Not entirely sure this is relevant, but I’m going to leave this Washington Post article right right here — and I do so respectfully as I used a John McWhorter quote to open my “Shaun King is Terrible for America” article. (I won’t even get into King’s code-switching, as he was raised by two white parents and presented fairly “white” until his teenage years.) The headline is telling:
Also, AOC left the Bronx for the posh suburbs of Yorktown Heights at age 5. Did she pick up the “code” to “switch” from by then? Serious question, as I generally have no problem with code-switching. I often pick up a bad Southern drawl hanging around Texans (my mom is from San Antonio), Georgians, and/or watching “Steel Magnolias.” But that’s not “code switching” and I would dial it back in front of an audience. And AOC isn’t black; her heritage is Peurto Rican.
Essentially, lingering facts like these remain: Nearly 90% of the people in Yorktown Heights, where AOC went through K-12 schooling, are white collar — and more than 90% are white. So I’m not sure her “linguistic repertoire and environment” was what Mr. McWhorter and many other pundits like him think it was, unless she was taking two hours of buses and trains each way to the Bronx every weekend. It’s not a “conspiracy” by the right-wing to point that out, but just a simple fact her Bronx roots she’s constantly playing up aren’t necessarily true, such as when she Tweets, “I’m still Alex from the Bronx.”