Changing One’s Accent Is a Democrat ‘Thang’

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.