When Secretary of State Hillary Clinton used a fake Southern accent in 2015, we called it pandering, even those who tried to rationalize the behavior and give her the benefit of the doubt, but today Vice President Harris’ obviously fake accent is an intrinsic part of her mixed race heritage and dare not be questioned by white people.
Once upon a time, as in barely a month ago, a politician who intentionally changed their voice to match an audience, either by putting on a fake accent or speaking in a way they don’t normally do, would have called “pandering,” as in pretending they are something they aren’t or professing to believe in something they don’t simply to please a crowd. While there’s certainly a performative aspect to politics, the pomp, the circumstance, the emoting on major issues, feeling the pain and all that, we generally distinguish our leaders from actors, believing politicians require a certain authenticity for voters to evaluate whether or not they say what they mean and will do what they say. Generally speaking, politicians who don’t either seem like their true selves or have a true sense of self in the first place aren’t successful for obvious reasons, being deemed untrustworthy by the electorate, willing to say or do anything to get elected, or at least this was the way things worked before President Kamala Harris upended all of conventional politics, transforming the political world into one of joy and vibes. She, apparently, requires the use of a completely new term to describe the fake accents she dons based on the audience in question: Code-switching, which according to the Associated Press’ Aaron Morrison means “deliberately adjusting one’s speech style and expression to optimize relatability,” a word salad fit for the Vice President herself. When was the last time you optimized relatability for anyone or anything outside a satire of a corporate tycoon trying to connect with the average person? Does anyone actually think, much less talk that way? Regardless, the previously unheralded term suddenly sprung into wide usage this past weekend, when the Vice President appeared at an event in Detroit speaking in a overly dramatic and more than a little fake “black” (for lack of a better term) accent, as though this daughter of a biologist and Stanford professor who was raised in Canada had roots in Motown. More critical observers immediately noted that she delivered the same remarks shortly afterwards to a different crowd, completely dropping the accent that time around and speaking in her normal voice instead, leading them to conclude that she was fake, phony, artificial in some way that cannot be trusted. Her defenders, however, immediately leapt to the barricades, claiming that they couldn’t possibly understand “code-switching” and that faking an accent everyone knows she doesn’t really have is her right as a person of mixed race descent, prompting many observers to wonder where the hell the term came from in the first place and how does it apply to the Vice President in particular?
To begin with, Oxford Languages defines code switching quite differently than Mr. Morrison. As they see it, code-switching is “the practice of alternating between two or more languages or varieties of language in conversation,” such as “the conversational code-switching of the German American bilingual community,” but by that standard, it’s hard to see any application to Vice President Harris in this situation. She isn’t bilingual to my knowledge and wasn’t addressing a bilingual audience. Even if we take it to mean regional dialects, she’s not from Detroit and has no connection to Detroit, meaning if she’s switching languages in some sense, it’s not to one she actually speaks or has ever actually spoken. For its part, NPR first covered “code-switching” in 2013 when they launched a new blog actually called “Code Switch” that covers “race, ethnicity, and culture.” At the time, they focused on five reasons people code-switch as submitted by their readers, none of which is much of a defense for a politician. First, “Our lizard brains take over: The most common examples of code-switching were completely inadvertent; folks would slip into a different language or accent without even realizing it or intending to do it.” Second, “We want to fit in: Very often, people code-switch — both consciously and unconsciously — to act or talk more like those around them. While this can be effective, it can also be perilous.” Third, “We want to get something: A lot of folks code-switch not just to fit in, but to actively ingratiate themselves to others. We can not tell you how many dozens of stories we got from people who work in service industries who said that a Southern accent is a surefire way to get better tips and more sympathetic customers.” Fourth, “We want to say something in secret: We collected many sweet stories of people code-switching in order to hide in plain sight, a habit most common among people in love. Because this tactic often relies on assumptions, it can get one in trouble.” Fifth, “It helps us convey a thought: Certain concepts need that perfect bon mot to come across effectively. Many people switch languages or employ colloquialisms to express particular ideas.”
Of these five examples, however, only two appear to apply to the Vice President and they certainly aren’t flattering. Either she wants “to fit in” or she wants “to get something,” but that was then and this is now as they say. Last month, when former President Donald Trump had the temerity to question why the Vice President was branding herself a black candidate rather than an Indian candidate, as she’d promoted many times in her past since her initial run for District Attorney in San Francisco, some in the media responded by claiming she was simply code-switching (rather than an accurate prediction of how she would behave, knowing what we do now). In fact, President Trump’s remarks originally prompted Mr. Morrison’s article, where he claimed “Kamala Harris has range. She can grill nominees for the Supreme Court or meet with foreign dignitaries, then pivot to hosting a Diwali celebration or dancing enthusiastically alongside an HBCU-styled marching band. It is a dexterity that Harris, the first Black woman and Asian American to serve as vice president, developed as a person of color to navigate the corridors of power or Main Street in a nation where race and identity influence how one is received or embraced. Harris, the daughter of immigrants from Jamaica and India, is an adroit code-switcher, a term that can include deliberately adjusting one’s speech style and expression to optimize relatability and ensure she gets a message across.” Code-switching, you see, is something that is now inherently associated with people of color who can only navigate the corridors of power by pretending to be something they are not, so much so, that some claim black people cannot survive without it. In either event, we’re no longer referring to how the average person falls back into different speech patterns in their home town or those who share a language other than English, even white people, much less something one does to deceive and manipulate others. Instead, it’s a tool to escape oppression, and therefore it must be positive in all respects. “We need to be celebrating our whole selves, which means we need to celebrate all of our identities,” explained Christine Chen, a Chinese American and co-founder and executive director of APIAVote, a supposedly nonpartisan civic engagement organization focused on the Asian American Pacific Islander community. “The more that a candidate can embrace their multiple identities, I think that’s a way to connect with different communities and different people who identify on different issues that you stand on,” she added.
“Shereen Marisol Meraji, former co-host of the award-winning NPR podcast ‘Code Switch,’ said Harris’ identity is layered and can still be challenging to navigate in a nation that once encouraged multiracial people to favor one identity over another,” explained Mr. Morrison as the article continued. “If you walk through the world as I have, where I’m trying very much to embrace both sides of myself, then it’s like you get put through these authenticity tests,” Ms. Meraji, who is of Iranian and Puerto Rican heritage, continued before adding, “The ability to code-switch and go into different communities…is a huge asset. And I think for people who are in competition with Kamala Harris, it’s also quite threatening.” Perhaps needless to say, none of these experts mentioned how one should react when the “code-switching” is entirely fake. Is it simply pandering then? Is there any time or circumstances when it’s just a lie or an act? Readers and other observers were left to wonder about that, whether there is a dark side as NPR strongly suggested, until this weekend, when the Vice President used an accent she simply doesn’t have and everyone knows it. Code switching, at that point, was suddenly repurposed into an ironclad defense for obviously false behavior. Ryan L. Nave, a 2024 Sulzberger Fellow at the Columbia School of Journalism took to X to declare, “This week too short to explain code switching to white people.” Tamara Charese, a PanAfrican Womanist, claimed, “I know Black folks call this code switching but it’s also a central portion of situational leadership. You have to be able to talk to different audiences and pivot your communication styles. Good leaders do this often and well.” Something tells me these and other commentators wouldn’t be saying the same thing if a Republican, whether a minority or otherwise, was the one doing the “code switching.” In that case, I’m quite confident they’d be referring to the phenomena as the pandering it surely is, but there also appears to be a larger phenomenon at play.
Namely, that progressives seem to have developed a rather unfortunate habit of coming up with entirely new words, or repurposing existing ones, whenever it suits their political purposes and then acting like we’ve used these words our entire lives, therefore you’re a fool if you wonder what’s really going on beneath the surface. It’s not always easy to keep track of these changes in real time, but to a large extent, we live in a brave new world of language. Three years ago I noted, “BIPOC. Person of Color. Latinx. AAPI. Equity. White privilege. Anti-racism. Critical Race Theory. If it seems like we’re living in a brave new world of language, or at least an explosion of language previously confined to academia into the common culture, that’s because we are. The left is engaged in a battle over the very words we use to describe both our history and the current state of racial affairs, and they’re not shy about the reasons why.” “You can’t change what you can’t name,” explained Cathy Albisa, the vice president of institutional and sectoral change at the racial justice nonprofit Race Forward. Ms. Albisa was speaking to the New York Times for a recent feature, ‘BIPOC or POC? Equity or Equality? The Debate Over Language on the Left.” Amy Harmon wrote, “Americans have always wrestled with language when it comes to describing race, with phrases and vocabulary changing to meet the struggles and values of the moment. But especially in the wake of protests for social justice in the summer of 2020, there is a heightened attention to this language, say scholars and activists, as some on the left try to advance changes in the culture through words.” Nothing progressives ever do remains the same for long, however. The fetish for producing new language to change the culture has now transformed into a political device to protect their preferred candidate from justified scrutiny.
If you doubt this, consider how Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a Southern accent was covered during her failed bid for the Presidency in 2015. Even as the mainstream media found a way to excuse it at the time, CNN admitted it could be perceived as pandering and there was no mention of code-switching of any kind. “Recently, Hillary Clinton made what was ostensibly an ordinary campaign stop in Columbia, South Carolina. Or, perhaps I should say — as Clinton herself did at one point — South Carolahnah. Clinton, as a few reporters immediately noted, at some points during her speech slipped into the faintest hints of a Southern accent; you can mostly hear it in the softening of the vowel i: retirement became retahrment, I sounded more like Ah. Clinton is far from the only politician to be accused of putting on a fake accent in order to pander to the voting public, but she’s been in the public eye for so many years at this point that we’ve had decades to observe the way her accent comes and goes.” They continued, “On the one hand: Clinton is married to a Southerner, and spent many years in the South. On the other, Clinton (or someone on her team) surely knows what she’s doing when she slides into the folksy accent. More than a decade of research on speech alignment, the academic term for this kind of copy-cattery, has shown that people like you more when you start to talk like them.” Back then, they at least attempted to rationalize it. “Not only does speech mimicry help people literally understand each other, in that it seems to help listeners decipher the words the speakers’ mouths are forming — there’s also some evidence that imitation may be a sign of increased emotional understanding. One 1999 New York University study found that the people who imitated others the most tended to be more empathetic than those who imitated less often.” The quoted Lawrence D. Rosenblum, a psychology professor at the University of California, “This really is something all of us do, all of the time” and, in Secretary of State Clinton’s case, “It could be, to some degree, that she is trying to ingratiate herself. But it could also be she does it because she happens to be a pretty empathetic person. It’s not something I would ever really criticize anybody on.” Today, they’ve renamed it code-switching and call you a racist if you disagree.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 