There's nothing wrong with AOC's code-switching

A final objection seems to be that Ocasio-Cortez is being cynical in using Black English to connect to black audiences. But the dialect is not non-native to her. More to the point, why would it be wrong for a politician to seek to connect to black audiences by sprinkling her speech with some of their dialect, which she grew up hearing and using herself? After all, language is fundamentally designed for connection. People often note that their speech tends to meld itself to the speech of those around them, such that they end up having a multiple linguistic identity. Ocasio-Cortez has one.

So: “How dare she use Black English to try to connect with black people!” someone harrumphs. But her doing so only qualifies as condescending if Black English is broken—but it isn’t—or if Ocasio-Cortez didn’t grow up with it in her linguistic repertoire and environment, which she did. Notably, the audience at the National Action Network didn’t mind her Ebonic notes—“Go on, girl, go on,” one man said. The potshots at Ocasio-Cortez make sense only if we parse the black people at that event as too dim to understand that they were being spoken down to. There is no need to parse them that way.