It happens naturally. You’re talking with your friends, dropping g’s and verbs, using double negatives, saying things like “We straight” instead of “We’re straight” (even the president of the United States has done it). It’s natural, it’s comfortable, it’s normal. And then, you get a call from that job you just interviewed with yesterday. Like clockwork, your demeanor changes, as well as your verbiage. The double negatives are eradicated; the dropped g’s are picked back up again. No, you are not faking. You are not becoming a different person. You are code-switching. You are putting forth your “other” self, the self that has been cultivated and curated simply for you to survive. You’re still you, you’re just the you that can be digested and taken in easily.
For most People of Color, code switching comes as naturally as breathing. It must. W.E.B DuBois spoke about this often, this double consciousness that Black people in America feel: A schism between their Black self and their American self. This division of the self explains why many Black people do, in fact, code switch. Their Black self, dripping in ebonics and coolness, is not accepted by America. Thus, these two selves develop: the self that’s chilling with friends and the self that gets the job. This is also a very sensible practice. Recent studies indicate that “whitening” up your resume can get you exponentially more callbacks.
What’s interesting about code-switching for Black people in the United States specifically is the usage of African-American Vernacular English, or “ebonics.” Ebonics is not just slang. It is not just uneducated grammar. It’s a specific and precise dialect—there is a way to be grammatically incorrect when speaking in ebonics. Often, individuals using ebonics are quickly castigated as uneducated or ignorant. The converse is true. In reality, most people that speak in ebonics can also speak in standard American English. AAVE is dialectical in nature. It is intentional and deliberate. The grammatical faux pas that an onlooker may see and quickly cast judgments on are not actually grammatical errors, but deliberate cultural syntax.
For individuals who don’t have to code-switch in order to survive in America, the concept may seem farfetched. But for those of us that have to adapt into a society intent on seeing us suffer, it’s integral that we learn how to manipulate the system. It’s integral to our very well-being that we learn how to code switch. Our use of colloquialisms, of our cultural dialect, does not make us any less equipped or less educated than those who don’t have this cultural creation. Code switching is one of many results of the schism Black Americans have internalized about their racial and national identity. It is the direct result of racism. It is the direct result of survival.
