Some Call It "Code Switching," I Call It More Disgusting Race Grifting From Dems

Did Hillary Clinton invent “code switching?” She was the first high profile (white) politician to affect a southern black accent, trying to appeal to black voters. During her first run for the Democrat nomination, in 2008, Clinton adopted this form of pandering during a speech at a black church. It was both amusing and pathetic. Did it work? Did black Americans vote for her who had not previously planned to vote, or had planned to vote for someone else? Who knows. Did it have the opposite effect for black voters who felt insulted? Who knows. The definition of “code switching” has evolved over the years, but initially, it was a term used in linguistics to describe tailoring one’s language to fit the audience. It requires the speaker to make certain assumptions about her audience which, too often, reveals the speaker to be an ignorant bigot.

At least Queen Hillary was not pretending to be black, nor claiming she had grown up in “the hood.” Then, along came Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), known as Sandy Ocasio until she first ran for the US House in 2018. That is when she started speaking with a Bronx accent, claiming she grew up “in the hood.” The reality is: she grew up in upper middle class comfort in Yorktown Heights. Her father was an architect. She graduated from Boston University, an expensive private college in Boston. While in college, she worked as an intern for Massachusetts senator Ted Kennedy in his Boston office. She still uses the fake Bronx accent. Do the voters in her congressional district know she is a pretender?

TWO BLACK WOMEN HAVE NOTHING TO OFFER VOTERS, SO THEY PANDER, LIE

Currently, there are two black women serving in congress who claim to have grown up in modest means or poverty who did, in fact, grow up in significant comfort and are currently quite wealthy: Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) and Janelle Bynum (D-OR). Crockett has been all over TV and the internet screaming, yelling her hatred for Trump and Trump voters in her version of black jive, with ghetto profanities rolling off her tongue. Her real voice is cultured and modulated.

So far, we have not heard Bynum break into black jive or use ghetto profanities. Perhaps that is because there are few blacks in her upscale congressional district in Oregon. There was no need to pander for the tiny number of black votes. Crockett’s Texas district, however, consists of 40% black voters.

Crockett grew up in St. Louis in upper middle class comfort and graduated from Rhodes College, a private college in Tennessee before enrolling in the University of Houston Law Center. As a member of the Texas House of Representatives, Crockett used her real voice. By the time she arrived in the US House of Representatives she decided a “black voice,” “black ebonics” and ghetto profanities were more useful.

In her congressional campaign, Bynum referred to her “working-class” upbringing. The truth is that Bynum’s childhood was spent in a solid upper middle class neighborhood just outside Washington, DC, attending a private boarding school. Both her parents were well-educated, well-paid teachers. She graduated from Florida A&M University with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and from the University of Michigan with an MBA. Bynum did not work her way through college as so many working class and middle class students, of all races, do.

Currently, both Crockett and Bynum are multi-millionaires.

BEYOND CODE SWITCHING

Kamala Harris billed herself as “Indian-American” until she ran for the Democrat presidential nomination in 2019. Then, she magically became “black.” The truth is, she is half Indian (from India) and about 1/8 or 1/4 black. She tried to rewrite her personal history, presumably because she and/or her campaign advisers thought being a “black” would make her more “relatable” to voters. How many times did she start her answer to an economic question with “I grew up in a middle class household?” I lost count. This was also a way of avoiding answering questions about the disaster called Bidenomics. Her mother was a highly paid biomedical scientist and her father was a (Marxist) economics professor at Stanford.

After the divorce, her mother’s career took Kamala and her younger sister to Montreal where they lived in a modest mansion on the McGill University of Medicine campus where her mother worked. Kamala resided in Montreal from age 12 to age 19, spending her first year of college at Vanier College before enrolling in Howard University, a private, historically black university in Washington DC.

Throughout her laughable campaign for the presidency last year, Harris could be heard “switching” voices. At a Labor Day rally in Detroit, Michigan, she adopted a twangy voice to explain what unions had done for American workers. Do all union members talk that way? Harris apparently thought so. Maybe she was emulating how she thought uneducated blacks talk. Either way, she sounded ridiculous.

^The definition of code-switching has evolved over the years, but initially, it was a term used in linguistics to describe tailoring your language to your present social context. Code-switching is usually discussed in terms of race or ethnicity, but because identity is so complex, it can happen in a variety of contexts. As The Left has aggressively promoted racism and race grifting over the last few decades, and as ever more benefits have been derived by pretending to be someone you are not, America has “created” ever more people who pretend to be someone they are not.