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When I was in college, there was a girl in my dormitory who spent the first semester of her junior year in England. She came back in January, speaking in a full-blown upper class English accent. Everybody in the dorm wondered who she thought she was fooling. How pretentious! It was like the near universal reaction to Madonna’s fake British accent. After summer break, she came back without an accent.
A similar transformation seems to happen with certain Democrat politicians. Hillary Clinton was widely mocked after she took on a black accent when she spoke at that church in Selma. What was going through her mind? Did she think her audience was so dumb she could convince them she was one of them? Did she not realize she was being filmed? Did she think the public would not be revolted by her phoniness and condescension? Her accent was so poor it was painful to listen to:
Barack Obama grew up in Indonesia, Kansas (with his white grandparents), and Hawaii. He had almost no contact with his Kenyan father, who in any case would probably have had a British accent, not an American black one. So, Barack grew up speaking English like a white person. Mr. Obama is similar to Colin Kaepernick: brought up in a white household, but now affecting a less-than-convincing black accent. And Mr. Obama famously thickens his accent when he speaks to black audiences. Since he’s black, it’s a little less jarring than Hillary, but since it’s not how he spoke growing up, it’s as phony as his marriage. He’s a down-low brother, not a down-home brother.
Kamala Harris also was middle-class, as she told us interminably in 2024. Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, who immigrated from India at age 20, certainly didn’t speak black English. If you listen to her Jamaican father, Donald J. Harris, on Youtube, he doesn’t speak with an American black accent either. Kamala’s black accent, which she puts on for black audiences the same way Barack did, is just as much of a put-on as his:
Joe Biden has never quite spoken in a black accent, but back in 2020, he famously told radio personality Charlamagne Tha God, “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, you ain’t black.” This use of improper English as a way to relate to blacks is even more condescending than a fake accent. The media called him presumptuous for telling blacks how to vote, but nobody seemed to call him on the implicit condescension of his language.
In 2012, Mr. Biden told a mixed audience in Danville, Virginia, “They’re gonna’ put y’all back in chains,” in reference to what Mitt Romney supposedly intended to do. Mr. Biden is from Delaware, not the South, so the “y’all” must have been an awkward attempt to sound black.
Elizabeth Warren has done something almost as phony: pretend to be a regular country gal. When she announced her candidacy for president in 2020, she said, “I’m gonna get me a beer.” I guess that’s just the way Harvard Law professors talk. Thank goodness there’s no such thing as a Native American accent.
Pretending to be someone you’re not is the essence of sociopathy.
I tried to think of Republicans who used fake accents, but couldn’t come up with anyone. At one point, I thought George W. Bush was a fake good ol’ boy. He was the grandson of a Connecticut senator, and the son of a CIA Director, then vice president, then president. W. himself went to Andover and Yale (where he was a member of Skull and Bones, the university’s most exclusive club), so I assumed that his swaggering shit-kicker routine was phony.
But when I looked into it, it turned out that he was raised in Midland and Houston while his father was in the oil business, and attended school in Texas through the ninth grade. So, he came by his accent relatively honestly – and more to the point, it never varied according to the audience. (One piece of personal fakery was the way he held his arms out to his sides, as if his lats were too big to let his arms hang down straight.)
So, what should we think of politicians who put on phony accents? Are they an indication that they’re putting on an act in other ways as well? It’s hard to escape the obvious conclusion. And what does it say about a political party when so many of its prominent politicians are so blatantly false? What, by extension, does it say about their platform? Might it be just a lot of moral posturing?
How should we feel about that — and about them? Just the way we felt about my schoolmate who spent a semester in England.
English
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If she was good looking it might have been cute and she’s an aspiring actress I’d suspect.
In cultures less hermetically sealed than the US, changing your accent is instinctive. An African counterpart on a project I worked spoke and carried herself like a perfect English rose with RP and plummy vowels. Outside the office with African friends, everything changed, posture, gesture, cadence, tone. Even though she was speaking English, I wouldn’t have recognized her if I wasn’t right there with her before. This is even more the case with native Asians. You wouldn’t believe the facial contortions they undergo to get through to you fucking Martians.
Maybe changing your accent is a left thing, I dunno. Being bad at it is an American thing. Partly because Americans view their idiolect as cultural capital so they think accent reflects class and status more than culture. American culture is state-imposed in strict conformity with PSB-D33/2 et seq., and exceptionally narrow and uniform by world standards. In the wider world people are aware of cultural rights, so they don’t assume that code-switching means you’re sucking up or talking down.
2. In many places, people switch between their dialect and the standard language depending on the situation. Sometimes if they are bilingual or trilingual they will even code-switch between languages.
An Austrian friend of mine normally speaks standard German when talking to me, or sometimes English. When I was in Austria I could tell when she was talking to relatives on the phone, because she would slip into one or other of the Austrian dialects (her family comes from the Austrian border with Hungary).
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A good example from the Scottish 1996 film Trainspotting. Renton and Spud are in court after being arrested for shoplifting. Spud is silent in this clip but in the film he never speaks anything other than Scottish dialect and he may not even be able to speak standard English. The judge speaks Scottish Standard English and Renton is able to rise to the occasion – “with God’s help I’ll conquer this terrible affliction”. In the book on which the film is based, Renton isn’t sure the judge believes he is sincere, but the point here is that when Renton has to, he can speak standard and even somewhat literary English depending on the situation. Their thuggish friend Begbie, who comments on the situation in the bar after the hearing, can’t speak standard English either.
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This is the sequel to the earlier film. Begbie is in jail. His lawyer speaks Scottish Standard English. Begbie speaks dialect and probably can’t speak standard English. Scots often code-switch but not all can.
During my Army barracks days, a few white folk hung with negroes. We called them wiggers. They adopted black mannerisms and speech. Now, whenever the ‘brothers’ met, they had a rather involved handshake called a ‘dap’. Wiggers learned the dap, using it to greet blacks. Funny thing was, this annoyed the blacks, and they started to adopt new and improved dap styles, in order to set them apart from their white sycophants whom they obviously disliked.
Not sure how it is today. Every now and then you run across some white kid sporting dreadlocks. Doing a U-Roy Natty Dread thing, I guess. Probably just in it for the dope. I can’t imagine waking up and thinking, “Man, I sure wish I was a negro.”
Its the hallmark of a conman and deceiver. normal people do adapt their language and behavior when in different company, but only slightly. but the politician thing is deceitful.
The original trainspotting book is quite wild, each chapter is from a different characters perspective, its hard at times to distinguish which one and which sex. Well worth a read.
Notice how many white dudes go in for a complete whole arm sleeve tattoos, almost solid green/black, IMHO its an attempt to change ones skin colour.
When back in the Upper Midwest where I grew up, I get back into the “ya, sure, you betcha” mode within minutes, especially after a couple of beers. Being married to a Scotch-Irish woman with Southern affectations, I’ve adopted y’all as part of my speech but I suppose I’ve incorporated more Spanglish than anything due to my environment.
The Dubya “good ole boy” ACT was even more pathetic than Caramel or Obammy, but the Hillary thingie was hilarious. These are the clowns who pretend to run the country. Even more hilarious than phony accents is the PROMO that Trump is running. Straight out of the WWE. Fraudsters one and all.