There’s a memorable scene in the 1980 comedy Airplane! in which the white air hostess can’t understand a black passenger’s slang. “Excuse me,” says a little old white lady, standing up from her seat to help. “I speak jive.” She proceeds to “translate”, with a comic disjunction between her WASP-y appearance and her fluent command of Ebonics.
When the Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez addressed Al Sharpton’s National Action Network recently, her Republican critics seemed to detect her speaking “urban”. Ryan Saavedra wrote that “Ocasio-Cortez speaks in an accent that she never uses while telling a room of predominately black people that there is nothing wrong with them folding clothes, cooking, and driving other people around on a bus for a living”. People remarked on her “drawl”; she was even accused — third-rail! — of “blackface”.
I had in mind to write about her use of language in terms of “code-switching” — the sociolinguistic term for the way a speaker adapts his or her language to their audience — and was anticipated by AOC herself. In response to the criticism, she tweeted that: “Folks talking about my voice can step right off. Women’s March & Kavanaugh speech, same. Any kid who grew up in a distinct linguistic culture & had to learn to navigate class enviros at school/work knows what’s up. My Spanish is the same way.”