‘I shouldn’t have to do that’: City Council hopeful describes codeswitching on the campaign trail

CALGARY — When Courtney Walcott speaks, it’s not with the voice he chose.

“If I speak in what I would consider to be my natural vernacular, what I grew up with, people didn’t respect me the same way. They didn’t respond to what I was saying. They didn’t engage with me,” said Walcott.

The teacher turned city council candidate grew up in a low-income home in Toronto. As he grew up, he learned to change his speech just to get people to listen.

“If you want to simply put it, make your life easier, sometimes it’s better to hide who you are to survive. And that’s that conflict, I shouldn’t have to do that.”

Now — he doesn’t codeswitch anymore and feels as though he lost a language.

“Sometimes it’s a bit of an identity crisis when you think back on it and the things we do to survive,” he said.

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Studies have shown that people automatically associate certain accents with certain personality traits.

“Their judgements of their personalities would change completely so we definitely get strong messages about all aspects of identity from the way people speak,” said Naomi Nagy, a linguistics professor at the University of Toronto.

“The quality of my thought, the quality of my idea, the quality of my presentation should speak for itself,” said Walcott.

Walcott knows he’s not alone in feeling this way, especially as we hit campaign season in Calgary and across the country.

“I can only imagine what it must be like, to say, for example, be a Black woman who has to both codeswitch but deal with the conflicts of gender in the same fight.”

He points to an interaction he had six years ago.

“I was in a university classroom and that is what was being presented to me, is that Black English is fundamentally educated as being unprofessional. And it was at that moment it was like ‘oh, shouldn’t we be teaching people to accept the quality of discussion that’s happening in front of them and not just the medium with which it’s presented?’”