She Crossed a Line That Even the Saltiest Speech Should Avoid

Last week Representative Jasmine Crockett of Texas landed in the hot seat for comments 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.