President Code-Switcher

President Code-Switcher

I can distinctly remember many events from my childhood. One type of event that will be forever seared in my consciousness is hearing my mother talk to white people, especially bill collectors, on the phone. My two sisters and I always knew when mom was talking to white people because her dialect would become very distinct (even though we're from upstate New York and already have a rather nasal dialect) and very different from the speech that she would use around her children, other relatives, and her contemporaries.

This is why the recent dust-up over recent remarks by Senator Harry Reid (D-Nevada) about the distinct possibility of then-Senator Barack Obama becoming President of the United States because he is a “light-skinned Black who speaks without a Negro dialect, unless he chooses to,” doesn’t surprise most African Americans at all.

Blacks and other oppressed minorities have for hundreds if not thousands of years used certain linguistic and other devices as survival tools. In the case of African Americans, switching from “hood” dialect to a more distinctive, “white” sounding dialect has a very long history. In my mother’s case, she would code-switch as a means of either consciously or subconsciously surviving both linguistically and culturally when having to conduct business with whites. And it should not surprise us that then-candidate Barack Hussein Obama would also code-switch when speaking to predominantly African American audiences.

As an aspiring campaigner, then-Senator Obama had already heard that the rumor was in some circles that he wasn’t “black enough.” This charge had its origin in the facts that he didn’t grow up in the urban enclaves of America, and that his mother was a rather eccentric white woman who had married both an African (Obama's father) and an Indonesian. While most African Americans grew up in such urban “jungles” as Cleveland, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, and Miami, Barack Obama grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia, not exactly prime breeding grounds for tough-talking gangster rappers. Knowing this, in order to galvanize African American support, candidate Obama knew that he would have to somehow earn his cultural bonafides. Thus he became a community organizer in Chicago and eventually joined a church with a strong Afro-centric worship style. He may have even subconsciously chosen to marry the very dark and lovely Michelle Robinson as a validating stamp of approval for the black identification that he so longingly sought.

As it concerns Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the lightning rod of the controversy, If we think about it carefully, Senator Reid comes from a generation which referred to African Americans as “colored,” “negro,” or, the more perjorative, so-called “n” word. For us to expect him to all of a sudden abandon the vocabulary that he has used all of his life is unreasonable, as it is also very unreasonable to compare him to former Mississippi Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott. Senator Reid never proclaimed that voting for a hypocritical segregationist (Strom Thurmond) would have “saved the nation from all of our troubles,” as Trent Lott of Mississippi .

There is another distinct difference between Senator Reid and Senator Lott of Mississippi: I just mentioned the main difference; Lott is from Mississippi, a state, to quote Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., "sweltering with the heat of racial injustice . . . " when we think of murdered civil rights workers and lynchings we don't think of Nevada . . . we think of Mississippi.there is no movie called "Nevada Burning," but there is one called "Mississippi Burning."

So unfortunately Senator Lott carried a burden that Senator Reid didn't; the burden of a long history of racial terrorism . . . while racism is a nationwide problem, it used to be epidemic in Mississippi . . . and for Senator Lott to extol the virtues of Senator Strom Thurmond, a man who preached segregation now and forever, yet had a love child by a black servant, is the height of hypocrisy. Exactly what did the good senator from MIssissippi mean when he said that " if Strom Thurmond had been elected (on the Dixiecrat ticket) as president, this nation wouldn't have had the problems that it has had . . ." Did he mean that there wouldn't have been a civil rights movement??? Did he mean that blacks, Latinos and others would have been kept in their "place?" What did he mean???