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Code switching — or changing behavior and speech for others’ comfort — is often used by Black people and other racial groups in majority-white spaces.
"Professionals are done code switching" LinkedIn News

I must not have gotten the memo on this one, because that's not what I thought "code switching" meant. When the term was first coined in linguistics, some 70 years ago, it referred to a sort of blending of language in a single conversation; the sort of thing that multi-lingual people might do when speaking with other multi-lingual people. In popular usage, it's had a number of meanings, from the informal (but stable) blending of different languages generally spoken by people within immigrant communities to the habit of "when in Rome, speak as the Romans do," so to speak.

It's this last meaning that's become caught up in the Culture Wars. When I first encountered the term, it referred simply to tailoring one's speech to the audience that one was speaking to; within the context of culture or language. So the simple fact that most of us likely speak differently to family or friends than we do at work wouldn't qualify, but a person who spoke Hopi at home speaking English at work would. My initial understand of the term centered around commonality; people adopting the common language and speech patterns of a group to which they belonged, but did not spend all of their time with. And it made sense; as someone who lacked the ability to code switch when moving between the suburban world of my upbringing and the urban and rural worlds that most of my extended family inhabited, I feld the deficiency when it came to being understood. Conversations often featured a lot of "what?" and "say that again." When I first went to college, I attended a Historically Black University, and my lack of familiarity with the way many the other students spoke resulted in my having difficulty understanding people for about the first month. And since I was the odd person out, it was on me to learn to understand them, and not the other way around. Enough facility with their language patterns and specific syntax and vocabulary to be able to code switch would have been remarkably helpful that year, and so I immediately saw the utility of the concept.

But language is always in flux, and the meaning of words, especially in popular usage changes over time. So I don't doubt that code switching has taken on the meaning that LinkedIn News ascribes to it. I suspect it started in circles far outside of my own, however, and so I'm just now learning about the shift.

What's also interesting about it is the social aspect of the new definition. Because it's generally understood that everyone is the hero of their own story, what makes things interesting is who the villains are. Having grown up on the edges of suburban Chicagoland, I spoke in much the same way my peers did. And with a teacher for a mother, there was a strong emphasis on getting thinks right, as defined by my schoolwork. And so to a lot of people, I "sound White." While in family settings, it simply made me sound strange, when I went to college, it marked me as deliberately "inauthentic."  For many of the people I encountered the differing speech patterns of White and Black people were the result of nature, rather than nurture, and so for me to speak and behave as I did was considered an affectation, performed to benefit myself within White society. It marked me as "fraternizing with the enemy" as it were; a sign that I valued being thought of well by others over being true to myself. I suppose that I should have realized that this idea would have lingered long enough for it to find its way into conceptualizations of social justice; but, to be honest, while I find the evolution of language and the movement of concepts to be fascinating, I don't normally pay that close attention.

The idea that code switching is carried out "for others’ comfort" is a logical one, given the current social milieu. But it also has the effect of vilifying those "others," who are presented as too fragile and brittle to work with the idea that there are people different from them in the world. Here I find irony; isn't everyone after their own comfort? As a freshman at the Historically Black University that I mentioned earlier, the discomfort that my speech and mannerisms created was palpable. As was my discomfort at their response. That mutual discomfort quickly became mutual hostility. Looking back on it, going to war with my classmates over it seems fairly extreme. In my defense, I was 17; the philosophical side of me had yet to be conceived at that point. Now that I'm an old man, however, I see the neediness that both sides brought to the conflict, and the anger that arose when those needs were unmet.

LinkedIn News is tapping into an idea that Black people need to be accepted by the broader society around for them for who they are, as they are; Whites should be secure enough in their power and resources to tolerate harmless differences such as how people speak and relate to others. But even if I believed in "should," it's still a very different thing than "is." The thing that I learned from that first year of college is that power and security are not tied together. One may have one and lack the other. I was a lone student from a nameless suburb of Chicago, yet a substantial subset the other students I met treated me as a threat. Whether it was to the legitimacy of the way they spoke and acted, or to their chances of success in their post-college lives, I don't know. I didn't have the presence of mind at the time to ask. At the same time, I saw them as a threat. Despite the fact that my father had chosen the school for me, and I knew almost nothing about it prior to arriving, the idea of being around other Black people seemed like a welcome respite from the constant undercurrent of racial resentment that I'd been aware of since the second grade. When it turned out that I'd simply traded one sort of resentment for another, a need to be seen as valuable, at least in my own eyes, asserted itself, and I fought (because that's all I knew how to do at the time) to defend it. But eventually I leaned that the world owes me nothing; if I wanted to be valued, I had to do it myself, and not ask anyone else's permission, or for external markers. But that's a hard enough task as an individual. Cultures and populations, I think, have a much harder time of it.