At a time when increasing numbers of serious public figures are going to be using Black English as an element in their oratorical palette, it’s high time we wised up on the likes of “Ain’t nothing wrong with that.” The criticism of these sentences uttered by someone trying to connect with a black audience is evidence of an ignorance about the nature and use of one of the most interesting developments in America’s linguistic history-an endlessly fascinating dialect too often treated as a collection of mistakes, an albatross condemning unlucky people to failure, or some kind of performance. John Cardillo of Newsmax tweeted, “In case you’re wondering, this is what blackface sounds like,” while Ryan Saavedra of The Daily Wire charged that Ocasio-Cortez, in this speech, “speaks in an accent that she never uses.” Lawrence Jones, a Fox News contributor and black American, shared a Twitter hashtag, #WedontTalkLikeThat. Ain’t nothing wrong with that,” she said, also stretching “wrong” out a bit and intoning in a way sometimes referred to as a “drawl,” but which is also part of the Black English tool kit. The supposed offense occurred when she spoke to the Reverend Al Sharpton’s National Action Network last week and sprinkled some elements of Black English into her speech. Apparently, the new representative of some of the most multiethnic neighborhoods in the United States has engaged in “verbal blackface.” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been accused of a lot, but the latest charge is especially piquant.

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