Wednesday, September 18, 2024

NO, REPUBLICANS DON'T RESENT KAMALA HARRIS'S "TWANG" BECAUSE THEY THINK SHE SOUNDS LIKE A WHITE SOUTHERNER

Elizabeth Spiers is one of the better op-ed writers at The New York Times and can be very sharp and feisty on social media. However, she's wrong about the reason Republicans resent the "twang" that sometimes shows up in Kamala Harris's speech:
So what’s really bothering Republicans? The answer has nothing to do with linguistic purity. It has everything to do with cultural stereotypes — and electoral math.

Studies show that people with Southern accents are often regarded as less intelligent, even by people who have those accents themselves.... There’s also a class bias; people associate deeper Southern accents with lower income....

When the speaker is white, some people hear a Southern accent as a marker of racism or other forms of intolerance. “The South did not invent racism,” the country musician B.J. Barham recently told me, “but every single racist thing you’ve ever seen said in the movie usually comes with this accent.”

... Republicans who think that white, possibly racist working-class people (or white people who believe themselves to be working class) are their base might feel that a Black Democrat using a Southern accent is stealing their shtick, or their votes.
No, Republicans aren't accusing Harris of trying to sound like a white Southerner. Spiers writes,
As John McWhorter has recently pointed out, what Ms. Harris was slipping into was Black English.
Spiers seem to think that Republicans don't know this. They do, and it's precisely what they resent, because they see Blackness as a privilege in American society.

Donald Trump certainly thinks so. He said as much in an April interview with Time magazine:
“If you look at the Biden Administration, they’re sort of against anybody depending on certain views,” Trump tells TIME.... “They’re against Catholics. They’re against a lot of different people... I think there is a definite anti-white feeling in this country and that can’t be allowed either.”

“I don’t think it would be a very tough thing to address, frankly,” Trump says. “But I think the laws are very unfair right now. And education is being very unfair, and it’s being stifled. But I don’t think it’s going to be a big problem at all. But if you look right now, there’s absolutely a bias against white [people] and that’s a problem.”
Polling suggests that many Republican voters agree with Trump, as FiveThirtyEight's Alex Samuels and Neil Lewis Jr. noted in 2022:
According to a 2021 survey by the Pew Research Center ... only 17 percent of Republican and Republican-leaning Americans said there is “a lot” of discrimination against Black people in today’s society. That number rose to 26 percent when Republicans were asked whether they believed white people faced “a lot” of discrimination....

PRRI [the Public Religion Research Institute] has asked ... to what extent respondents agree that discrimination against white Americans is now as significant of an issue as discrimination against Black Americans and other minorities — almost yearly between 2011 and 2020.... the share of Republicans who “completely agreed” or “mostly agreed” with the statement was mostly higher during Trump’s time in office than during Obama’s.

Last year, Philip Bump of The Washington Post cited the results of more recent polls:
In July [2023], Yahoo News commissioned polling from YouGov looking at the extent to which different racial groups were seen as targets of racism....

White Americans ... were more likely to say that racism was at least a small problem for them. But among Republicans? A third said that racism against White people was a big problem and 7 in 10 said it was at least a small problem — a higher level than Republicans felt was the case for any of the other racial groups included in the poll....

Last November, YouGov asked similar questions on behalf of the Economist.... Republicans ... were more likely to say that Whites faced at least a fair amount of discrimination than they were to say the same of Black Americans.
Republicans see Kamala Harris as a non-white person who's had all kinds of advantages because of the color of her skin, and has capitalized on all this privilege to become a successful lawyer and politician, even though she doesn't deserve all this good fortune. (Notice how many Republicans call her a "DEI hire" who'd be a "DEI president.")

Having been elevated to a status she doesn't deserve, with a usual style of speaking that suggests (as it did to Trump) that she isn't even Black, she has the nerve to sometimes slip into a style of speaking associated with Black people? Is she asking for more affirmative action?

That's what Republican voters are thinking. They think it's phony, something she does to persuade us that she should be given even more DEI privileges.

I assume that the "twang," as Spiers calls it, is one style of speaking she's very familiar with, and it feels like the right style to use in certain situations, the way my bilingual grandmother would sometimes finish English-language sentences with a phrase or two in Italian, something I mostly heard her do while she was talking on the phone to friends her age, who were probably doing the same thing. My grandmother was born in America to immigrant parents and spoke unaccented English to me, but food words were always said the Italian way. I have to remind myself to pronounce "ricotta" the way other Americans do because even my mother, two generations removed from Italy, learned to pronounce it like an Italian ("ree-goth-a").

But Harris's verbal code-switching will continue to infuriate Republicans, who think she's getting away with something. Look how crazy it makes Donald Trump's most trusted advisors:


This is just a variation on "Why can Black rappers say the N word and I can't?" Elizabeth Spiers shouldn't overthink it.

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