What Maya Rudolph's impression reveals about Kamala Harris

It didn't take long for Donald Trump to play the race card on Kamala Harris. Only days after she became her party's presumptive nominee for president, Trump declared that her racial identity was nothing but an act. "I didn't know she was Black until a number of years ago, when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black," he told the National Association of Black Journalists. "So, I don't know, is she Indian or is she Black?"

Racist? Sure. But on a deeper level, Trump was calling into question the vice president's authenticity and truthfulness. In this construction, Harris is a phony — someone who uses her race for personal gain. To Trump, the way she presents herself through multiple lenses — the Indian and Jamaican ancestry of her parents, her upbringing in California, her education at a historically Black university — is just some DEI grift.

Nicole Holliday knew this was going to happen. A sociolinguist at UC Berkeley, Holliday specializes in how people construct their social identities through the way they speak. She had studied the way Barack Obama crafted his biracial image through political speech, and when Harris ran for president in 2020 Holliday understood that she presented a persona unlike any other candidate. Years before the MAGA knives came out for Harris, Holliday set out to study how the vice president speaks — and what her linguistic patterns reveal about her racial identity.

Like anyone, Harris' speech patterns and pronunciation come from where she spent her formative years and who she spent them with. Harris is a self-described "daughter of Oakland, California" who grew up in the Bay Area, spent time in Montreal, and went to college at Howard University. That's a familiar American story, but it means Harris exhibits a combination of a California accent and what linguists like Holliday often refer to as African American English.

To study Harris' pitch, Holliday collected audio clips from debates during the 2020 primaries. The results were revealing. When Harris criticized her future running mate Joe Biden for his positions on school integration and busing, for instance, she famously ended an anecdote about a little girl who had benefited from those policies by saying "that little girl was me." On the word that, Harris' pitch had a noticeable fall, followed by a rise. That low-to-high shift, in linguistic notation, is called an L+H* pitch accent. And it has different meanings in African American English versus the Mainstream US English more likely spoken by white folks. (Don't @ me: These are the terms linguists use.)

"White people only have that when they're doing contrastive things," Holliday explains. "You get this L+H* when they're trying to correct you. But Black speakers across the United States just put it all over the place. It doesn't mean contrast." So when white people unfamiliar with African American English hear that rise and fall, they think the speaker is being kind of argumentative. "The rises and falls happen in places that are unexpected for your average white listener," Holliday says, "so they try to make sense of it using the way they would talk." How "Black" Harris sounds, in other words, is in the ear of the beholder.

Another element of Harris' accent that gets heard differently is called a "phrase-initial falsetto" — a little squeak she often uses at the beginning of a sentence. When that sentence starts with I, something self-referential, it can sound to folks unfamiliar with Black speaking patterns as if Harris is contradicting them: "No! You're not the one. I am." But that, Holliday says, is not what Harris is doing. What she's actually doing, in a completely authentic way, is what Trump accuses her of faking — she's speaking in the Black linguistic patterns she grew up around. Holliday's data, in fact, shows that Black women have a much wider pitch and frequency range than other folks — particularly in emotionally charged situations.

This, in linguistic terms, may be where Trump's audience finds justification for the idea that Harris is "crazy." "People are hearing her do these things that could be described as emphatic to an average white listener," Holliday says. "And if they're overlaying racist ideologies on top of that, that's where you get to 'unhinged.'"

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Those pitch variations Holliday studied are very hard to fake; Meryl Streep wins Oscars for a reason. Which is why Holliday deployed a novel methodology to analyze Harris's speech pattern. In 2022, she compared the way Harris talks to audio clips of the comedian Maya Rudolph doing her impression of Harris on "Saturday Night Live." What, Holliday wondered, could we learn from Rudolph's spot-on mimicry?

The comparison is particularly apt. A lot of research on African American English focuses on younger people, or poorer ones. But not only is Rudolph a gifted impressionist, she's also a demographic match for Harris. As Holliday notes, the two women are roughly the same age, and both have one Black and one non-Black parent.

In clip after clip, Holliday found, Rudolph nailed Harris' speech pattern, but exaggerated it for comic effect. Her low-to-high rise on the that in "I was that girl" is peakier, for instance. In her "I'm also America's cool aunt" joke, she hits the phrase-initial falsetto on the I'm, and the L+H* accent on America's. Just about anything Harris does, Rudolph does, too, but more so. Rudolph actually does the falsetto thing twice as often as Harris, Holliday found.

Holliday also delved into the diverse influences that shaped Harris' accent. She didn't study the Indian features of Harris' vocal patterns, because she felt the Asian American community surrounding Harris as a child was too small to have much of a linguistic impact. But to look for signs of Harris' Californian upbringing, as well as her time at Howard, Holliday studied thousands of individual phrases she used in the 2020 debates. In many cases, she found that Harris has a classic California Vowel Shift — when she makes an "oo" sound and "oa" sound, like in "cool" and "goat," they're produced more forward in the mouth, in linguistic parlance.

In other areas, Harris deviates from the California Vowel Shift. Many Californians, for example, pronounce the words "cot" and "caught" the same, as homonyms. Harris does not. Neither does she pronounce "pin" and "pen" the same — what's known among linguists as an African American Vowel Shift. In fact, when Holliday went looking for 28 standard features of African American English in Harris' syntax — stuff like substituting ain't for have not, or saying finna for I'm fixing to — Harris didn't do any of it. In other words, you can take the girl out of California, but you can't take the California out of the girl.

Holliday found that Harris does use some features of African American English. She'll leave out the copula, the to-be verb, in front of the vernacular words gotta and gonna. ("Dude gotta go," referring to Trump, was a catchphrase for a while.) And she occasionally says I'mma, as in "I'mma let you finish." But here's where the roots of Harris' identity are harder to parse, because those elements of African American English are also spread through general pop culture. So what part of Harris' heritage or history is she drawing on when she uses those constructions?

Holliday thinks those usages are "camouflaged" — recognized as informal political speech by all audiences, but also coded as a signal of shared identity for Black audiences. Like every politician, Harris wants to connect to as many audiences as possible. That's how you get votes.

"Every politician throughout history does it," Holiday says. "The fact that people have different styles is not an indication of inauthenticity. The issue is that when people perceive it as inauthentic, then that can be politically damaging. When your styles are scrutinized by the entire country — including people who are not doing it in good faith — that is another layer."

And therein lies the real rub. As a multiethnic woman, Harris is facing an assault on her identity unlike any other presidential nominee in history. When Trump and his surrogates describe her as an undeserving "DEI hire," and use her speech patterns to mock her as inauthentic, they're taking an age-old tradition of race-baiting to a whole new level. Holliday's work puts the lie to Trump's warped and pernicious ideas about what makes us who we are.

"We become ourselves in the space we inhabit," Holliday says. "I don't think Harris is inauthentic. I think she's just inhabited a lot of spaces."

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Adam Rogers is a senior correspondent at Business Insider.