They Mean She Sounds Black

 

Maria Bartiromo claims Kamala Harris is faking a southern accent. Rep. Michael Rulli responds by saying "she must've gotten the blueprint from Hillary Clinton" pic.twitter.com/CmySD9KyvJ

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 3, 2024

OK, in the spirit of "same old tired playbook" I could refrain from addressing this stupidity, but I won't because just let me do this white privilege thing for a minute. I strained to hear a hint of a southern accent. It isn't that. I feel like the people who are saying this aren't sure what a southern accent sounds like (and there are multiple southern accents--Texas doesn't sound like Georgia, and neither sounds exactly like Florida). I have a Philadelphia accent. I distinctly don't sound southern, but there are traces of the south in the mouths of some of the people where I live--Black people. 

This is because of the great migration. Racist whites with memories of the 1950s and 1960s can tell you they think Black people were literally invited up here. Practically trucked in. That's not exactly how it went. But it does explain in part White Flight to the Philadelphia suburbs. And how some Whites feel about the integrated public schools I attended where I noticed the difference in how some of my peers spoke versus how I did. 

But not that much. Your working-class White is just as likely to drop a double negative, say "ain't" out loud where people can hear, or employ "wrong" verb tenses for emphasis--as in "She don't know what she's doing" has a different mouth feel and intentionality from "She doesn't know, etc."  

Now, my folks set me down in front of PBS as a kid and I can speak the Queen's English if I mean to with a credible Mid-Atlantic accent, even.   I speak customer service for my job--proper nearly accent-free and grammatically correct.  It is not how I speak at home. This is called code-switching. And I am not bothered about what that says about my authenticity--so how could I be fucked up about what it says about Kamala Harris' authenticity if she sounds a little different to different audiences--I do it myself. If you read my blog, you know Yiddish and Italian slang creeps in. It would! I have dimensions and have sat at different tables.

So I understand what they mean by this particular "trifling", and I think I want to call it racist-adjacent. It isn't said totally out loud, and they do want to compare it to Hillary Clinton--but I get what they are trying to say about who she is. And it's bullshit. She is being herself with the people she's being with. This is what diversity looks like. People swim in many waters. They use different strokes.