Kamala Harris Spoke Blackly In Public, MAGA Can’t Hang
Inside the latest weird right-wing freak-out
Kamala Harris is Black — proudly so! — and this continues to confound Republicans. It specifically bothers them that she code-switches based on her audience. She talks differently when addressing supporters at a packed rally in Atlanta or Detroit compared to an equally packed rally in Pittsburgh or Eau Claire, Wisconsin.
Monday, a post dropped on Elon Musk’s Perpetual Disinformation Machine that compared clips from Harris’s Labor Day speeches in Detroit and Pittsburgh. “Kamala in Detroit vs. Kamala in Pittsburgh — literally 5 hours apart!” wailed someone called Johnny MAGA. “The difference is insane.” Not really. She didn’t discuss union issues at one rally but later rambled at the next one about bacon, wind, and fictional cannibal Hannibal Lecter. Then we could assume she’d suffered a traumatic brain injury between rallies.
The right-wing ecosystem is more incestuous than a V.C. Andrews novel, so of course, the very next day, Fox News White House correspondent Peter Doocy brought this up during the press briefing, where other people might’ve had serious questions.
“Since when does the vice president have what sounds like a Southern accent?” Doocy asked. White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre appeared stunned at the stupidity but quickly recovered.
Here’s the full clip from Aaron Rupar at
:Doocy, reviewing his notes from right-wing social media feeds, tried hard to push this dialect scandal, but Jean-Pierre cut him off.
“Do you think that Americans seriously think this is an important question? You know what they care about? They care about the economy. They care about lowering costs. They care about health care. That’s what Americans care about. The question is insane. I’m moving on.”
This is why Jean-Pierre should never call on a partisan hack like Doocy. Even if she’s answered questions from every other journalist present, she should then move on to fictional ones: “I’m going to end with Vicki Vale from the Gotham Gazette, then that guy who used to flirt with C.J. Cregg on The West Wing.”
It’s not just a ‘Southern’ accent
Fox News anti-personality Jesse Watters, who’s shared rape fantasies about Harris on-air, took the racist talking point even further and suggested that Harris was faking her own accent. Depicting Harris as a “pretender politician,” Watters said, “Kamala was raised by an Indian mother in Canada but now she sounds like Fani Willis.”
Fani Willis is the district attorney of Fulton County, Georgia. She’s also Black but the racist implication here is that she’s more “authentically” Black than Harris. Watters would likely hide behind the argument that Willis has a legitimate “Southern accent,” and Harris doesn’t. However, Willis herself is not a Georgia native. She was born in Inglewood, California, and mostly raised in Washington, DC. After graduating from Howard University in 1993, she moved to Georgia to attend law school at Emory. So, “sounds like Fani Willis” is giant racist bullhorn.
Last month, Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance said, “Kamala Harris went down to Georgia and started [her rally] with a fake Southern accent. What the hell was all that about? She grew up in Canada. They don’t talk like that in Vancouver or Quebec or wherever she came from.”
Their racism is so lazy, I’m just going to repeat what I wrote the last time I covered this: Harris was born in Oakland, California, which was almost 50 percent Black when she was a child. (Gentrification has brought that down to about 21 percent today, but that’s still almost double the national percentage.) This is like questioning the Southern bonafides of someone born in Mobile, Alabama. Harris’s family spent some time in the midwest before Harris, her mother, and sister moved back to California and settled in a Berkeley neighborhood so Black she was bused to school as part of a desegregation program. She did spend six years in Montreal, which Vance couldn’t bother to Google, after which she attended Howard, the historically Black college in Washington, D.C.
African American Vernacular English (AAE) is a product of extended contact between enslaved Africans and Southern whites. Enslaved people would’ve spent most of their time around rural Southern whites, and significant overlap in the dialects exist to this day. After a relentless post-Reconstruction campaign of white racial terror forced many freed Black Southerners out of their homelands (i.e. “The Great Migration), AAE was soon heard wherever there were large concentrations of Black residents, although some clear distinctions were made between “city folk and country folk.”
People have compared this latest attempt to smear Harris with how Hillary Clinton was mocked for her own “accent evolution.” When she ran for president, Clinton was accused of trying to sound “folksier” than expected from a former first lady.
The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart dinged Clinton for speaking with what he considered an apparent Southern accent on the campaign trail: “Here’s the Illinois-born, New England-educated senator speaking in South Carolina …” Stewart said in one 2015 bit. “‘Well, anyway if y’all excuse me, I gotta go get Shelby’s juice! She’s having a fit!’” (That’s a reference to Steel Magnolias, which is how Yankees think all Southerners sound.)
Stewart neglected to mention that Clinton moved to Fayetteville, Arkansas, in 1974 and lived in the state with her Arkansas-native husband until 1992. She would’ve started saying “y’all” and “fixin’ to,” not simply to fit in but also to communicate more clearly with everyone. Re-adopting southern vernacular when speaking with supporters in South Carolina wasn’t political pandering. As Tamara Cherese posted on social media, “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.”
Superficially, the Harris fuss is yet another example of attacking a woman candidate’s authenticity. However, I think there’s more going on here: Conflating AAE with a generic “Southern accent” is an insulting erasure of Black culture. When these dullards accuse Harris of “faking” a “Southern accent,” they obviously don’t mean that she’s trying to sound like Scarlett O’Hara or even Julia Sugarbaker. White conservatives are obsessed with “policing” Blackness — dating back to the one-drop rule.
It maddens racists that Harris embraces all aspects of her heritage. Watters compared Harris to Fani Willis because he doesn’t believe the latter can speak “correctly” (i.e. “white”). The repeated claims that Harris is as Canadian as Ryan Reynolds is also meant to diminish her genuine connections to the Black community.
Peter Doocy asked Karine Jean-Pierre during the press briefing, “Is this how [Harris] talks in meetings?” because inquiring racist minds want to know if Harris kicks off her heels and goes full Oaktown around world leaders. Is she faking being “Black” or is she faking being “white” (i.e. “professional,” “normal,” and all the other coded terms)?
White conservatives, even liberals like Stewart, exist in a world where successful Black people are racial Eliza Doolittles, who a team of white advisers help polish away the rough Blackness until all that’s visible is a shiny coat of social whiteness. They imagine Kamala Harris or Barack Obama learning to correctly pronounce “bottle” before gaining admission to the privileged white spaces they’ll occupy only conditionally.
AAE is more than a dialect. It’s a unique language developed during bondage that has endured and established a link connecting Black people across the nation. When Africans were first brought to America against their will, enslavers deliberately stripped them of their language and history. Today, white conservatives are offended that any Black person would treat AAE as something they’d share publicly and not actively suppress and conquer.
When Kamala Harris drops into AAE before a largely Black audience, she isn’t pandering. She’s signaling that the link between us remains strong.
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Don’t we all use different voices in different situations? My “home shouting at the kids” voice is different from my talking to friends voice and that is different again to my addressing colleagues in a formal meeting voice.
And I know many people who live in a different part of the U.K. to where they were brought up who revert to a voice which is much more like that of their home town when they go home to see family than they use where they now live and work.
>> White conservatives, even liberals like Stewart, exist in a world where successful Black people are racial Eliza Doolittles, who a team of white advisers help polish away the rough Blackness until all that’s visible is a shiny coat of social whiteness. <<
That's just gorgeous. Well done.