Last week Representative Jasmine Crockett of Tomments she made about her state’s governor, Greg Abbott. “Y’all know we got Governor Hot Wheels down there, come on now,” she said at a Human Rights Campaign event, “and the only thing hot about him is that he is a hot-ass mess, honey!”
Crockett, a Democrat, has come in for a good deal of flak from critics on the right who accuse her of affecting salty Black speech patterns to get attention. After all, those critics point out, she’s an educated person, a successful lawyer, who has on many other occasions relied on standard English and a more reserved speaking style. That criticism, however, misconstrues the way Black Americans speak. We tend to have a two-pole speech repertoire, one for the public at large and one for our own community, as I have argued here about Kamala Harris and others.
Martin Luther King was duly famous for the power and polish of his rhetoric. Yet in the book, “The Word of the Lord is Upon Me: The Righteous Performance of Martin Luther King, Jr.,” the sociologist Jonathan Rieder notes, “Within his circle of Black friends and colleagues, King indulged in vulgar, ungrammatical, racial, lewd, and street talk” — even using the N-word when joshing around with his colleague, Andrew Young.
It wasn’t strange or fake when King code-switched, and it’s not strange or fake when Crockett does it, either. The difference is that King was not given to using the “street” ways of talking in public. Few public figures were, back in the days of fedoras and dances with numbered steps. Today, people speak more informally in all arenas, and part of that way of talking is trash talk.
Political insults used to be different. Theodore Roosevelt once wrote of President Benjamin Harrison, “He is a coldblooded, narrow-minded, prejudiced, obstinate, timid old psalm-singing politician.” Compare that to President Trump calling Representative Adam Schiff “little Adam Schitt,” or Trump’s aide-de-camp Steven Cheung calling Gov. Ron DeSantis a “desperate eunuch.” Roosevelt’s takedown was the verbal equivalent of a crystal goblet. Trump’s and Cheung’s are used Dixie Cups.
I suppose that means Crockett is the new normal. She got personal when she criticized Byron Donalds, a congressman who is Black and married to a white woman. Crockett referred to Donalds and other Black conservatives as “skinfolk who definitely are not our kinfolk.” Performative, yes. A little “Desperate Housewives,” even; I almost imagine Donalds responding by splashing his drink in her face. But this tone is now, for better or worse, common in our public spaces. It got that way bit by bit over the past few decades. I considered it a major crack in the plaster in 2004 when Dick Cheney suggested to Senator Patrick Leahy that he commit an impossible sexual act. And here we are.
What set hairs on fire last week wasn’t that Crockett disparaged someone. The problem was that the man she called “Governor Hot Wheels” is paralyzed from the waist down, and therefore uses a wheelchair. Crockett went even further with the physical ridicule, saying the governor was not “hot.” Crockett’s defense, that the reference to wheels was about “the planes, trains and automobiles he used to transfer migrants into communities led by Black mayors,” is creative but hopeless. She was mocking someone for a physical incapacity that shapes his entire life, as well as for aspects of appearance that one cannot control.
Don’t give her a pass for sounding “authentic.” President Trump’s physical mocking of a disabled reporter was one of his most revolting public moments. Nor should the rules of civility be different because someone occupies a less powerful position, or is Black, or is a Black woman and is therefore “punching up.” Claiming to be exempt from the rules of fair play will only feed the racial resentment and retribution that is driving our nation’s politics right now.
Public debate need not, and probably should not, be a cotillion. Michelle Obama may want to “go high,” but maybe these days we need to go more like middle. Even lower middle. “Governor Hot Wheels,” however, is the kind of thing adults teach their kids not to do.
Genuine? Colloquial? Funny? On fire? Great — bring it on. But not “Ha ha, you’re in a wheelchair!” even if the audience is loving it. That isn’t speaking truth to power. It’s hitting way below the belt and helping bring our standards of civic exchange ever lower than they already are.
John McWhorter (@JohnHMcWhorter) is an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University. He is the author of “Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter: Then, Now and Forever” and, most recently, “Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.” @JohnHMcWhorter
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