Plog Number 325
Code Switching
Hello Ploggers, how are you. It is Saturday here and I personally love my Saturdays or Sabados as the Spanish speakers say. I am a novice at Spanish but I learned the days of the week early on.
There are so many critiques about Kamala Harris that are worth mentioning. I only do so in the way of an explanation. The Fox news hosts are so busy assigning fault to her every move. They have criticized her laugh, her ideas and now even her voice. They are saying that she talks differently for different occasions. I heard one of them say she tries to speak like Martin Luther King. They say she is “code switching”. They are portraying it as a negative quality which is far from the truth. This whole thing intrigues me for many reasons. For one I thought it was a secret thing that only black people knew about. It is also something that is absolutely necessary to function in white society. My friend and I call it “doing the Buffy” or “doing the Becky”. We have had many private conversations about how we have had to go Buffy or Becky to meet our objectives at work. We work in a white dominated society. And we are smart enough to know that we can’t be our home grown selves 100% of the time.
We learned early on that our lives have layers and subsets. All of who we are is not made up of one whole homogenous persona. We learned in an unspoken way, to adjust our level of blackness according to the situation. We can dial our blackness up to 100% when in the privacy of our homes. The home space is a safe space where we can be authentic. In our homes we are surrounded by other people who also know the rules. But when we go out into the world we have to adjust the blackness. The blackness goes anywhere from 40% to 70% in public spaces. If on a job interview or even talking to the boss it can go down to 0%. At a bank it usually hovers around 30%.
Why do we do this constant changing our level of who we are? We do it so that we are found to be more accepted in a majority white society. American society has deemed white as right. The standard has been set and it is a white standard. If we want to be successful we (black people) have to be acceptable, pleasing and white sounding. But I don’t think the whole thing is limited to only black people. Haven’t you seen sitcoms where the main character is telling somebody off and then the phone rings and they change their voice to a lovely and dulcet tone? Bea Arthur comes to mind in her roles as Maude and or Dorothy Zbornak. She was the queen of the Code Switch in American entertainment. They should open an exhibit for this in the Smithsonian right next to the Archie Bunker chair. They could call it the blackness dial. It changes according to the situation.
If this is all they have on Kamala, they have nothing. She is such a strong candidate they are looking at miniscule things to bring her down. The “Code switch” may seem like a big exposed secret to those on the right, but the rest of us know better. If anything it is a testament to how we as Black Americans have to make ourselves fit into a world that won’t accept us as we are. Adaptation is the best way to survive. RECLAIM!
Comentários