Code-switching and why your're tired
At the end of a relatively calm day at my college, I can still feel tired. I used to wonder about this: “Why I am I so tired?” as I fall onto the couch and reach out my left hand to grab the television remote. At the same time, my right hand picks up my phone while I wait for Netflix to launch, and I open a food delivery app to have Thai food sent to my apartment. In the next 2 hours, I will only get up once to open the door to the delivery driver. Why am I so tired? And if you are a parent, and reading this on your phone while you feed someone else, then you are even more tired than I am. It took me a while to figure out why -- in a day that was relatively free of crisis and drama --- I would still come home exhausted. It was my first year or so of doing administrative work, and I thought that fatigue came from transitioning from a teaching schedule to a nine-to-five office schedule. Or perhaps it was the commute which doubled when I started working nine-to-five. It was only after a year, and seeing this video from Key & Peele and their bit on Barack Obama’s “Anger Translator” that I understood why.
Watching Jordan Peele play Obama, I saw what I felt most days: the conscious movements of emotional restraint that make a human face a mask. What was making me tired was code-switching. And, what was providing a cathartic release was watching the Anger Translator freely embody the feelings we cannot always say.
Code-switching (what it is, how it is defined, who uses it) is controversial. For NPR’s aptly titled program “Code Switch” it’s defined this way: “In one sense, code-switching is about dialogue that spans cultures. It evokes the conversation we want to have here.
Linguists would probably quibble with our definition. (The term arose in linguistics specifically to refer to mixing languages and speech patterns in conversation.)” My zeal to write a blog post about code-switching showed my naïveté (“Hey Paige and Tina -- I’ll write about code switching!), and a few hours’ research to find a simple definition taught me how ignorant I really was. So, what should I say? I will use a story from a colleague in an English department who serves as department chair:
“When someone asks me a question (at work), I have to think: why are they asking me this? What’s the context? What’s their motivations? And what should I say to respond to their question so I get the best outcome. I have to think all this before I even open my mind! It’s exhausting.”
Rather than discuss what it is, I would like to share another experience: how it feels to do it all the time. Code-switching compromises our ability to provide authentic expression when we need it. This is not the same as repressing emotional statements that can be harmful, rather code switching is the conscious selection of different words or phrases in order to provide linguistic credentials in the workplace. To say, in short: I am qualified. We are exhausted from it because beneath the need to find the right word or phrase is a lingering anxiety (for some, fear) that we may not belong in this academic workplace. For some, what we battle daily is the need to demonstrate our basic qualifications with our speech. Even though we are more than qualified.
But what offers me hope and moments of amusement and humor is when another WOC and I can lock eyes and not codeswitch, but speak to each other with an invisible language of comfort and community. We lock eyes and say, wordlessly: I got you.