McWhorter - Black English doesn’t have to be just for Black people
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Black English is a linguistic spice to be taken off the rack as needed
By John McWhorter
Matt Rife is a comic. He’s 28, he’s white and he can be hard to listen to. And that’s because he’s always dipping into Black English.
Rife is from the small, very white town of North Lewisburg, Ohio. And yet in his routines, to strike a genial “You know what I’m talkin’ about?” chord, he often breaks into a Black sound, syntax and slang that is highly unlikely to be the common coin of social intercourse in North Lewisburg.
In a routine about friction with his stepfather, for instance: “You gon’ keep me in dis room wit’ dis movie? I guess, lock me uhhp, you know what I mean? All summer, baby — ah’m good!”
Then, following a few sentences in mainstream English: “I finally had leverage for wuhnce. Neither one of us could snitch on the other puhr-son without losing everything, it was nice. I was like, ‘You kin either beat me, or — you ain’t gon do both, OK?’,” adding an expletive. It’s as if Rife goes in and out of trying to be Dave Chappelle.
Rife has been widely dissed on social media for this habit. People find it fake. A part of me did, as well, the first time I caught him on TV. However, I’m not sure we should, in Rife’s case or in that of other non-Black celebrities (such as the Asian American rapper and actress Awkwafina) who dip into Black English. This is something non-Black people under about 40, celebrity and otherwise, seem increasingly to be doing in ordinary life. My students have written papers attesting to this tendency both in speech and texting.
It is Human Language 101 that people style-switch all the time, even when they are not switching into a different language or a distinct dialect from that point on. “Wow, this insurance for my flight is so expensive … but ya gotta watch out for yerself, I guess!” you might say when stressing your good old Everyman pragmatism. Many Black Americans switch in and out of Black English in the same way, using it as a kind of seasoning.
Of course, the question is why a white guy like Rife is doing that, instead of switching into a more vanilla version of colloquial white English. And the reason seems to be that Black English, for him, as for so many Black people, is a comfort zone, where it all gets real.
It was peculiar for a white person to process Black English that way, to the point of making personal use of it, until roughly the late 1990s. But things have changed. Rife, born in 1995, grew up with rap as mainstream music in America, with most of its buyers white, and Dave Chappelle was a mainstream celebrity. It is reasonable to imagine that Rife thinks his audience processes his Black English usage as a warm method of interpersonal bonding in the same way he seems to. In fact, a tweet of his suggests that he hadn’t even been conscious of what he was doing until apprised, and doesn’t even think of himself as shifting into something “Black” at all.
In other words, Rife is not posing or ridiculing; he’s connecting. Linguists call it accommodation. A non-Black speaker these days may do it with a Black audience. On a couple of occasions a while back, I saw one of the founders of the KIPP charter school network, Dave Levin, style-shift into a slight but perceptible Black English sound on and off when he was addressing mostly Black audiences. This is the linguistic equivalent, in its way, of the youth voting activist Billy “Upski” Wimsatt’s old habit of starting or closing out his group sessions on college campuses by calling on everyone to dance together. (I’ll admit that I found Wimsatt’s dancing bit kind of fake at the time, but I needed to ease up.)
In any case, neither Levin’s apparent language shifting nor even that of Hillary Clinton, who got roasted for using the merest dusting of Black English before a Black audience in 2007 — when actually she is a natural language-sponge who also sounded slightly Southern when living in Arkansas — deserve contempt for reflecting in language exactly what we were supposed to be going for: interracial harmony.
Except that these days, that ideal may seem a tad 1.0. Under the new identitarian mind-set, where we cherish coming together less than we cherish a diversity of identities, many see someone like Rife as culturally appropriating Black speech, something that isn’t his. “Mimesis is a kind of negation,” as I once heard someone explain at a conference.
This may be a popular way of thinking in certain circles right now, but I’m afraid it will never have much to do with what goes on out in the real world. There is simply no way that whiteness and Blackness will mingle as they have in music, cuisine, gesture, greeting styles, dating, matrimony and multiracial identity, and yet for some reason be halted at language. One might wish to enforce an artificial kind of blockade here, but it’s far too late. The horse has been out of the barn ever since white kids embraced Jay-Z and Tupac.
It isn’t fair, to be sure, that Rife can dip in and out of Black English while many Black people always “sound Black” and can be linguistically discriminated against because of it. However, the solution here is not to despise non-Black people for taking on shades of a “blaccent” but to battle the discrimination against it. On that front, change is happening, just slowly. Anyone who thinks America’s reception of Black speech in general hasn’t changed profoundly since 1990 is either too young to have experienced the change or hasn’t been paying attention.
In general, an ongoing immaturity in America’s sense of language is the idea that people typically speak in more or less the same way all the time. America makes it easy to suppose so, as our dialect diversity is relatively slight. But style-shifting is humans’ linguistic default, not a pose or party trick.
Observers noted this recently when Fani Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County, Ga., defended herself from allegations of an improper work relationship. Willis gave a notoriously colorful courtroom performance into which she sprinkled Black English references such as referring to money in “Gs.” Back in the day, some Black women scholars, hip to the default status of style-switching, wished Anita Hill had done something like this in her testimony regarding Clarence Thomas. But I’m not sure it would have served her well. We associate colloquial styles with relaxation, intimacy and bonding, none of which are necessarily useful within the context of congressional or courtroom testimony. In this, Willis may not have done herself any favors.
However, the social media comments I saw suggesting that Willis was being fake, only pretending to speak naturally in a mode she is too educated to actually be comfortable in, were wrong. The default assumption should be not that Willis can only speak in one way, but that she — law degree and all! — is quite comfortable in drawing from the Black English spice rack.
In getting a bad rap for style-switching, in other words, both Fani Willis and Matt Rife were just showing themselves to be linguistic normies.
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