get the job. Professor m’Cheaux added that the discussion was also complicated by one more important factor.
Blackness.
Regardless of their geographic upbringing, their mixed-race heritage or their parental backgrounds, Black politicians have an extra tool at their disposal. By simply varying her cadence and moving her neck a little more, Harris has the ability to make herself more relatable to Black people. Black Americans aren’t so hypnotized by neck movement or negro preacher cadences that they are willing to overlook a candidate’s actual political positions — we’re not that dumb. “Malcolm X did this all the time,” m’Cheaux said. “He would switch between using academic phrasing to more colloquial terms, and he was very good at it. So would MLK Jr. He was a great orator and a brilliant writer, but he knew better than to use language that would go over the heads of the people. If you notice, when he’s talking to the masses, you will hear less of that Georgia twang than when he spoke at a chicken dinner.”
Plus, If it’s wrong for Kamala Harris to exploit her advantages, then it should be wrong when white politicians weaponize their whiteness. Why doesn’t Doocy complain when Donald Trump uses dog whistles like “law and order,” or “low-income housing forced into the suburbs” to appeal to white voters? JD Vance’s entire career is based on the mythology of his white, Appalachian hillbilly background. Mike Pence became a Republican star by using his Christian background as a virtue signal to the religious right. When Trump selected Pence as vice president, was he pandering to white evangelicals? Why isn’t Pence considered a DEI hire?
“There are things that are not controversial in every group that people outside the group might not understand,” m’Cheaux explained. “But when you are on the world stage, people who are observing and analyzing the behavior don’t have a cultural point of reference. So to them, the behavior seems fake.”
M’Cheaux also pointed out the inherent danger in scrutinizing Kamala Harris’ speech in a way that no other candidate faces.
“If you focus on these types of things long enough, you eventually circle back to being racist and misogynistic,” m’Cheaux noted. “When you heavily police language this way – because it is so in alignment with the conventional way of linguistic imperialism and the white-centric approach to self-expression, conformity and behavior, you’re going to just scratch right beneath the surface and strike oil in a hot minute. And that oil ain’t nothing but racism. It’s now people who ain’t Black trying to tell somebody who is how they can and cannot express themselves.”
He ain’t lying.
Also, when it comes to cultural gatekeeping, unlike a certain news network that’s full of Doocy …
Sunn m’Cheaux don’t be lying.
Remember, that’s two different things.
Michael Harriot is an economist, cultural critic and championship-level Spades player. His New York Times bestseller Black AF History: The Unwhitewashed Story of America is available everywhere books are sold.