Is our 'blaccent' and use of code-switching really that offensive? Right-wing critics think so

Should Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez be allowed to slip into an African-American accent while speaking to a mostly African-American crowd about issues of great interest to African-American communities?

I say, sure, if she can pull it off.

That calls for a little explaining. Allegations of cultural misappropriation rose with ferocity in conservative media over the past week since the New York Democrat, widely known as "AOC," spoke with what the Washington Examiner called a "Southern drawl" during a speech at the Rev. Al Sharpton's annual National Action Network convention in New York.

AOC was responding to President Donald Trump's dismissing her as a "young bartender" in an earlier speech to the National Republican Congressional Committee's annual spring dinner. "I'm proud to be a bartender," she said. "Ain't nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with working retail, folding clothes for other people to buy. There is nothing wrong with preparing the food that your neighbors will eat. There is nothing wrong with driving the buses that take your family to work."

The audience sounded like it was with her all the way as she stretched her words into a drawl and declared, "Ain't no-thin' wro-o-ong with that...."

Indeed, there is not. Bartending's honest work, honestly described by AOC, and it's a profession that benefits from the ability to communicate and quickly build rapport with people, even when they might be slurring their words.

Yet AOC's online critics, eager to get the triple-bang thrill of mocking her, Sharpton and liberal political correctness, turned into armchair linguists and piled on.

"In case you're wondering," John Cardillo of Newsmax tweeted, "this is what blackface sounds like."

Ryan Saavedra of The Daily Wire charged that AOC "speaks in an accent that she never uses" -- although Ocasio-Cortez later cited video evidence that she has spoken similarly in the past.

David Almasi opined at Project 21, "It's hard to believe she didn't get called out by the majority-black audience for pandering or worse."

That's OK. I found it hard to believe when candidate Trump didn't get called out at conservative evangelical Liberty University when he quoted from "Two Corinthians," which Christians usually call "Second Corinthians," followed by "That's the whole ballgame; is that the one you like?"

Yet aside from a few snickers from the crowd, his audience welcomed him for making the appearance and he later received more than 80 percent of the evangelical vote against Hillary Clinton, according to exit polls.

And Clinton was on the minds of AOC's conservative critics. She was widely mocked for adopting what some called a "blaccent" before a mostly black audience in Selma, Ala., in 2007. The Drudge Report called her "Southern Fried Hillary." Many of her mockers conveniently omitted the rest of her quote, in which she pointed out that the words come from a well-known freedom hymn composed by the Rev. James Cleveland. But why let facts get in the way of an amusing partisan attack?

In an excellent defense of AOC's oratory, John McWhorter, a linguist and an African-American, argues in The Atlantic that her speaking style was not "verbal blackface"; she was "code-switching."

"Few find code-switching surprising when Latinos do it between English and Spanish, alternating between the two languages within a single conversation or even sentence," he writes. "The concept perhaps seems less familiar when done between dialects of the same language, but this, too, is extremely common."

Indeed it is. Our elders pressed my cousins and me to master the Queen's English in order to succeed in mainstream America. But if you were to wake me up suddenly in the middle of the night, I might reflexively curse you with the Alabama-born black accent of my home community.

Comedian Trevor Noah, host of "The Daily Show" and a mixed-race South African, apparently caught that irony when he titled his show's new outrage segment "Ain't Nobody Got Time For That" instead of, say, "Things That Annoy Me Today."

AOC grew up Puerto Rican -- an amalgam of Spanish, African and indigenous cultures -- in the Bronx, a salad bowl of ethnic diversity that undoubtedly gave her an edge on code-switching. She obviously doesn't hesitate to use it, as I mentioned earlier, when she knows she can pull it off.

But, yes, there always is a risk that some people will take it the wrong way, accidentally or on purpose, especially when politics are involved. Yet instead of being too quick to shame others for linguistic incorrectness, whether from the right or the left, I think we should all be less punitive and more patient. Our language should encourage us to learn more from each other, not find new excuses for a fight.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)