Opinion

You betta believe it: Like Kamala Harris, I straddle two worlds

The reason for this is simple: I am two people. I am two people in the same way a lot of Black Americans have to be two people. I would imagine that most people who are not White have to speak two different languages in America.

But, for some reason, Black people don’t get the benefit of doubt when it comes to our two different ways of speaking. It strikes some people as duplicitous. Disingenuous. And I think we know why that is.

Kamala Harris is now taking heat from conservative quarters for speaking in a different way to different crowds. It’s all part of the far right’s latest talking point about the vice president. As conservative talk show host Ainsley Earhardt explained the problem, “There she is in Detroit. She changed her accent when she was there in Detroit because she was speaking to a group that, you know, has that similar accent. And so she did the same.”

All because Harris used the phrase, “You betta.”

You betta. Harris used the phrase in Detroit when referring to labor unions. Her point was that, if you enjoy certain benefits today as a worker, “You betta” thank a union member, for it is labor unions that fought so hard for better working hours, working conditions and weekends. Of course, “you betta” is a much stronger phrase than the more formal “you had better.” It’s more of a command, a call to action. From a Black woman who went to a historically Black university, and became the first female vice president, there’s nothing confected about it.

But conservatives seem to feel that, if you’re not like them at all times, then you cannot be trusted.

At a White House news briefing on Tuesday, Fox News White House correspondent Peter Doocy wouldn’t let it drop: “Since when does the vice president have what sounds like a Southern accent?”

Replied press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, “The question is insane. I’m moving on.”

I don’t think conservatives understand that the way to Black and Brown people’s votes is not by accusing us of not being White. Because that is what is going on here.

Black Americans are often accused of sounding either too “ghetto” or too “country.” (Nobody seems to be able to decide which is worse.) I remember years ago, at school, a young White girl told my class that I sounded “ignorant.” I was crushed — but, in time, I adapted. I listened to the way White people spoke on TV, and I imitated it — so I wouldn’t be called ignorant again. I imitated it so people wouldn’t assume negative things about me because of the way I spoke.

I assimilated — but only to a degree. And that assimilation doesn’t make anything about the way I speak untrustworthy. Like many Black Americans, I straddle two different worlds.

White people rarely have to do this, though some can relate. I have had the opportunity to teach White students from Appalachia and other places where accents are musically Southern. And many of them tell me the same thing happens to them. They tell me that all it took was one person, usually a teacher, who spoke “proper English” to tell them they sounded like a “redneck” to make them learn to stop pronouncing “oil” as “ole” or “window” as “winnder.” But when they get back home, they speak the way their family and friends do.

Changing the way you speak according to which crowd you’re talking to doesn’t make you dishonest or inauthentic. It just makes you part of two different worlds. And both worlds are a part of who you are. It doesn’t mean you’re affected. It means you’re adaptive. It means you want everybody in the room to understand you. And it probably means you listen more carefully, too.

The more conservatives try to criticize Harris’s Blackness, the more they reveal how few Black people they know and how incurious they are about us.

In a perfect world, no one would have to change the way they speak to be taken seriously. But that’s not the world we live in.