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Jasmine Crockett: code switching as political strategy [1]

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Date: 2025-09-16

Before I assume that everyone knows what code switching is, let's just define it. Code switching for the purposes of this article means using the language of the group one finds oneself in, which applies so often among those who have not been a part of that group, and whose own background would not include use of the language, always more formal, more educated-sounding, more class aware and let's call it what it is from an informal perspective, speaking as if you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth. Thus, reversely, one not born into that "group" would code switch back to the informal language of one's own group and social milieu when not in the more formal silver spoon group.

This entire thought problem came about the other day when I caught a very quick video of Jasmine Crockett, the fiery Congresswoman from Texas, giving her House colleagues hell about their blatant hypocrisy on among other things, guns, and following the murder of Charlie Kirk. But this time her language wasn't merely angry and delivered in formal speak, it was, as my late husband would have called it, black speak. (He was an African American guy, incredibly well-educated, but was born in a ghetto, and specifically into a house he called a Sula house--full to the rafters with women, kids, men who drifted in and out. And he spoke the language of the ghetto because it was what he knew. Until he went away to college, and then to Europe, and back to the USA and graduate programs. Where, with all this exposure to a larger and economically more privileged world, he learned how to speak as if he had that cliched silver spoon in his mouth.)

Her anger was palpable, but it was her use of language that was even more important. She used "y'all" instead of my colleagues or my fellow congressmen and -women; she dropped every "g" ending--she didn't slip one time into pronouncing the ends of her words. She spoke rapid-fire, something else quite easily done using one's comfortable vernacular. And she created quite in-your-face images as unsparing as the black speak ones we'd hear in a film by Spike Lee. Or the images my own husband could conjure when, as he'd say, "I'm putting that silver spoon back in my pocket; hear me."

Am I contending this was on purpose, the use of black speak by Crockett? No, well maybe, but that is irrelevant anyway. What matters is that she spoke an unvarnished truth to power that almost all black folks would get, but most important, so darned many white folks who are working class, blue collar, or having left it behind, still know the language of their own working-class people would also understand. Perhaps for those not so deeply into the MAGA cult that they'd never hear her or any of us for that matter, they'd feel her anger, understand why it is righteous and true. And maybe for once, finally they'd feel entitled to their own anger at how off the rails we are at this moment in time.

She didn't sound like an entitled, rich, well-educated politician. She sounded like millions of Americans who are angry, scared, embarrassed and fed-up with not only Trump, but all of those in his administration who are telling us it's their way or the highway. We don't matter. Being shot is just the way it is because of that almighty Second Amendment; well, unless it's one of their own and then it's our fault, we killed him, we're the violent ones.

And finally, I am white, well-educated, quite comfortable with silver spoon chatter patter, but like my late husband, I didn't come out of that privileged world either. Maybe that's why I got it so quickly--Crockett was speaking the way I am able to switch back into when I'm pissed. I drop my "g's," speak far more rapidly than is my habit now, and use the familiar when addressing my peers. She is one of us. One of the many, many millions who are either still in the lower to lower-middle class, or who, having climbed out of it, still recognize what it took to get out of it and watching all of us being denigrated, rendered powerless and irrelevant simply wasn't acceptable to her. As it must not be for us.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/9/16/2343825/-Jasmine-Crockett-code-switching-as-political-strategy?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web

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