I was born in a small mill town in rural upstate South Carolina, Woodruff. And I lived with my parents and sister for much of my early life in an even smaller mill town, Enoree, south of where I was born.
At 65, I retain a very heavy Southern accent.
I wasn’t very aware of that accent, however, until my early 40s after I left teaching high school—for 18 years at the high school I had attended in my home town—and moved to higher education.
Students not from the South directly mentioned my heavy accent, and as a college professor, I began attending and presenting all over the US—prompting many people, often smiling, noting my deep Southern way of talking. [In Milwaukee a few years ago, I asked for oat milk with my coffee and the guy serving looked up and said, “You’re not from here.” He was very nice and wanted to bond because he often had people flinch at his mid-western twang.]
Not long after I entered higher education in 2002, I was introduced to Joe Kincheloe, who became a mentor and friend. Although we failed to meet in person (he died unexpectedly and far too young in 2008), Joe secured for me several book contracts, and we co-authored a book together in 2006: Reading, Writing, and Thinking: The Postformal Basics.
Joe had been born in rural Tennessee so I think we had some Southern kindred spirit that drew us together.
One of my fondest memories is the first time we spoke on the phone. After only a few words out of my mouth, Joe laughed, “You are from the South aren’t you?”
During that call, Joe also talked about his struggling in academia because of his Southern accent—even at Southern universities such as Clemson; he noted a really tough experience with regional bias at Penn State as well.
Although I am a very privileged white male—like Joe was—we understand the persistent biases that exist for how we talk, which triggers in many people assumptions about who we are.
I thought about that conversation with Joe when I saw this on social media:
I also thought about my first year at Spartanburg Methodist College (only a few miles from the converted mill apartments where I now live).
There was a guy on my hall from Charleston, a large and popular city on the SC coast. Charleston is a quilt of various social classes from extreme wealth to extreme poverty, but it is also highly diverse in how people talk, regional dialects that are some times bound by individual islands.
The guy from Charleston had to contend with Upstate SC folk noting his Charleston accent, but more interesting was being in the room with him while he was on the phone with his parents.
Some of us sat in awe, him speaking so fast and (to us) oddly that we could barely understand what he was saying.
He had learned, as Mamdani above, to adjust his accent to his audience—speaking a bit less in his natural way at college than with his family.
This is code switching, one way that marginalized people seek to navigate their environments without suffering the negative consequences of being considered outside the norms.
Code switching has been a fascinating experience for me because I often find myself in highly formal academic settings (teaching, interacting with colleagues, speaking and presenting in formal settings, etc.) as well as living my day-to-day life among Southern friends and acquaintances who can be intimidated that I am a “professor” and once was an “English teacher.”
While I have begun to lean into my Southern drawl in those formal academic settings (it adds some humor when I speak or present, and I think being self-effacing helps relax the audience), I make sure to toss in the “ain’t’s” and such regularly in my daily life to assure folk I am still just a redneck from Woodruff, although well educated.
While I don’t trust the concerns raised by conservatives and MAGA about Mamdani’s code switching, I do think this issue highlights that language bias remains significant in the US (and many English speaking countries).
How we talk is who we are.
One of the most important moments for me as an educator—especially one dealing directly with reading, writing, and speaking—was discovering the work of Lou LaBrant.
LaBrant spent much of her career advocating for healthier attitudes about language and language usage, raising concerns about provincialism among students (and adults) as well as the dangers of “word magic”:
A basic understanding which needs to be taught in school and home is that the existence of a word does not at all prove the existence of any thing. Children do not understand this; nor do all adults. (p. 324)
She is suggesting the primitive belief that by avoiding the words she is avoiding the differences. We have much of this word magic indirectly taught in our classrooms. (p. 326)
Key here, I think, is that formal schooling—often English teachers—instill more unhealthy attitudes about language—correct v. incorrect usage, accents, and grammar—than healthy ones.
Mamdani makes conservatives and MAGA nervous because he is popular, engaging, and (so far) effective as a politician.
This lazy swipe at his code switching, I suspect, is an attempt to claim Mamdani is fake, inauthentic, a performer.
Well, I concede that last one because like teachers, politicians must perform.
I do, as I noted above.
Part of our performances involve, necessarily, how we talk as an expression of who we are.
Having worked in New York City, LaBrant developed her beliefs about language to include an awareness of the relationship between student language, their lives, and their education:
We frequently overlook the need of the bilingual child or youth to take advantage of a language which is an intimate part of his childhood. … One might note the pleasure young Negro readers often find in some of the pictures of Negro life by Ralph Ellison or James Baldwin, a please of recognition and not of protest. (p. 501)
…A diversified, individualized offering permits the “deprived” reader to utilize the large experience he has acquired in out-of-school hours. We tend to measure the experience of such young people in terms of what they lack; that is, in terms of what they do not know but which other middle-class young people do know. (p. 502)
This is now understood as seeing written and spoken texts as windows, mirrors, and sliding glass doors (Sims Bishop, 1990).
But pulling back from that, this is a call for recognizing and honoring the humanity of each students, of all people.
Judging, attacking, and belittling how people talk is judging, attacking, and belittling who they are as humans.
There should be no room for that among adults, and certainly, this ain’t how we should be treating children and young adults in our schools.
Note
Sims Bishop, R. (1990). Mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors. Perspectives, 1(3), ix–xi. https://scenicregional.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Mirrors-Windows-and-Sliding-Glass-Doors.pdf]
Recommended
If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?, James Baldwin
What There Children Are Like, Ralph Ellison
The work of Ian Cushing
Close Reading: Social in/justice and the deficit foundations of oracy, Ian Cushing
Lou LaBrant: Understanding Reading Today through the Lens of the Past
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