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?

Jamila Lyiscott grapples with these questions and offers readers the journey of awakening the wounds inflicted by code-switching. She compels readers to understand code-switching as upholding racial and linguistic hierarchies, unveiling its history of racism and colonial violence, and shows the powerful possibility of a world where we can be free from the surveillance of whiteness that occurs through language.

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.