It didn’t take long for Donald Trump play the race card about Kamala Harris. Just days after she became her party’s presumptive presidential nominee, Trump declared that her racial identity was nothing more than an act. “I didn’t know she was black until a couple of years ago, when she happened to become black, and now she wants to be known as black,” he said told the National Association of Black Journalists“So, I don’t know, is she Indian or black?”
Racist? Sure. But on a deeper level, Trump questioned the vice president authenticity and truthfulness. In this construction, Harris is a fraud — someone who uses her race for personal gain. For Trump, the way she presents itself through multiple lenses —her parents’ Native American and Jamaican ancestry, her upbringing in California, her education at a historically black college—is simply a DEI scam.
Nicole Holliday knew this would happen. Holliday is a sociolinguist at UC Berkeley who specializes in how people construct their social identities through the way they speak. She had studied how Barack Obama constructed his biracial persona through political speeches, and when Harris ran for president in 2020, Holliday understood that she was presenting a persona that was different from those of other candidates. Years before the MAGA knives came out for Harris, Holliday began studying how the vice president speaks—and what her language patterns reveal about her racial identity.
Like everyone else, Harris’ speech patterns and pronunciation are informed by where she spent her formative years and who she spent them with. Harris is a self-described “daughter of Oakland, California” who grew up in the Bay Area, spent time in Montreal and went to college at Howard University. That’s a familiar American story, but it means Harris exhibits a combination of a California accent and what linguists like Holliday often call African American English.
To study Harris’s pitch, Holliday collected audio clips from debates during the 2020 primariesThe results were revealing. When Harris criticized her future running mate Joe Biden for his positions on school integration and busing, for example, she ended an anecdote about a little girl who had benefited from those policies with the words, “That little girl was me.” About the word ThatHarris’s pitch dropped noticeably, followed by a rise. That shift from low to high, in linguistic notation, is called an L+H* pitch accent. And it has different meanings in African American English versus the mainstream American English more likely spoken by whites. (Don’t @ me: These are the terms linguists use.)
“White people only have that when they’re doing contrastive things,” Holliday explains. “You get this L+H* when they’re trying to correct you. But black speakers in the United States just throw it in everywhere. It doesn’t mean contrast.” So when white people who aren’t familiar with African American English hear that rise and fall, they think the speaker is being a little argumentative. “The rises and falls are happening in places that are unexpected to the average white listener,” Holliday says, “so they’re trying to make sense of it using the way she would talk.” In other words, how “Black” Harris sounds depends on the ear of the beholder.
Another element of Harris’s accent that is heard differently is a so-called “phrase-initial falsetto” — a little squeak she often uses at the beginning of a sentence. If that sentence begins with Isomewhat self-referential, to people unfamiliar with black speaking patterns it may sound as if Harris is contradicting them: “No! It’s not you. I am.” But that, Holliday says, isn’t what Harris does. What she actually does, in a completely authentic way, is what Trump accuses her of faking — she speaks in the Black language patterns she grew up with. In fact, Holliday’s data shows that Black women have a much wider pitch and frequency range than other people — particularly in emotionally charged situations.
This, in linguistic terms, is perhaps where Trump’s audience finds justification for the idea that Harris is “crazy.” “People hear her do things that to an average white listener would be described as emphatic,” Holliday says. “And then when they layer racist ideologies on top of that, you become ‘unhinged.'”
The pitch variations Holliday studied are: terribly hard to fake; Meryl Streep wins Oscars for a reason. That’s why Holliday has used a new methodology to analyze Harris’ speech patterns. In 2022, she compared the way Harris speaks to audio clips from comedian Maya Rudolph while doing her Harris impersonation on “Saturday Night Live.” What, Holliday wondered, could we learn from Rudolph’s spot-on impersonation?
The comparison is particularly apt. Much of the research on African American English focuses on younger people, or poorer people. But Rudolph is not only a gifted impressionist; she’s also a demographic match for Harris. As Holliday notes, the two women are about the same age, and each has one black parent and one non-black parent.
In clip after clip, Holliday found, Rudolph had Harris’ speech pattern down pat but exaggerated it for comic effect. Her low-to-high rise on the That in “I was that girl” is more ruminative, for example. In her “I’m also America’s cool aunt” joke, she hits the sentence-beginning falsetto on the I amand the L+H* accent on That of America. Almost everything Harris does, Rudolph does, but even more. Rudolph does the falsetto technique twice as often as Harris, Holliday discovered.
Holliday also delved into the various influences that shaped Harris’s accent. She didn’t study the Native American features of Harris’s vocal patterns, because she felt that the Asian American community that surrounded Harris as a child was too small to have much linguistic impact. But to look for signs of Harris’s California upbringing, as well as her time at Howard, Holliday studied thousands of individual sentences she used in the 2020 debates. In many cases, she found that Harris has a classic California Vowel Shift: when she makes an “oo” sound and an “oa” sound, as in “cool” and “goat,” they are produced more forward in the mouth, in linguistic jargon.
In other ways, Harris deviates from the California Vowel Shift. For example, many Californians pronounce the words “cot” and “caught” the same, as homonyms. Harris does not. Nor does she pronounce “pin” and “pen” the same — what linguists call an African American Vowel Shift. When Holliday looked for 28 standard features of African American English in Harris’s syntax — things like replacing is not for have notor say finna for I’m going to — Harris didn’t do it each In other words, you can take the girl out of California, but you can’t take California out of the girl.
Holliday found that Harris does use some features of African American English. She omits the copula, the to-be verb, for the vernacular words must And go(“Dude gotta go,” referring to Trump, was a catchphrase for a while.) And every now and then she says I’m goingas in “I’m gonna let you finish.” But here the roots of Harris’ identity are harder to parse, because those elements of African American English also spread through general pop culture. What part of Harris’ heritage or history is she drawing on when she uses these constructions?
Holliday thinks these practices are “camouflaged” — recognized as informal political speech by all audiences, but also coded as a signal of shared identity for black audiences. Like any politician, Harris wants to reach as many audiences as possible. That’s how you get votes.
“Every politician in history has done it,” Holiday says. “The fact that people have different styles is not an indication of inauthenticity. The problem is that when people perceive it as inauthentic, that can be politically damaging. When your styles are being scrutinized across the country — including people who are not doing it in good faith — that’s another layer.”
And therein lies the real rub. As a multiethnic woman, Harris faces an assault on her identity unlike any other presidential candidate in history. When Trump and his surrogates describe her as an undeserving “DEI hire” and use her speech patterns to mock her as a fake, they take a centuries-old tradition of racial hatred to a whole new level. Holliday’s work exposes the lie of Trump’s twisted and pernicious ideas about what makes us who we are.
“We become ourselves in the space that we live in,” Holliday says. “I don’t think Harris is being fake. I think she’s just inhabited a lot of spaces.”
Adam Rogers is a senior correspondent at Business Insider.
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