The Cost of Code-Switching

An indictment of the racial terror that code-switching has wreaked upon people of color for centuries—and a vision for linguistic justice

What is it like to be taught that the language that raised you is unworthy of the classroom and the workplace? To be trained to switch in and out of yourself at will for bodily, social, and psychological survival? To be hypervigilant, shameful, and fearful of the costs of your own authentic voice? And how can we begin the work of refusing double-consciousness as an inevitable inheritance? Of alchemizing our twoness into powerful integrated selves that are watchful of the threat of white supremacy, but unbound by its laws?

Jamila Lyiscott grapples with these questions and offers the journey of awakening to the deep psychological, spiritual, and emotional wounds inflicted by code-switching. Rather than the widely accepted view of code-switching as a benign survival skill or a path to upward mobility, she compels readers to understand code-switching as upholding racial and linguistic hierarchies, unveiling its history of racism and colonial violence, and instead offering the powerful possibility of a world where we can be free from the surveillance of whiteness that occurs through language. Lyiscott journeys through a series of eye-opening experiences, from her childhood Caribbean-American home in Brooklyn, NY, where a rich tapestry of language and culture raised her, to the streets of Soweto, where Black children lost their lives in their fight for linguistic justice, to classrooms across the US, where teachers are stifled by curricular mandates that limit the power of student voices.

The Cost of Code-Switching argues for the healing of what Jamila Lyiscott calls Black Fragmentation—the spiritual, mental, and emotional fissures that result from switching in and out of home languages and cultures to survive white supremacy. Together, we learn that code-switching does not innocently permit us to move from one equally regarded language into another. Rather, it involves conditioning about who is barbaric and who is sanctified, who is delinquent and who is standard, who is professional and who is ratchet.