The Real Reason the Harris Twang Is Driving Republicans Crazy
New York Times
By Elizabeth Spiers
Sept. 18, 2024, 5:04 a.m. ET
As is the case for many people who grew up in the Deep South but have lived somewhere else for many years, the Southern accent I once had has given way to the “nowhere man” accent that I think of as generically American. But it comes roaring back when I visit my family in central Alabama, and even lingers for a few days after I have returned to Brooklyn. It’s also a little more pronounced after a martini (or two).
No one gets offended when my Southern accent comes and goes. For Kamala Harris, it’s a different story. Figures on the political right, including JD Vance, Donald Trump and various conservative internet celebrities, have accused Ms. Harris of affecting a Southern accent on the campaign trail, and implied that it was a kind of deception.
Ms. Harris, who is not from the South, wasn’t using a Southern accent, though. As John McWhorter has recently pointed out, what Ms. Harris was slipping into was Black English. There’s nothing unusual about her using Black English because to state the obvious (to everyone except Donald Trump, apparently) Ms. Harris is Black.
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. It’s a learned bias that begins at a young age. There’s also a class bias; people associate deeper Southern accents with lower income, an impression that can translate into wage discrimination and fewer opportunities for professional advancement — one of many reasons people with accents may work consciously to eliminate them.
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.” For Mr. Barham, who has very progressive views and a deep North Carolina twang, the result is that fans who have heard his voice and seen his camo hat sometimes assume he has a certain set of political views — then get upset when they realize he’s playing a song about the dangers of toxic masculinity or about abortion rights.
Mr. Barham shrugs it off. “I sound a lot like my dad, I sound a lot like my grandfather,” he told me, “but I say some drastically different things than those two men used to say.”
It’s possible that all the complaints about Ms. Harris’s speaking style are just another bit of trumped-up outrage, anything to get people fired up for a moment. But my less generous interpretation is that conservatives find her accent infuriating for one very specific reason: because they buy the negative stereotypes. They associate Southern accents with less educated, working-class people who, if they’re white, might be racist — and that’s a demographic that conservatives cynically regard as their property.
When Mr. Trump does photo ops in a big rig and says, “I love the uneducated,” he’s not so much code-switching as code-hitching, adopting signifiers that he — a billionaire with inherited wealth and an Ivy League degree — has no authentic claim to understanding, but which he thinks will appeal to his base. This is the same reason the private school alum and two-time Ivy League graduate Ted Cruz elongates his drawl while declaring that liberals can “kiss my ass.” Because he and Mr. Trump think it’s useful.
Perhaps the most enduring fiction that Republicans have sold to the electorate is that despite significantly shifting the tax burden onto working people, enacting explicitly antilabor policies, trying to gut public education and attenuate what little social safety net this country still offers, Republicans are somehow supposedly the better party for the working class. More Republicans self-identify as working class than do Democrats, but not because of income: About six in 10 voters with lower family incomes are Democrats or lean Democratic. Also, nearly six in 10 union members associate with the Democratic Party.
One explanation for the discrepancy is that some Republicans who own businesses and work white-collar jobs identify as working class for the sole reason that they don’t have four-year college degrees. And when Republican politicians talk about working-class people, they generally mean white working-class people. Nonwhite workers who have blue-collar jobs vote overwhelmingly Democratic.
So 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. And that’s equally true of Ms. Harris’s distinctly Midwestern running mate, who wears camouflage because he actually hunts (and not big endangered game on expensive safaris like the Trump sons), who knows how to coach high school football and can tell you how to fix a carburetor. He doesn’t have to pretend to be that guy; he is that guy.
If you’ve spent the past few decades driving giant pickups with suspiciously pristine truck beds, waving the Bible (occasionally upside down) and suddenly speaking as if you have a mouth full of molasses anytime you’re presented with a microphone, it might be upsetting to realize that your opponents speak like who they authentically are. Worse, you might realize that they expose your claim to be the party of the working class for what it is: pure artifice.
By Elizabeth Spiers
Sept. 18, 2024, 5:04 a.m. ET
As is the case for many people who grew up in the Deep South but have lived somewhere else for many years, the Southern accent I once had has given way to the “nowhere man” accent that I think of as generically American. But it comes roaring back when I visit my family in central Alabama, and even lingers for a few days after I have returned to Brooklyn. It’s also a little more pronounced after a martini (or two).
No one gets offended when my Southern accent comes and goes. For Kamala Harris, it’s a different story. Figures on the political right, including JD Vance, Donald Trump and various conservative internet celebrities, have accused Ms. Harris of affecting a Southern accent on the campaign trail, and implied that it was a kind of deception.
Ms. Harris, who is not from the South, wasn’t using a Southern accent, though. As John McWhorter has recently pointed out, what Ms. Harris was slipping into was Black English. There’s nothing unusual about her using Black English because to state the obvious (to everyone except Donald Trump, apparently) Ms. Harris is Black.
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. It’s a learned bias that begins at a young age. There’s also a class bias; people associate deeper Southern accents with lower income, an impression that can translate into wage discrimination and fewer opportunities for professional advancement — one of many reasons people with accents may work consciously to eliminate them.
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.” For Mr. Barham, who has very progressive views and a deep North Carolina twang, the result is that fans who have heard his voice and seen his camo hat sometimes assume he has a certain set of political views — then get upset when they realize he’s playing a song about the dangers of toxic masculinity or about abortion rights.
Mr. Barham shrugs it off. “I sound a lot like my dad, I sound a lot like my grandfather,” he told me, “but I say some drastically different things than those two men used to say.”
It’s possible that all the complaints about Ms. Harris’s speaking style are just another bit of trumped-up outrage, anything to get people fired up for a moment. But my less generous interpretation is that conservatives find her accent infuriating for one very specific reason: because they buy the negative stereotypes. They associate Southern accents with less educated, working-class people who, if they’re white, might be racist — and that’s a demographic that conservatives cynically regard as their property.
When Mr. Trump does photo ops in a big rig and says, “I love the uneducated,” he’s not so much code-switching as code-hitching, adopting signifiers that he — a billionaire with inherited wealth and an Ivy League degree — has no authentic claim to understanding, but which he thinks will appeal to his base. This is the same reason the private school alum and two-time Ivy League graduate Ted Cruz elongates his drawl while declaring that liberals can “kiss my ass.” Because he and Mr. Trump think it’s useful.
Perhaps the most enduring fiction that Republicans have sold to the electorate is that despite significantly shifting the tax burden onto working people, enacting explicitly antilabor policies, trying to gut public education and attenuate what little social safety net this country still offers, Republicans are somehow supposedly the better party for the working class. More Republicans self-identify as working class than do Democrats, but not because of income: About six in 10 voters with lower family incomes are Democrats or lean Democratic. Also, nearly six in 10 union members associate with the Democratic Party.
One explanation for the discrepancy is that some Republicans who own businesses and work white-collar jobs identify as working class for the sole reason that they don’t have four-year college degrees. And when Republican politicians talk about working-class people, they generally mean white working-class people. Nonwhite workers who have blue-collar jobs vote overwhelmingly Democratic.
So 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. And that’s equally true of Ms. Harris’s distinctly Midwestern running mate, who wears camouflage because he actually hunts (and not big endangered game on expensive safaris like the Trump sons), who knows how to coach high school football and can tell you how to fix a carburetor. He doesn’t have to pretend to be that guy; he is that guy.
If you’ve spent the past few decades driving giant pickups with suspiciously pristine truck beds, waving the Bible (occasionally upside down) and suddenly speaking as if you have a mouth full of molasses anytime you’re presented with a microphone, it might be upsetting to realize that your opponents speak like who they authentically are. Worse, you might realize that they expose your claim to be the party of the working class for what it is: pure artifice.
