Karine Jean-Pierre refused to answer a question about Vice President Kamala Harris’ speaking voice Tuesday from Fox News’ White House correspondent, deriding the inquiry as “ridiculous.”
At Tuesday’s daily press briefing, Peter Doocy, the cable network’s White House correspondent since 2021, asked Jean-Pierre: “Since when does the vice president have what sounds like a Southern accent?”
The press secretary immediately let the Fox reporter know: “I have no idea what you are talking about.”
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“She was talking about unions in Detroit using one tone of voice,” Doocy said. “She used the same line in Pittsburgh and it sounded like she at least had some kind of a Southern drawl.”
The uproar appears to have started after a post from the Trump campaign’s account on X, formerly Twitter, which posted side-by-side videos from the rallies in Detroit and Pittsburgh.
“You better thank a union member for sick leave, you better thank a union member for paid leave, you better thank a union member for vacation time,” Harris yelled to applause while speaking before union workers at a Detroit high school.
“Thank unions for sick leave, thank unions for paid family leave, thank unions for your vacation time,” Harris said in Pittsburgh—in a slightly less animated speech after traveling over 200 miles between the two cities.
“Do you think Americans seriously think that this is an important question?” the incredulous press secretary asked Doocy. “I’m not even going to entertain some question about… it’s just, hearing it sounds so ridiculous.”
“The question is just insane,” Jean-Pierre added.
Doocy pressed on, asking Jean-Pierre, “Is that how she talks in meetings here?” The press secretary immediately called on another reporter.
Harris was raised in Berkeley, California, and Montreal, Canada, before attending Howard University in Washington, D.C.—one of the premier historically Black colleges and universities in the country.
Although she is not from the South, Black culture in the Bay Area was heavily influenced by the region. Over 3 million Black Southerners left the region during the second phase of the Great Migration, according to the National Archives, and many ended up in the Bay Area.
African-American Vernacular English was first recognized as a separate language in the same region. The Oakland Unified School District approved AAVE as a second language in 1996, and scholars have since written extensively on the differences between it and standard American English.
The well documented linguistic phenomenon of “code switching” might also explain the small differences in Harris’ accent.
“Many of us subtly, reflexively change the way we express ourselves all the time,” wrote NPR’s Gene Demby in a blog post that launched the popular podcast “Code Switch,” which has run since 2013. “We’re hop-scotching between different cultural and linguistic spaces and different parts of our own identities—sometimes within a single interaction.”
However, the phenomenon has stumped right-wingers for years, inducing outrage from former Fox host Tucker Carlson, who made similar comments about former President Barack Obama’s accent while he was still running for office in 2007.
But it’s not the first time the Trump campaign has zeroed in on Harris’ accent, calling it out after her star-studded rally in Atlanta, which featured major Black artists including Quavo and Megan Thee Stallion.
