Here’s some hilarity. Yankee white person Hillary Rodham Clinton, from 2007, quoting a black civil rights hero:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-H9BOIYhgc]

Last week, in a speech to Al Sharpton’s group in the Bronx, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez spoke in a more “street” accent than she usually uses. Listen to it here. This caused some conservative commentators to criticize her for “verbal blackface.”

What nonsense. She’s not phony. She was simply code-switching, which is something almost everybody does, often unconsciously. I’ve caught myself doing it when speaking to audiences in the South and in the North. I don’t mean to; it just happens. I do have slightly different accents, depending on my audience. Again, this is normal, as the linguist John McWhorter explains:

Ocasio-Cortez was engaging in what linguists call code-switching. Few find code-switching surprising when Latinos do it between English and Spanish, alternating between the two languages within a single conversation or even sentence. The concept perhaps seems less familiar when done between dialects of the same language, but this, too, is extremely common. For example, what an unfortunate number of Americans think of as black people slipping into “errors” when they speak is, in the scientific sense, people code-switching between standard and Black English, the latter of which is an alternative, and not degraded, form of English.

Ocasio-Cortez’s critics seem to assume that since she is not black, her use of Black English must be some kind of act. This, however, is based on a major misreading of the linguistic reality of Latinos in America’s big cities. Since the 1950s, long-term and intense contact between black and Latino people in urban neighborhoods has created a large overlap between Black English and, for example, “Nuyorican” English, the dialect of New York’s Puerto Rican community. To a considerable extent, Latinos now speak “Ebonics” just as black people do, using the same slang and constructions, code-switching between it and standard English (and Spanish!) in the same ways.

This means that Ocasio-Cortez, as a Latina, was not using a dialect foreign to her experience. She grew up around it; it would be surprising if she did not have it in her repertoire to some extent. “I am from the Bronx. I act & talk like it,” she tweeted. Anyone who would riposte that she isn’t from the black Bronx in particular would miss that Black English stopped being a black-exclusive dialect in the Bronx decades ago.

Read the whole thing. 

If you go out to rural Louisiana, you will hear white working-class people speaking informally in ways that, on paper, resembles the usages of black working-class people. You even hear this in cities like Baton Rouge, especially among older whites and blacks. If someone from up North stood in line at CVS and listened to white and black native Louisianians talking to each other, they might think that the whites were in some sense mocking or condescending to the black people — but what they would completely miss is that this is how a lot of people of both races talk normally here. 

It’s not like the Cash Me Ousside girl, the white suburban brat who deliberately talks in an exaggerated black street accent. It’s far more subtle than that. Someone with an experienced ear overhearing the conversation could easily tell the difference between a demotic white Southern accent and a demotic black Southern accent. But there’s a lot of overlap, even with grammar and syntax. I grew up fluent in this mode of discourse. Thing is, I also learned, as one does, when it is not appropriate to speak this way, when a more formal diction is required. Back home, though, speaking in the same mode I use when, say, I’m giving a speech, or even just hanging out with friends in Washington, would make me sound weird and stuffy.

It’s interesting to think about people I know whose “native” accents and modes of discourse are the same ones they use in professional life. If you grew up in the educated urban middle class of the past few decades, chances are you don’t code-switch, because you wouldn’t even know what that is.

Anyway, I’m with McWhorter: give AOC a break. She’s the cosmopolitan here, not those who call her a hypocrite.

Now, enjoy this classic 2007 SNL skit with Amy Poehler and Maya Rudolph, speaking Deep Bronx:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbTrAEesNiA]