On this week's episode of Basic Black, host Chris Collins is joined by four guests to look at code-switching: an adjustment to one's behavior, speech, or appearance in different spaces and places. When W.E.B. Dubois wrote The Souls of Black Folk, he called code-switching the duality or double-consciousness of Black people living in two worlds. But code-switching is also important to those entering different spaces, for survival and well-being, i.e. “The Talk.” However, in this time of racial reckoning and many people using the term “authentically Black and openly Black” (as journalist Don Lemon did), are people of color feeling more comfortable with expressing themselves — their full and whole selves — in a new and bold way? And what, if any, are the consequences of doing that?

Guests include Dr. Dericka Canada Cunningham, a licensed psychologist in Massachusetts and the Multicultural Specialist for Counseling and Health Services at Salem State University; Dr. Stephanie Batiste, an Associate Professor of English, Black studies, Comparative Literature, Theater and Dance at the University of California, Santa Barbara; Phillip Martin, Senior Investigative Reporter, GBH News Center for Investigative Reporting; and Susan X Jane, Principal at Navigators Consulting with over 25 years of experience working in the field of culture, diversity and inclusion.

When asked how code-switching is destructive to people of color, Batiste says that, “It causes a lot of stress. It causes people really to retreat. It’s this idea that they have to fundamentally change how they speak and who they are.”

Martin provides a few examples of prominent Black public figures — including MSNBC’s Joy Reid, Mass. Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, and UCLA gymnast Nia Dennis — who are unapologetically bucking the trend of code-switching. “There are some people who will never apologize," he says. "Joy Reid: assertively Black. And she’s not going back… Code-switching is a form of survival, but I think it is very different than what it was in the 60s, 70s, from decades ago, or for that matter, years ago.”

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