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.

Jamila J. Lyiscott aka, Dr. J, is an award-winning scholar, poet, author, and nationally renowned speaker most well known for her viral TED talk, ‘3 Ways to Speak English,’ which has garnered over 5 million views. Dr. J is a self-proclaimed anti-codeswitch ambassador committed to exploring, asserting, and defending the value of Black life globally and ha been featured on Hulu, BBC Radio, NPR, in Spike Lee’s “2 Fists Up,” Cosmopolitan, NowThis, and many other media outlets nationally and internationally. She is the author of Black Appetite. White Food: Issues of Race, Voice, and Justice Within and Beyond the Classroom, currently serves as a professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, is the founding Co-director of the Center of Racial Justice and Youth Engaged Research, and has been an invited speaker at over 300 institutions across the world.

• Publisher: Beacon Press
  
• Publish Date: February 23, 2027
  
• Pages: 152
  
• Language: English
  
• Type: Hardcover
  
• EAN/UPC: 9780807024454
  
• Dimensions: 8.5 X 5.5 X 0.0 inches | 1.3 pounds
  
• BISAC Categories: Politics, Education