As the presidential election gets closer and polls show former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris in a tight race, conservative pundits are testing out a new line of attack on Harris.
At a White House press briefing on Tuesday, Fox News’ Peter Doocy asked press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre why Harris has “what sounds like a Southern accent.”
Jean-Pierre quickly shot down Doocy’s question and moved on, but conservative pundits are still treating Doocy’s premise — that Harris, who was born in Northern California, is using a fake accent — as a national incident.
“HARRIS SLAMMED FOR ‘FAKE ACCENT’ IN DETROIT SPEECH,” Fox Business blasted in a chyron.
“Kamala Harris rallies across the country repeating same speech in different accents,” read one Fox News headline .
“Kamala was raised by an Indian mother in Canada, but now she sounds like Fani Willis,” Fox News’ Jesse Watters said on Tuesday night , referring to the district attorney of Fulton County, Georgia, who is a Black woman.
What Harris is doing on the campaign trail is called code-switching: the practice of changing your tone and syntax depending on your audience. It’s not a new phenomenon and is not just for politicians. Black people and other marginalized groups often code-switch in order to connect culturally with their own communities.
But conservatives are instead accusing Harris, who identifies as both Black and Indian, of faking an accent as another way to question her identity. They’re trying to portray her as a fraudster who is only pretending to be Black.
It’s the same strategy that Trump deployed in a widely panned interview at the National Association of Black Journalists convention last month. “I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago, when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black,” he said . “So, I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?”
His running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), who has mixed-race children, defended Trump and claimed he was just trying to say that Harris is a chameleon .
But conservatives who are trying to use Harris’ ability to code-switch as a line of attack are feigning ignorance. It’s something presidential hopefuls of various backgrounds and political ideologies have deployed during their campaigns. For example, former President George W. Bush used cowboy rhetoric to endear himself to Republican voters during his time in office, and in 2016, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) spoke in Spanish and touted his use of “Spanglish” at a meet-and-greet in the Bronx, New York.
The dustup is also reminiscent of how conservative media treated the first Black president.
In 2007, as a senator from Illinois, Barack Obama delivered a speech, largely using Black dialect, to a mostly Black audience in Hampton, Virginia. In the speech, he talked about the federal response to Hurricane Katrina and racism. When Obama ran for president the following year, the media covered the speech — but it was during his reelection campaign in 2012 that conservative pundits made a big deal of it.
The Daily Caller ran a video of the full speech, saying it revealed new, “inflammatory” comments.
Tucker Carlson, then working at the Daily Caller, took credit for breaking the story.
“This accent is absurd. This is not the way Obama talks,” Carlson told Sean Hannity on a Fox News appearance . “At least, it is not the way he has talked in the dozens, the scores of speeches I have watched him give, or public appearances as I’ve seen him make. This is a put-on. This is phony.”
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