Code-Switching explored through Boots Riley’s Horror-Comedy Sorry to Bother You (2018)
By Abhimanyu Sharma
Film as a medium comes with varied crucial responsibilities. Its profound impact on culture increases exponentially with the onset of the age of media, making content accessible to anyone with a tablet and an internet connection. Consequently, filmmakers capitalize on the medium's reach, more often than not weaving in commentary on contemporary society and its intersections with race, class, caste, gender, and sexuality in their content and thereby making it a cultural product. Living in a globalized world comes with its challenges, such as balancing cultural and media representation to avoid a hegemony of any one culture. Although contemporary society is still very much balancing an otherwise western hegemonized world order, be it in cultural norms or media and news representation. Boots Riley makes judicious use of the filmic medium in his film Sorry to Bother You (2018) to recreate a meditation on the subject of the use of assimilation and "code-switching" by people of color in work environments to gain class mobility in a capitalistic system. One that values and rewards "performative whiteness," which inadvertently contributes to cultural erasure and the heralding of whiteness. The film explores the intricacies of the role that accents and linguistics play in mobility in a capitalist system by focusing on a Black telemarketer, whose livelihood depends solely on his ability to appeal to customers, only using his voice to sell products. It comments on cultural linguistics while showcasing western ethnocentrism, i.e., evaluating other cultures according to preconceptions originating in one's own culture's standards and customs. Riley further relates this to how contemporary society is systemically designed to benefit those that already possess the desired "white" mannerisms.
Thematically, the film addresses subjects of race, class/class mobility, caste, gender, and sexuality by incorporating ‘code-switching’ to address the class and racial mobility. Riley uses fantastical elements such as the use of the Equesapiens, which essentially proves to be a motif to critique the capitalist regime, i.e., the current world order. Janine Bradbury, an interdisciplinary scholar specialising in African American literature elaborates on the rising popularity of the genre ‘passing for white’ in Hollywood, "The genre was popular in the 1940s and 50s when segregation was rife and the ‘one-drop rule’ – which deemed anybody with even a trace of African ancestry to be black – prevailed.” Box-office hits included Elia Kazan's Pinky (1949) and George Sidney’s musical Show Boat (1951), which featured light-skinned, mixed race characters who passed as white in the hopes of enjoying the privileges whiteness confers." (Bradbury). Bradbury dates back the genre to early 1950s Hollywood, although she still accounts for its new context with the current political climate. She critiques the genre for overlooking questions of colorism, treating racial identity as rigid and fixed, and not accounting for the complexities of the mixed-race experience.
The character of Cassius Green makes use of a white voice in order to be able to seem relatable and friendly to the customer on the other end. Writer and cultural critic Touré (born Touré Neblett) explains this phenomenon in an article for The Guardian. “Cassius ‘Cash’ Green, a low-level telemarketer, learns that in order to succeed at work he has to put on a white voice. This does not mean a nasal affectation along the lines of that -voice stereotype that mid-level Black comedians do. It means putting into your voice the ease that white privilege brings. It means sounding as if you are entitled to the good life. It means feeling calm way down in your soul. It means never having to be afraid someone will call the police on you just because you're breathing.” (Touré)
Touré further sums up the privilege of the white mannerisms that establish familiarity and lead to upward mobility in society and work environments; it is essentially the reason that a suit and a tie is considered the norm for business aesthetics. The norm defines what society accepts as an appropriate representation for the setting; then why do we not use kurta-pajamas, saris, boubou, kanzu, dashiki, kimonos instead of the suits, ties, and skirts? Consequently, assimilation raises concerns of forced systemic institutionalized erasure of a person's cultural heritage and identity to make them more "appealable" to the workplace and, in turn, more palatable to the larger society. In an article for The Odyssey, Melissa Banbow further stresses the aspect of western hegemony over cultural assimilation: “I say, unequivocally, that to deny a people, any people, of their right to style their hair and bodies as their ancestors have done is to deny them their right to practice their cultural traditions, and is thereby a continuation of colonialism via the practice of cultural hegemony. The suggestion that one's style of dress is potentially 'distracting' or 'unkempt' is explicit ignorance and an insinuation that the cultures of the peoples of the so-called third world are not ‘professional’.” (Banbow)
If we go back to a time before political correctness and let racism hide in the shadows, the words used to refer to countries who do not traditionally wear Levi jeans and t-shirts (made of cotton picked by African slaves) would be backward, uncivilized, and barbaric. Cultural superiority is very much alive within corporate America and pervades not only the cubicles of this country but every aspect of our global and cosmopolitan culture. In response to the decision of including the literary narrative around code switching in telemarketing stemming from his own past experiences, Riley mentions in an interview with The Guardian, "You'd try to obscure the fact that you're black, just on the very basic level of trying to make someone feel like you're like them, and on the more racist level of someone being OK giving you their credit card information."
A.T. McWilliams, a published essayist on social justice and racial equity, provides insight into the phenomenon and history of code-switching: “Thanks to the breakout film, code-switching has re-emerged in America’s racial discourse. When Einar Haugen introduced the term in 1954, he sought to describe the fluid nature with which multilingual people moved between languages. Since then, the term has expanded to capture how individuals adjust all forms of communication and expression based on their audience.” (McWilliams) He essentially argues about the tragedy of assimilation that is highlighted in the first half of the film, while also recognizing it as a tool for social mobility; which, in the case of Black people, is a necessity and a survival tactic in an age where Black lives are not valued as much until they possess white mannerisms and/or characteristics. McWilliams says, "From navigating job interviews to ingratiating oneself with clientele, there are countless reasons people of color code-switch in white spaces.” However, historically, code-switching has served as a defense against linguistic discrimination: a form of bias that is partially implicit. In one study, the psycholinguist Shiri Lev-Ari determined that we are "less likely to believe something if it is said with a foreign accent." Lev-Ari also found that trust decreases when exposed to non-native languages, meaning our brains are predisposed to unconscious linguistic discrimination. However, even for Black people who are native English speakers, dialectic discrimination abounds. For instance, during 1999 study, researcher and linguist John Baugh sought to test the severity of such discrimination. To do so, he called landlords across California to inquire about housing opportunities while alternating between "African American Vernacular English" (AAVE), "Chicano English," and "standard American English." In doing so, he found that in predominantly white areas of California such as Palo Alto, San Francisco, and Woodside, standard English resulted in more "confirmed appointments to view apartments advertised" by up to 50%. Therefore, in the search for modern essentials like housing, code-switching can provide access often denied to Black people (McWilliams). Police brutality, which has resulted in unarmed Black men being killed by police at 3.49 times the rate of unarmed white men, has rendered one's Blackness a perpetual signifier of danger. To date, Black people have been killed by police for walking to their apartment, carrying a toy gun, staring, and many other harmless acts too ordinary to be worthy of death. When Black people are killed for simply being themselves, code-switching presents itself as self-protection (McWilliams).
Consequently, it becomes explicitly clear that rather than criticizing the phenomenon of code-switching, one should scrutinize and critique the circumstances and the conditions under which it takes place. In an article in The Economist, ‘The Cost of An Accent’, the author provides instances of the genuine lingual bias that exists and affects actual living conditions and opportunities presented to an individual. In one of the studies referenced in the article, the author mentions Kelly Wright, a graduate student at the University of Michigan who carried out a similar study. Ms. Wright is the daughter of a German mother and an African-American Cherokee father raised in Knoxville, Tennessee, and has a native command of Black, standard American, and southern white accents. She made recordings of all three accents and had a group of 340 subjects rate the person they heard. Speaking in her Black accent, she was judged to be more "difficult" and "poor" than when she used the other two. The white accent was considered the most "pleasant", "educated", "attractive", "confident", "trustworthy" and "rich". The southern accent scored between the two on most of the rankings. She inferred that sounding southern and white costs you a bit; sounding Black costs a lot. It only goes to reinforce the western cultural hierarchy rooted in systemic bias that exists in contemporary society, which often acts as a deterrent for the ones who deviate from the desired model. The concept of code switching is not isolated to the United States; in fact, the British discriminate on the basis of class and region in addition to race. British newspapers often report on studies of which accents sound the most pleasant or intelligent , which the most annoying or ill-educated. Ambitious people from outside the south-east are told to "lose their accents" if they want to do well ("The Cost of An Accent").
Writer and researcher Vaidehi Mujumdar, embraces the phenomenon and associates it to a reality of the evolving world's hybridity, which includes appreciating differences without assigning qualitative traits to them. In an article for The Guardian, she elaborates: “Code-switching is typically defined in linguistics as a mixing of languages and speech patterns in conversation. At any given time, my family speaks in at least three different languages – Marathi, English, and Hindi – simultaneously. It is so normal to engage in code-switching that I did not realize it happened so often until a friend pointed it out after having dinner with my extended family.” (Mujumdar) Sorry to Bother You highlights capitalism's role in assimilation, where we see Cassius Green adapt and bend his ideals for a bigger paycheck. He does not necessarily do so willingly but is motivated by improving his living conditions to get to the "bourgeoisie" level and be an appealing match for his love interest, Detroit. In Riley's film, the trade-off for a higher salary is cultural erasure, which perpetuates the norm of viewing global trade through a lens of western ethnocentrism, essentially proliferating a system designed to benefit certain traits over others, rather than meritocracy.
The film further comments on the othering that people of color experience in white spaces; in one scene, we find Lift taking Cash over to a party where he is then asked for his presumed gang life stories. After this, Lift badgers him into rapping for the white audience, despite Cash's repeated refusals. Eventually, Cash figures out what the crowd wants and begins to shout out the N-word, which gets the audience pumping. It is interesting to see the commentary on the commodification and appropriation of race and ethnicity while conveniently divorcing them from the individual, who is, in turn, marginalized and othered. Acclaimed New York Times writer, Greg Howard touches on the concept of "transcending race" and critiques it through the example of O.J. Simpson, "Simpson's story is that of a black man who came of age during the civil rights era and spent his entire adult life trying to "transcend race" — to claim that strange accolade bestowed on blacks spanning from Pelé to Prince to Nelson Mandela to Muhammad Ali. Which is to say, it is the story of a halfback trying, and failing, to outrun his own blackness."(Howard) He further elaborates on the problematic nature of shutting out one's identity and heritage to accommodate into white spaces, even if it is for upward mobility. Doing so perpetuates an expectation and a linguistically biased system: “What Simpson may not have recognized, though, is that the United States' history is a story of theft, and theft does not require cooperation. Talents you don't trade can be stolen through your silence, through your absence, or after your death. And once you've been marked as having "transcended race," the success you've earned in spite of white racism can be twisted into an example of white magnanimity. Muhammad Ali was a menace, a black fighter who engaged in psychological warfare with his opponents, changed his name after joining a black-supremacist sect and gave up the best years of his career in exile rather than killing for a country he decried as racist...Martin Luther King Jr., harassed by the F.B.I. and ultimately assassinated, is now deployed as a symbol of a nation that has achieved colorblindness. You can imagine the Barack Obama obituaries to come.” (Howard)
He draws parallels to Muhammad Ali and Martin Luther King Jr., both controversial figures who were vociferous in their commitment towards exposing the hypocrisy of racial transcendence during their lives, only to have their messages diluted and appropriated after their death. Consequently, Howard’s analysis of the treatment of several prominent Black figures highlights the probationary nature of racial transcendence in the U.S., specifically pointing to the infamous example of O.J. standing trial as a Black man, and not as O.J. Simpson.
Kat Chow, writer and one of the founding members of NPR’s Code Switch team, highlights the degree of racial animosity that can be traced as one of the causes for code-switching in her NPR article. Chow says, "Racial Resentment refers to a "moral feeling that Blacks violate such traditional American values as individualism and self-reliance," as defined by political scientists Donald Kinder and David Sears. Racial resentment reflects a tension between the egalitarian self-image of most white Americans and the anti-black effect. The 'racist,' after all, is a figure of stigma. Few people want to be one, even as they are inclined to believe the measurable disadvantages black people face are caused by something other than structural racism. Framing blacks as deficient and pathological offers a path out for those caught in that mental maze." (Chow). The phenomenon of racial resentment can lead to internalizing the hostile rhetoric of the abuser and result in an individual actively working towards performativity that is accepted by and catered towards the standards of "whiteness."
The latter half of the film focuses on critiquing the capitalist system and its exploitation of cheap labor, a symbolism ranging from the horrid extreme working and living conditions to dehumanization and categorization of the workers as second-class beings. Riley uses fantastical elements to represent the workers as the Equisapien, a horse-like human hybrid that is meant to be the future of labor. The Equisapien also acts as a symbol for Black body objectification, with phallic dialogues like "strong like a horse" and "hung like a horse". We see this when Lift is advocating for Cash to take the opportunity of playing the middleman to the horse-like human hybrid and their capitalistic masters. Consequently, by taking the transformation formula, Lift effectively creates a ‘manufactured Martin Luther King’ that would be in on the exploits of the hetero-white patriarchy. Furthermore, Lift tries to entice Green with the transformation, saying that he will have a "horse sized penis" (in addition to being the voice of an oppressed underclass). The film also addresses the intersections of class and gender in several key scenes. Jacob Oller, writer at The Hollywood Reporter, extrapolates this relationship in one particular scene, "When Green is unsure if the transformational drug had already dosed him, he asks Detroit if his penis has gotten bigger (rather than, say, if his face is a horse face) — because if there's anything that the world of Sorry to Bother You understands about the intersection about capitalism and masculinity, it's that both are about ego above all else." (Oller). One can also look at the Equisapiens as a representation of the "woke" laborers who are seen organizing and demanding justice through protests with Cash's help. We see this during the end credits of the film; it showcases the extent to which the system of capitalism can be exploitative and yield-oriented, where ethics and morality come second to profit. Similar themes can be observed within Detroit's character's literary design, who owns an art gallery entirely devoted to art exploring blaxploitation and the horrors of capitalism.
Interestingly, the ads running on TV shown in the film add further commentary, touching on issues of false advertising by conglomerates to propagate their agenda towards the oversaturation of content during the peak of the convergence era. Touré shines a light on society’s demand for content that shows human beings being humiliated, “In the film, there is a television show that has become phenomenally popular by airing footage of people being badly beaten up. A video of Cash – left bloody after a can hits him during a riot – goes viral. People in this film love to laugh at each other: there is a coarse tension between them that is connected to their economic situation."(Touré). As Greg Howard aptly puts it in his article on the lie of transcending race, "This country was built on the backs of black slaves whose lives and labor were stolen by their white masters. That theft created a caste system in which both groups of people could occupy the same spaces yet have completely different experiences: a white America and a black America. This was true in 1619, in 1865 and in 1947, when Simpson was born; it holds true today.”(Howard). Consequently, Sorry to Bother You uses its Black protagonist to show a striking interaction between race and class. The set up, akin to the real world, promises upward mobility to BIPOC individuals at the cost of assimilation. Inevitably, this is later revealed to be a facade that ultimately exists to perpetuate pre-existing power structures of western capitalism. The system is designed to essentially exploit free labor for profits from the disadvantaged communities within the US and the global south at large, further exacerbating inequities to maintain the status quo of these structures, which in turn, benefit a certain set of people at the cost of the ‘others’.
Citations:
1. “The Cost of an Accent.” The Economist, 4 Aug. 2018, p. 74(U.S.). Academic OneFile, link.galegroup.com.libproxy1.usc.edu/apps/doc/A548600851/AONE?u=usocal_main&si d=AONE&xid=d61310b7. Accessed 19 Apr. 2019.
2. Mujumdar, Vaidehi. “I Don't 'Code-Switch' to Hide My Identity. I 'Code-Switch' to Celebrate It | Vaidehi Mujumdar.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 31 Mar. 2015, www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/31/i-dont-code-switch-to-hide my-identity-i-code-switch-to-celebrate-it.
3. Bradbury, Janine. “'Passing for White': How a Taboo Film Genre Is Being Revived to Expose Racial Privilege.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 20 Aug. 2018, www.theguardian.com/film/2018/aug/20/passing-film-rebecca-hall-black-white-us rac.
4. McWilliams, A.T. “Sorry to Bother You, Black Americans and the Power and Peril of Code-Switching | AT McWilliams.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 25 July 2018, www.theguardian.com/film/2018/jul/25/sorry-to-bother-you-white-voice code-switching.
5. Fox, Killian. “Boots Riley: 'In Film, the More Personal You Get, the More Universal You Get'.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 25 Nov. 2018, www.theguardian.com/film/2018/nov/25/boots-riley-musician-director-sorry-to-bother you-interview.
6. Touré. “Sorry to Bother You: Is This the Most Shocking Anti-Capitalist Film Ever?” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 19 Aug. 2018, www.theguardian.com/film/2018/aug/19/sorry-to-bother-you-is-this-the-most-anti capitalist-film-ever
7. Benbow, Melissa. “Is Cultural Hegemony Business Professional?” The Odyssey Online, 28 Aug. 2017, www.theodysseyonline.com/corporate-america-and-the-erasure cultural-difference.
8. Oller, Jacob. “Dissecting 'Sorry to Bother You' and Its Surprise.” The Hollywood Reporter, 16 Apr. 2019, www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/sorry-bother-you ending-has-a-complicated-meaning-1127950.
9. Chow, Kat. “Model Minority Myth Once Again Used as a Racial Wedge Between Asians and Blacks”
10. Howard, Greg. “Why ‘Transcending Race’ Is a Lie”