Michael Harriot: cold switching is back. I mean, technically it never went away, but every few years the subject pops back up in online discourse. But what is cold switching? is it something that black people do to avoid racism? if so, when white people use a black scent, What are they avoiding? And i is that reverse code switching? well, welcome to Black Splain. Each week We ask an actual scholar or expert to answer one specific question about history, politics, culture, science, or just something that's got people talking. from a perspective too often missing from the conversation. A black one. Now the conversation might go anywhere, but we promise the discussion will be rooted in facts, truth, and at the very least we promise you'll have more information to form your own opinion, And today we're asking Son Michael and Doctor Rachel Elizabeth Weisler to blacksplain can white people code switch? nine years ago. I wrote an article about code switching called How to Sound White on the Phone. It was based on this viral piece of advice from the 17-year-old high school student named Savannah Tomlinson, whose yearbook quote was. Anything is possible when you sound Caucasian on the phone. After the article was published, my inbox blew up with white people asking, Well, what does sounding white sound like? so when Kamala Harris was accused of trying to sound black at a campaign event last year, instead of offering my opinion on whether or not she was code switching, I interviewed social media's favorite sociolinguist, Son Michelle. I didn't know at the time that Michelle, who again, is an actual sociolinguist, had waded into another controversy. that's why we invited him on Black Splane today to talk about cold switching, if gatekeeping is possible and what it means to sound white versus sounding black. I mean if he could teach the Gullah language to white students at Harvard, I'm sure people would listen to him, right? Have you met the internet? So if people are arguing with a scholar about his subject of expertise, then who would they listen to? I'm just one man trying to find some answers. It's not like I could track down a professor who studies how black people talk and black history and how white people steal how black people talk. Or can I? Dr. Rachel Elizabeth Weissler: Dr. Rachel Elizabeth Weisler. but you of course can call me Rachel. I'm a professor at university of Oregon in linguistics and black studies. And, I consider myself an African American English perception researcher I'm, primarily interested in, yeah, looking at. Black language, how folks use it, how it changes over time, how it's appropriated Michael Harriot: welcome to Black Splane, the podcast where experts, scholars, or people who know things tackle one question about a subject in their area of expertise. This isn't a lecture. It's meant to be smart, funny, and have unflinchingly honest conversations with people who've actually done the research, lived the experience, or spent their careers studying a particular thing. there won't be any white perspectives framed as objectivity, no performative neutrality, just real information delivered with all the receipts. today we're gonna ask Dr. Rachel Weissler and Dr. Sun Michael to black splain. Can white people code switch? Or how do you sound white on the phone? And of course, along the way, we're gonna talk about what it means to sound white, what it means when white people use a black scent, is that reverse code switching or just cultural appropriation? And we're gonna talk about whether it's even possible, and we're gonna talk about whether or not it's even possible to gatekeep black culture. But let's start at the beginning. I do know that you've seen the conversation David Olawayo had with Godfrey of all, I think it's important when we're talking about that conversation to understand where the southern accent actually comes from, Sunn m'Cheaux: Well, there's a couple things. As far as the Southern accent, one of the things that David did was, well, I guess all three of them did in a sense when they were asking about the Southern accent, was presumed that it was a singular accent. But actually, Michael Harriot: Yeah. Sunn m'Cheaux: you know, the Southern accent is a misnomer. because there's a wide variety of accents. I think people outside of the United States greatly underestimate how diverse the United States actually is, and population and land mass as well. there's hundreds of different dialects and variations of English. I'm talking about dialects, And so it's very diverse. talking about like the black contribution to southern accents and dialects. we usually start at English. That's the first place that everyone starts is England. They say, you're talking white too, no matter how much of an accent you might happen to have, you're still talking white. even in England, there wasn't one English coming over. Remember Michael Harriot: Right. Sunn m'Cheaux: the English also before, before they set eyes on dominating Africans, they did it to the Irish. They did it to the Irish, did it to the Scots, to the Welsh. They did it over there to their neighbors, stripped them of their language, stripped them of parts of their culture. Irish was itself a language that was, they tried to strip them of that. Gaelic, they stripped them of that. Hiberno-English came about and they trying to dominate how those people could perform speaking English. So all of that was happening before they even got to us. So that was already happening. And so when you get over here to the United States or the colonies at the time, it's not one English that's coming over. It's multiple variations of English that's stratified in class, stratified in ethnicity, The, the influence is coming from multiple levels of English, multiple forms of English, English that had already been essentially colonized and sanitized across the water before it even got to us. Dr. Rachel Elizabeth Weissler: of all, there's contesting histories. And we have to consider again, how did we even get to the United States? And so black people being brought against their will to this place. there's a Creolist hypothesis that argues that African-American English is influenced by the African languages that these folks were speaking before they were brought to the United States and then English mixed with this. But then you have another hypothesis that says because they came through the South, they're coming into contact with these Southern American English speakers. And now we have this interaction with these black folks and the Southerners that then creates this variety of English. And people often will talk about that, right? Like they'll say that Southern American English sounds similar to African American English, but there are plenty of differences, though maybe there are some likenesses as well. And there's honestly no consensus on that. People just kind of have their different opinions on what they believe. But what we do know is that anytime you get into a contact situation, so that's different peoples with different languages coming into contact with one another, you have to find some sort of communicative system. Sunn m'Cheaux: The bottom line is it's impossible when you have people who are intentionally destroying records and contact. points of contact so that you don't know these things, to really be able to pinpoint specifically where this thing came from, including indigenous influence, which is, we know for a fact, and trust me, I'm not about to get into the, into the we the real Indian thing, but as it pertains to us being able to pinpoint language influences, that also includes indigenous people. That also includes indigenous nations, indigenous persons that we either were in community with or those who enslaved black people. the metaphor that I use is like jollof rice. Okay, we got red rice. Somebody else got jambalaya. Somebody else, know, that same one pot dish exists throughout the diaspora, including Michael Harriot: Right. Sunn m'Cheaux: Mexico. in some different form, it's still essentially a tomato-based one-pot rice dish that everybody's doing a little something different to it. And since that's like how language and accents are moving throughout the diaspora. And so what is the determining factor is who is in control, like who has the power to dictate, first of all, in the population influence and also to regulate the language. And also there's a consequences and reward system. I don't know if you remember this or not, it was, Donald Trump had, he's a Ross Perot-like character, not like this right here, know, Jeff, Jeff, Michael Harriot: Jeff Sessions, yes. Sunn m'Cheaux: Jeff Sessions. And the first thing that Trump did when Jeff Sessions finally defied him on something that he couldn't control, the first thing Trump did was mock his accent. That he wanted to make sure that it was made known, are a hick, a hillbilly, you are unintelligent. And he did that by way of mocking his accent. Remember when he had the reporter that he didn't like, he targeted the reporter's disability with a hand. When it was Jeff Session, he went straight for the accent. And so even amongst themselves, they know that these accents are essentially not only attached to dialects, but social-ex. And what is your social standing and how you speak? Remember, the term code switch wasn't coined by a black person. We use it, and we think in terms of code switch being something that's specific to us, but that's not actually originally a black concept. That concept existed in terms of not just race, but class. So even people who are of lower class, a lower social class, They understand what comes along with not using that standard American English sort of accent or dialect. And I think that's all the nuance that gets missing when you're an outsider looking inside And I listened to them talk and I'm like, well, even if you did associate, because Godfrey came to defend. David by saying he doesn't know any better. On the outside looking at it, of course, if his association with the Southern accent is slavery, then yeah, he's probably going to think that that's got something to do with subservience. To me, that's a cop out because he's a very well-educated in language person. David understands language. He has a strong command of the English language. The schools that he graduated from, the Royal Academy for like Shakespeare Academy, like bro, mastering the English language is your thing. That's your calling card. And so it can't be both things. It can't be. The reason you're getting this job over an African American actor is because you're so well researched and knowledgeable and know how such a profound knowledge of the character on top of all your, you know, skills, your formal acting skills. Okay. Then when you get caught saying something silly, it's I ain't know any better. Michael Harriot: One of the things that annoys me when I see people play southern accents, whether they're American or you know, from another country, is that they flatten the southern accent. Like you could hear like people on the same screen, one of them using a Texan accent and one of them using a Georgia accent, because the Georgia accent is different from the South Carolina accent. And the Texas accent is whole different everybody Sunn m'Cheaux: Ray Ray Ray Michael Harriot: flattens them as as Southern, right? Like Sunn m'Cheaux: Right. Michael Harriot: just speak like white people speak. If you're gonna not get Sunn m'Cheaux: Right, right, right. Michael Harriot: the accent specifically correct. Sunn m'Cheaux: Like even in the New York dialect, you hear people borrowing words from Jewish people, from Italian people. Some of the Dutch is still hanging around in there and things that we associate with, I mean, I can go through like an average ghost face killer song and point out things that are actually from different ethnicities. Michael Harriot: Right. Sunn m'Cheaux: But they don't know that. They don't know enough to know what they don't know. And that's what ends up happening is we all come in full Augusto like, I, I know this. know what the habitual will be. know. But then when somebody says, okay, but are you hip to this right here? And it's like, nah, see, then that's why you need to humble yourself. Cause I listened to the interview where he was also saying there was some other starts parts of that video that I'm surprised didn't actually gain more backlash than even that one subservient statement. Cause I'm like, what is this nigger I'm talking about? And I'm listening like, you not really making the sense, either you not making the sense you think you make or you saying what you're saying on purpose. you what mean? you said, we assume we have the most charitable interpretations. We assume he ain't mean to do it. We assume he didn't understand what he was saying. We assumed a lot, but maybe he meant exactly what he said. Meanwhile, you're issuing this apology because you lack the very thing you're saying they didn't need. You lack Michael Harriot: Right. Sunn m'Cheaux: the cultural competency that you're saying they didn't need to perform these roles. But if you had it, you wouldn't be standing here apologizing saying, isn't who I am. Michael Harriot: Yeah, and and it it it also speaks to what how language is formalized and what is considered official or laudable, right? So what he learned at the Royal Shakespeare Academy is certified as education, right? But Sunn m'Cheaux: Right. Michael Harriot: me knowing the language from being around it, being an being in America, that lived experience is not certified, right? Right. Like Sunn m'Cheaux: Right. Right, right, right, right, right. Michael Harriot: what I mean when you talk about education and language, right? You're talking about ultimately, right, who certifies something as official or right versus wrong, Sunn m'Cheaux: Right. Right. Michael Harriot: right? the joke by comedian Shalewa Sharp kinda illustrates like what the code is that we're switching from, why it's necessary, and why it's Sometimes even better. Dr. Rachel Elizabeth Weissler: it's called. So it's habitual B is what the linguists call it. So it's the same thing, right? This idea of habituality, right? Like you do it now, but you do it all the time. It's not just a singular event. And this is a syntactic structure. The linguists will call this like a tense aspect marker because it gives us so much more about whatever subject it is we're talking about. you're saying this isn't like a singular point in time. know what to expect because this is something about this individual or subject. Michael Harriot: that gets us into we've heard this term a million years. What is talking white? Sunn m'Cheaux: You know, I'm glad you asked that because whenever it comes up, it's an interesting reaction that comes from both sides of the question. There will be people, internally, not just Michael Harriot: Right. Sunn m'Cheaux: white folks, but internally amongst black folks, there's this conflict. Well, you get the group of black folks who will be like, you know what it is. Their whole thing is. Quit playing, you know what we're talking about. You know what you're doing. Michael Harriot: Yeah. Sunn m'Cheaux: And then there'll be those who will say, from the educated perspective will say, oh, well this is ironically anti-black because there's no, you can't say that intelligence, just because I was speaking intelligently, and I know how to speak proper doesn't mean that that's white. You're basically saying that intelligence equals white and ignorance equals black, which is not the argument. That's actually not Michael Harriot: Right. Sunn m'Cheaux: the argument. But that's the position that they're taking because they have in, you know, if I can digress for a second, there's a movie called The Big Hit written by, you know, directed by my boy Ben Ramsey. And there's a scene where the kidnappers are getting a phone call. And the guy said, well, we're going to trace his call. And he said, well, what if they got a blocker that stops you from tracing their call? And he says, well, if they got a trace buster, I got a trace buster buster. And the other guy says, well, what if they got a trace buster buster buster? And they kept going back and forth, but I got the buster buster buster. And they kept on having to figure out what would you do if the other person is countering the thing that you anticipated you would have to counter. And therefore you prepared to counter that, but they're prepared for your counter. That's what it sounds like when you have educated black folks who are saying that the people who are saying that the thing that is anti-black is indeed itself anti-black, but your argument is itself anti-black. So if the people who saying, know what it's like to talk to the black folks who are saying, you know what we mean when we say talk in white, and then you slide in and say, I think y'all mean intelligent. And if y'all mean intelligence, your bid to call out anti-blackness is itself anti-black because y'all are associating ignorance with blackness. But they are associating intelligence with whiteness. At which point the original black folk who called them out said, that ain't what we talk about. You know the difference between intonation. You know the difference between pitch. We know when we're talking about vocabulary, like certain types of words. If I come in here and say, bro, I got this gnarly bruise on my elbow, Like, come on, bro. Don't do that. You know good and well, ain't a bunch of brothers walking around saying gnarly. You know this. You know this. Dr. Rachel Elizabeth Weissler: And I don't know if you are on TikTok at all, but there are some pretty great videos now where they'll have wave translators. So white American vernacular English, you know, they're kind of being facetious and making jokes of basically having a black person or a white person. Yeah. Black person say something and the white person translate it. So like the, buddy, or something like this. Right. So TMichael Harriot: You Dr. Rachel Elizabeth Weissler: these kind of canonical jokes about, you know, how white people speak, but If you're looking for kind of what is like white English, right? Because there is no neutral American English, right? I mean, that's something to kind of get straight out the bat. There is no neutral way for anyone to speak. And I should say too, I didn't do this at the beginning, but language is not only spoken, we have signed languages and written languages too. And so we have just be conscientious of that. There is actually black American sign language. There's plenty of films about it. It's very interesting. And there's good history to. learn about that. But right now we're talking about spoken languages. with spoken language, you have just different ways that your articulators are moving, right? And so that means that everybody has an accent because an accent just means your tongue moves in one way when you pronounce something a certain way. It's the difference between pajamas and pajamas. Those mean the same thing to you all. But some people say pajamas, some say pajamas. it's just vowel differences. so people are treated or people are not, they're not, there's not one that's a neutral way of speaking. So yes, there is a white, English, but it'll be influenced by a bunch of other factors. Some folks might argue that the Midwestern accent gets seen a lot as the percept, conceptually neutral, variety of American English for whiteness, but That's not necessarily the case, but linguists will call this variety MUSE or SAE or SDAE. So that's mainstream US English, standardized American English or standard American English. And you can, and a lot of times in research, we see African-American English as it is compared to the standard rather than actually doing research of African-American English, just sitting on its own. Like, why is it that we historically only look at it as compared to this colonial language. I mean, we have to think too why we also even consider British English to be fancy. Like, why do we make all these associations that way? Like, that's directly associated with colonialism to why we feel that way. There's nothing inherent about the way the Queen speaks that would make her better or worse linguistically than someone in a different part of the world. But colonial thought influences our perceptions of how we think about language in general. Sunn m'Cheaux: so it's not that it's a force field or a barrier that you can't cross because your melanin won't let you in to use these words. Like, only white people can say these things. Like, that's not how language works. We know that. It's all you're speaking in generalizations. Yeah. Yeah, I am. Right. are you talking about? Generalizations are not inherently bad. Michael Harriot: Right. Yeah, we all do. Right. Like like if like right. Sunn m'Cheaux: You know, unless you make them that way, you can use them in a bad way. But speaking in general isn't an inherently bad thing. In order to not do that, we'd have to literally try to quantify every single individual down to a thing which is impossible. Michael Harriot: Right. I always use this this analogy of if I was in a room with a mechanic and he says, Well, you know, you gotta put oil in your car. I wouldn't raise my hand and say, Hey, I got an electric car. It don't take no oil. Right. I understand Sunn m'Cheaux: All right. Michael Harriot: that he's talking about generally cars. Right. Right. If you be Sunn m'Cheaux: Right. Michael Harriot: if I was in a talking to a person who was ornithologist. And they said, you know, birds fly. I'd be like, not not penguins, not turkey like we understand that everyone Sunn m'Cheaux: Ray! Ray! Ray. Michael Harriot: is talking generally except when we talk about white people. Right. Sunn m'Cheaux: Exactly, exactly. that is intentionally, that's intentional on their part because it doesn't benefit them to deal with the broader, like the macro. They didn't deal with the broader issue. TMichael Harriot: I know that white people will argue that they code switch when a white guy at work say, hi, how are you doing to seven coworkers? And when it gets to you, say, what's up, man? Right? And is that code switching? And if not, what is code switching? Dr. Rachel Elizabeth Weissler: Yeah, good question. So code switching is underneath the umbrella of language shifting. And so there's multiple ways that you can shift languages and that just means moving from one language or one code to another. Style shifting is moving, speaking different ways within the same code or within the same language. So for example, we're style shifting when we talk to our children versus when we talk to our boss versus when we talk to our best friend. we're probably going to use the same language variety with those people. we could, we also could not because our boss could be a white person and you know, whatever, there could be different reasons. But let's just say, it is very conceivable to use one language, but style shift when we talk to our little baby versus when we talk to our boss. Code switching is switching in and out of different language codes, right? So full linguistic systems. And you can do that at the sentential level. So through sentences at the word level. And even within sentences, we see code switching with Spanish and English, for example, where you might use Spanish verbs, but you're using English for everything else, let's say. But then a lot of times we see African-American English code switching with standardized American English. Again, kind of being that person to person, depending on who we're talking to. So no, the white people are not code switching when they say, what's up man, to the black person. They are inferring, looking at that black person, thinking that they can speak to them in a different way. borderline potentially disrespectful if they don't have the rapport with that individual, if you ask me. And that is not the same thing. TMichael Harriot: thing is, so have you ever heard of like the Clarence Thomas theory of like why he is the way he is? Like it all stems back to language. Jeremy, producer of this show and I are from South Carolina. And Clarence Thomas grew up in a community that spoke Gichigal. I guess it's looked at as another language. always, cause I grew up hearing people talk it. I'd never thought of it as being bilingual, but Clarence Thomas spoke Gullah Geechee. And then when he started going to school with white people, they told him like, you have to change the way you talk. And like, some white folks, essentially adopted him and made him ashamed of the way he talks. And that's mushroomed into what he is now. Right. Dr. Rachel Elizabeth Weissler: blackness seems to be cool, you know, and sometimes not when you want to get a job though, or in all these other times when people are, you know, like important times when we want to be able to be our authentic selves. And that puts us in a really tough situation where if we don't use African American English and use this code switch voice, are we then seen as authentic and then not being hired because of all these other negative descriptors and associations with not being our authentic voice, but then using our authentic voice gets associated with all these other negative descriptors. So that's a whole other issue that I do feel passionate about. But yeah, I think that's this cool factor. The fact that, you know, a white politician, for example, could use African American English features and be seen as relatable to the public and maybe more likely to get voted in somewhere. Versus Sunn m'Cheaux: like racial profiling, it's like linguistic profiling. Brother did a study where he had, for these ads for apartment buildings, or apartments that were vacant, said, okay, I'm gonna have these people call for the apartment. Someone with a general Hispanic accent, sort of general American white accent. black accent and we'll see how this goes. In most of the cases with the job interviews, the apartment ads that were put out, the white voice was told, hey, come on by, take a look at the apartment. The ones who were like, yeah, I wanna know if that apartment that you got open is still open around there. And they were like, yeah, nah, nah, nah, nah. Sorry, it's been taken. So he was like, how is it, what is it that these people are picking up on, on the other end of the phone that they're hearing when there's what sounds like, sounds like a Mexican man calling versus what sounds like a black man calling or what sounds like an Asian man calling versus what sounds like a white man calling. And this is the very same mindset that we have when we have the black. names thing. Racists will find a way to root out, before they even see you, root out your blackness in multiple levels. so when people say, oh, there's no talking black or talking white or talking this or talking that. Listen, We know good and well, ask yourself if there's no way to distinguish in a general sense race over the phone, how come the racists haven't gotten that memo? Why are they so effective at discriminating against us over the phone? What are they hearing that respectable, educated black folk ain't hearing? And thing is, you are hearing it. Dr. Rachel Elizabeth Weissler: you know, there was this great example of Barack Obama saying, now we straight. When someone asked if he wanted change and it went totally viral. And NPR has this like, is our president racially bilingual? is our president racially bilingual? didn't even know what to do because he's so, but so typically using that standardized American English speech. And then at one point decided, you know, or it came out that he used now we straight and it blew the whole world open. So. What I think that tells us too is that the language is still policed, right? Even if it's getting appropriated and used by others, Black people are still being surveilled in how we use our own varieties and ultimately it can be detrimental for our own day-to-day life, right? Sandra Bland, there's... papers that talk about how she was talking to the officer and like her language made him feel threatened. And so, right, like she's just using her natural dialect. Are you just perceiving it as angry because she is a black woman and you perceive anything that comes out of a black woman's voice to be angry, even if the intonation for a black woman's voice is not any different than a white woman's when they're using anger or not. And so these are the different, I think, pieces that we still have to reckon with as a. societies, how can black people speak and represent themselves authentically and be treated equally to our counterpoints that are literally using our language for the sake of benefit and they benefit from it, but somehow we don't. Sunn m'Cheaux: a pet peeve of mine would be like when Oprah would do all that, girl. I ain't saying you can't do it, it's a part of your culture, you're entitled to it or whatever. But when you go out of your way to be classist and you go out of your way to be respectable and speak against so many facets of the culture that are not, that do not fit that very narrow straight of what is respectful to you. And then when you want to add a little spice, even Michelle Obama has said she does not want her daughters to talk like that. She said that. In her own interview, she said, no, no, no, no, don't, don't, don't, don't do that. You got to basically present yourself in a more articulate manner, whatever. Yet when Barack and Michelle and all them get ready to, you know, on that campaign trail and they're singing that Al Green and eating that barbecue and wanting to relate to people. Now all of a sudden this girlfriend and shoe, you know, and, and again, it's your culture too. You can dip and dive, slide in and out is double-touch at all you want to. I, I, who am I to, to, to. Monitor how somebody should or shouldn't code switch when and when not to But for people who don't code switch for people who are closely associated with the way that you are switching out of when it's convenient Don't throw them under the bus By denigrating that way of speaking it's called switch all you want But just don't throw shade at the thing that you're switching out of that's all that's all I'm saying. So when people who don't who are speaking in their natural sort of cadence, and I use the term natural loosely because it's all learned, people who are speaking in their natural cadence that you have chosen not to, which is fine. We both from the Chuck. You know good and well, this ain't, this is ghost witching. We done had conversations off camera. You know what my accent sound like. I know what your accent sound like in the Chuck, okay? But. That's what it's about. You having the autonomy, the agency to speak how you want to, when you want to. I know that whenever I'm listening to you right now, that's because you chose to for your own reason, not because there's somebody behind the camera telling you to tighten up your diction. And that's the plan. mean, that's what I want for us. It's not that I want us all to sound one way or us all to talk in one big black sort of way. What I want is for us to have the agency. for us to have the autonomy, for us to have the ability to decide for ourselves when we're gonna speak what way, because I don't actually want to speak with a Gullah Geechee accent with everybody. don't, I don't, it's not because I have an aversion to it. To me, there's an intimacy that's there. There's a familiarity that's there. There's a sense of home. There's a sense of comfort. Michael Harriot: during COVID, I American Airlines Magazine, hired me to write this piece on Charleston plantation tourism. And I hadn't been home in a while because of COVID. My mom, you know, she doesn't have her heart is not well, so I can't be out there and then go see her. She was living in Goose Creek. Sunn m'Cheaux: Right. Michael Harriot: the hotel they had me staying in was right downtown, right off King Street, in Charleston. And I walked to the store. Sunn m'Cheaux: Mm-hmm. Michael Harriot: And it was like a dude delivering the Pepsi guy delivering the sodas the woman who was working behind the counter. And when I heard the Geechee accent, and no lie, man, like I started c like crying like, I Sunn m'Cheaux: Yeah. Michael Harriot: hadn't been home in so long. That is what home, like people see what home looks like and what f what it feels like. That's what home sounds like, it's also interesting to me. White people adopt the black sense. Sunn m'Cheaux: Right. It's the same. Right. Michael Harriot: Right, you can tell that it's a white person talking. Like they'll say, I grew up around black people, I grew up in the hood, but you can tell it's a white person talking. It's almost Sunn m'Cheaux: Right, right. Michael Harriot: like an affectation, the same as when we hear David Alawayo using Georgia accent playing somebody from Texas, right? Right? It it's Sunn m'Cheaux: Right, right, right. Michael Harriot: inauthentic to someone, and here's the important part, with a trained ear from lived experience. TMichael Harriot: like I can tell when it's a black person singing versus a white person singing. I've had this online argument about Tina Marie, but to me she has a Caucasian timber to her voice. Michael Harriot: And It r it's reflected in our speech. Dr. Rachel Elizabeth Weissler: I'll say first that language is a unique system that's a cognitive capacity of humans while other animals have ways of communicating. Humans are the only ones that have language. And what language is, is these different pieces that allow us to communicate. we have, again, these are kind of boring words, but syntax, semantics, phonetics, phonology, basically meaning we have sounds of words. We have how you put those sounds together, how you then put those sounds into words, how you put those words together, and then how we interpret those words. So those are all those unique pieces, right? And then we have something called prosody. Prosody is what you're talking about with this timber, right? It's where even if I'm enunciating my words in the way that we might consider to be conceptually Queen's English or whatever, what is it that's still indicating that that's a Black person on the phone? That is the prosodic or intonational phrases. of the speaker because we have intonation. Intonation can be indicating different parts of speech, but it also can be indicating race, right? So if I was to say, how are you today? You can hear my voice kind of moving, but if I took away the words from that and just said, hmm, hmm, you might wonder, okay, her voice went up and down. Maybe there's a question in there. In American English, as we finish on a. high note usually in our prosody and so that indicates a question. So yeah, it's our prosody that's indicating our Blackness much of the time. But of course, there's also the lexical items. So the words, there's the syntactic structures. One of my favorite ones to talk about is acts, for example, right? Like I'm asking you a question, acts and ask. Again, there's a variable, Black people can use either one, but that switching of those two speech sounds, the k and the s, is something we call metathesis. And that's just a syntactic or that's just a phonological feature that exists in actually a bunch of other languages. Like you can Google metathesis and you'll find on Wikipedia like 50 languages that use it. African American English is just one. But yeah, it's there's just phonological uniqueness to African American English, syntactic uniqueness, lexical uniqueness, and that prosodic uniqueness as well. Sunn m'Cheaux: And then you have. Michael Harriot: Right. I I I Sunn m'Cheaux: and now you can doom scroll all day long if you get the right algorithm that's feeding you a steady diet of black language, you can be out in, know, Idaho somewhere on a farm. you know, with a steady, steady stream of black language and never have met a black person in your life and be able to adopt enough of it to be able to, I wouldn't say speak it, but to be able to perform some degree of it. Michael Harriot: To pe especially to people in Idaho. Sunn m'Cheaux: Right, absolutely. You will sound like mad niggas in Idaho, even though you might sound completely fool-gazy to us. You know, and so that's the thing is... Actually, I just did a video about this yesterday where I was talking about the context that creates the culture. It's the context. They can take the content, but not the context that makes the content have meaning. And so, I don't know if you know about it not, but there's this saxophone playing trend that's going now. The meme where some pending doom is happening and you hear the saxophone. wailing from boys in the hood. Now, if you don't know the context of why the saxophone, like what's, if you don't know what that's about, if you weren't there, if you, if the reference that those saxophones are referencing, weren't something that came into your consciousness that turned, crossed over into pop culture amongst ourselves, there are certain things that are pop culture in certain groups. like certain demographics that you know, I know where you're from. And that's it. That's it. We cannot keep the horse in the barn. We cannot stop them. Like the answer is not black people need to stop putting out black centric content. Black people need to keep all the blackness to themselves. Black educators need to stop educating black people on black stuff online because white people might see it. We don't have a mass family chat, a mass group chat. There's no way for me to get the same broad audience to give them knowledge of self in different continents at once. That's not feasible. What you need to protect are the things that cannot be like taken easily, you had to be there. You have Michael Harriot: Right. Sunn m'Cheaux: to talk, have to, someone said, and if there's black people who don't know these things, then they just ain't black enough. See, that's where you're wrong. That's exactly where you're wrong. That if you think that if somebody doesn't know, first of all, a lot of times what they're talking about are linguistic terms, like social linguistics, linguistics, things that are very specific discipline. Average person's not walking around knowing You know, the difference between elliptical speech, you know, and, and, and discourse markers, like there's terminologies they don't know. And when you're telling them the difference, you know, with epizootis and stuff like that, and the phrase and how that, and how that applies to black language. The white linguists already know this. They know linguistics. Michael Harriot: Right. Sunn m'Cheaux: This is a linguistic lesson and they already know the information because they know linguistics. If I'm trying to tell you how the IPA. applies to the sounds made in black English, you think the average black person is walking around knowing the International Phonetic Alphabet? Of course not. But the linguists, black or white, already do. So what you're asking me to do is cut off our black nose to spite their white face over information that's already accessible to them because they know the discipline that you do not. And so, no, you can be black in any number of ways. Dr. Rachel Elizabeth Weissler: day, right? Black people innovate, white people take it over. What do black people do? Continue to innovate. You consistently see this innovation happening, not only linguistically, but also physiologically and all these other ways, right? Like we do our hair a certain way and now people are the hairstyles. We have our clothing a certain way and people are stealing that. We talk a certain way and people are stealing that. but yes, you bring up a really good example. We call this idea of kind of the language shifting or changing or going away semantic bleaching. So this idea of the words that had certain meaning at a certain time, are losing their meanings or at least, the credit or the basis of the language and the structure seem to be getting lost in terms of where they originated from because of who is currently speaking them now. I wanted to give one example outside of African American English for comparison that there's lots of Native American and Indigenous folks in the United States and there's multiple language varieties that are endangered. But there has been some interesting research looking at the portrayal of Indigenous languages on television. They call this kind of generally res talk, where people are watching these TV shows where people are using different varieties across different reservations. And then the kids are watching that and then they're internalizing that as their variety. And now you have kids that are speaking different Native American. varieties of languages that aren't even from their own tribes, for example. So you're seeing TMichael Harriot: Wow, that's... Dr. Rachel Elizabeth Weissler: this, right? Yeah. so, I mean, similarly, very different, really, rather, in with African American English, how are Black people portrayed on TV? Like, what are the canonical linguistic forms that are used online or on TV and then also in the media? Sunn m'Cheaux: Especially considering we didn't invent black in the first place. We didn't assign ourselves black in the first place We really just appropriated a thing that was used against us in order to have solidarity and to me I'm like that's a that's a that's a bum trade like, you know, Michael Harriot: Yeah. Sunn m'Cheaux: we're gonna we're gonna get all the the the riches your wealth your ingenuity we're gonna exploit you for your labor and do all these things to you, but hey Y'all get to call yourself black and suffer together You you get to die together You get to get whipped together. You get to, you know, and I'm like, wait a but that's, that's not enough. Like black is not enough. I know people think that that sounds like, you know, anti-black for me to say that black is never, it'll never be enough. Black will never be enough for me. We didn't create it in the first place. We were forced to make use and make do with it in the second place. And it was an okey-doke. So at the end of the day, when you have people who the entire timeline since before we were labeled black, whether it's Tribal warfare or national warfare, tribalism is a pretty backhanded thing to say, but know, war amongst nations in Africa. We know for a fact that black has never been enough. Most of the, you know this, most of the rebellions that were thwarted in things that we conspired to rebel against the man, how did they get exposed? It was Michael Harriot: Right. Sunn m'Cheaux: right. And somebody in the midst did this right here. who look like us. And so we know that's never been enough. We know that black is not a monolith and it wasn't even something that was ever meant to be enough. We're doing that the same way that we use in the bone marrow to make soup, like bone soup. You know, they eat the meat and we make bone soup and now we turn that condition into a tradition that we'll defend as opposed to getting back to a condition that optimizes who we were actually meant to be, that our actual true selves. and not this facsimile that we were forced to be. So that's never gonna be enough. No, I'm not gonna stop teaching black folks on social media because the naysayers in a peanut gallery, and yes, I know that has a racist, you know, of derivative in the proverbial peanut gallery, don't like it. No, I'm not gonna do that. You can't always get what you want. You can't just say, well, we don't have any connection to Africa. We were born here, raised here. We are the original indigenous people. I don't have to go along with your fantasy. I don't have to. Whether you're the real Israelites, you call yourself the real, all in one section. We're the real Jews. No, we're the real indigenous people. Like, no, we're the real Africans. Somebody told me that Africa was populated from the black people who came from North America and were shipped there, that slavery actually worked in reverse. Someone else told Michael Harriot: Yeah, but Sunn m'Cheaux: me that English was originally the black language of Turtle Island, the North American language that we taught the Europeans. and that the indigenous people, well those are just Mongolians. I don't have to go along with that. I know it takes all kinds. I know it takes all kinds. I have a high tolerance for foolishness because I understand not all of us have had equal opportunity and equal access to knowledge and, well, to information. And to have that information converted to knowledge and that knowledge converted to wisdom. Dr. Rachel Elizabeth Weissler: It's challenging too, because African-American English is variable in terms of writing system. so the ways that people, black Twitter was like a big thing that people studied for a long time back when Twitter was Twitter. And then looking to see, know, white people are now using those terms and is that acceptable? Now we need to use different ones. The Linguistic Society of America will do something like Word of the Year and they'll bring up a word like, the word of the year for 2025 is front. And it's like, Do you know how old that word is? You know? And so, you know, to answer the question more simply, at this point, I don't see African-American English going away because of the iterative innovation that we see continuously that Black people do in life. mean, look at our community, right? Like we're constantly getting put down, but constantly trying to come back up. We do this linguistically as well. And so I don't see the variety going away, but I do see it continuously changing. And I do see this semantic bleaching happening where, I mean, I keep examples of it all the time. There was some, maybe it was progressive. was some insurance company that said, you know what this is? a bad flex, but having this insurance, good flex. And it's like, y'all are using flex in the wrong way. This doesn't make any sense. What's happening here? But nobody's questioning it because of them taking it over, right? Who was in the boardroom that approved that? So that's sort of, at least initially, my reaction is that I don't see it going, I don't see the variety disappearing, but certainly changing with all these different influences that are happening. Sunn m'Cheaux: And that's what I'm saying is you can only survive for so long by like sneaking, hiding, slithering behind the bush and trying to keep things on the low because languages die every day. Languages die all the time. Languages go extinct, languages get killed. Linguicide is a term that a lot of people aren't familiar with. Because they take it for granted that languages will just simply always be but that's not true There are ways that through way of laws regulations social order different types of Right Michael Harriot: Genocide? Sunn m'Cheaux: absolutely where a language can literally die Dialects can literally die out they can literally age out and so if you think that us keeping quiet about our language and just just this Don't draw no attention. It's like in that, a quiet place, like in that movie where if you make noise, a monster come and get you. That's how people feel like blackness will survive. If we just stay quiet and still enough, maybe the, you know, the white monster won't come and eat us up. And what kind of life is that? No, Michael Harriot: Yeah. Sunn m'Cheaux: the idea of gatekeeping reminds me, and I talked about this before, where in the cafeteria at school, if somebody wanted something off your plate, they would put their finger in it. They're like, Michael Harriot: Mm-hmm. Sunn m'Cheaux: hey, you want your mashed potatoes? Or, hey, you want your hot dog? Or whatever. Knowing fully well that at that point you'd be like, man, go ahead and take it, man. You know, I don't, I I don't want it, you know, because they've had their hands on it. Now, this is a game that mostly white kids played. Black kids did not play this game. Okay? But they would think it was funny to put their hands in each other's food in order to claim each other's food. And so some of the kids would take the hovering over their food while they were eating just in case somebody came to put their finger in it. You couldn't even halfway enjoy your food. because you're so busy eating defensively. I, on the other hand, didn't do that. My proposition was very simple. If you put your hand in my food, I'ma beat you behind. You put your hand in my food, I put this in your mouth. if that's a fair trade for you, put your hand in my food. This is my gatekeeping right here. But one thing we, I ain't tucking my chain. Michael Harriot: Vai. Sunn m'Cheaux: They walking around scared that the white man gonna snatch their chain. So they tucking their chain like no no no no, don't be talking like that in front of them folk, them folk gonna hear you and you. Nah, bruh. Nah, it ain't gonna be me. I'm not tucking my chain. I am determined and committed to living out loud, doing what I do as a black man in this world, going through academia that can be very, very anti-black and white, white-centric through the way. You think that I don't want these, you want our own people and those who would oppress us, those who would denigrate us to know the habitual B or that acts came before ask, like the etymology of those things, the origin of these words or whatever. Of course that's important to know. So instead of saying, well you just giving up our recipes, I ain't give up no recipe. You don't understand the difference between instructions and recipes. Those are not the same thing. There's a difference between somebody saying, that right there is flour, that's butter, versus this is what you gotta do based on mama-ole recipe to put this thing together and get the same results she got. That doesn't make sense. Dr. Rachel Elizabeth Weissler: It is just a matter of fact that the, language shifts and changes quickly. but that doesn't mean that the authenticity isn't there, but it certainly does look, look different. And there is a fear and it's reasonable to wonder like, are these kids all just going to be speaking white? Is African-American English just going to be wiped out completely? And what I would say is no, we have some stable features that we see historically from the beginning of people doing analysis of black folks, which by the way, way back in like the 1960s, African-American English was only categorized by the young black urban male. There was no consideration of black women or older folks or biracial folks or folks that are in the South versus people that are in the North and so on. But to your point though, I do think it is imperative, just as it is imperative to teach our Black kids the history that they're not learning at school, it's imperative that we are teaching them, speaking the varieties around them, as well as sharing with them again, kind of these older recordings like you're talking about. So these kids have exposure, the exposure to knowing what blackness sounds like and how blackness is presented and represented in the world historically is how we will keep at least culture and tradition alive. I think it's not enough for us to designate to our children. The language variety is okay, but just in a certain place because we're still saying that it's somehow wrong in these other spaces. We need to be transforming the spaces, which I'm working on. But Sunn m'Cheaux: right. And that's the thing is, what really are we preserving if you silence all the black educators? Say you succeed, you get what you want, now all the black educators ain't teaching nothing black no more. First of all, what they gonna do with all that education? Start teaching medieval English? What are we doing? We're all teaching Gaelic now? Black academics to then dedicate their talents to focusing on very Eurocentric topics. And that's what's going to rule out our platforms and think that they're not going to fill in the vacuum. I can tell you right off the top of my head, three to four, there's one in particular who's working on the major African-American reference book right now. He's white, but he has two co-authors, the face of it. is predominantly this white guy who constantly goes viral, saying positive. I mean, he is saying positive things about black language or whatever, but I'll make the same post before him get this many views. He make the same basic post and go viral almost every time, because the white man ices cola. So Michael Harriot: Right. Sunn m'Cheaux: my thing is, so when we're busy gatekeeping and keeping ourselves quiet, and not utilizing our knowledge and talent and skills or anything to uplift Blackness. You think they're just gonna stop and be quiet and say, man, if only we could get some more knowledge from Black folks in order for us to be able to capitalize off of their culture. No, they'll make something up like they always do. It doesn't have to be authentic. It doesn't have to be real. They'll just make something up. Michael Harriot: And I mean it it's it's ultimately gonna be like like chat GPT trying to steal from somebody who can actually write, it don't sound the same. Or like we n like when those British people heard the blues and try to imitate it, it don't sound like the blues. Like the Rolling Stones is genuinely considered themselves to be a blues band, Sunn m'Cheaux: Right. Michael Harriot: And you're saying we are we should stop playing the authentic blues cause the Rolling Stones might make a lot of money. Sunn m'Cheaux: Right, right. Led Zeppelin capitalized off so many blues artists and they're in the Hall of Fame, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and I believe they are, and they did their thing. But at the end of the day, they're not the culture. And this is what I'm saying is we still, this was one of the tantrums that country artists kept throwing was because something happened that they were just made aware of. I don't think they were made aware of. because their own self delusion. Which was when Beyonce put out the country album, they felt like, but this ain't country. How could she win an award for this and this ain't country? Lo and behold, little did they know Beyonce's album wasn't the one that was dictating what black country sounded like. Black folks been, we've been doing country soul, what they call like uncle music. blend that we've been on trail rides and at barbecues and family events for years. We didn't stop. Michael Harriot: Yeah, I don't you think white people like that's a thing that I wonder about, right? Like do white people know about Johnny Taylor? Sunn m'Cheaux: No! Michael Harriot: Do white like do they know about Liquor House music? I think that is the last thing that hasn't been stolen. TMichael Harriot: so final question, is there such a thing, this is the question of the episode, is there such a thing as talking white? And if so, what is talking white? Dr. Rachel Elizabeth Weissler: yeah. It's funny because no one's ever asked me that question. If I were to define talking white, I would define talking white as speaking in a way that aligns with standard language ideology in the American context. So again, suppressing variability and variation often aligned with those who are in power that have subscribed certain features often related to those that are the ones in power. There's nothing inherent about a way of speaking white that makes it better than speaking a different way. But it is a lot of the time about suppressing variation and aligning with aligning with this, the textbook norm of speaking. That's what I would say. TMichael Harriot: So I guess, I think what you're saying is, it's like talking white is just like talking black, but with no seasoning. I think that's exactly what you said. I think that's, Dr. Rachel Elizabeth Weissler: I so, yes. TMichael Harriot: I wanna thank you again for kind of walking us through this and serving as our expert.