(no subject)

[nerdflighter]

extremely frustrated because I have like, a lot of questions about aave and its usage but I don't know who to ask


1. wouldn't it be easier to focus on removing the stigma around black people using aave than trying to get white people to stop using it?

2. why does so much of the activism I see on tumblr around aave basically boil down to ‘you can use it if you aren't black, just feel extremely bad about it’?

3. I've also seen black people say ‘nonblack people shouldn't use aave because they're almost always grammatically incorrect but that assumes that all black people speak grammatically correct aave, which surely isn't true, but that's not CA somehow, and that nonblack people are incapable of speaking grammatically correct aave. it also worries me because we don't enforce standards of correct grammar on any other language, because we understand that there's a lot standing between someone and 100% perfect grammar. like, we (as progressives) apply that to English, but not to aave. how does that work?

4. bearing in mind that aave is inextricable from internet culture at this point, and also that I don't want to feel bad about using it, how can I use it while being respectful of black people and black communities?


I want to ask someone these questions, but I don't want anyone to feel pressured to reply to them. I'm not actually owed a conversation about this but I'd desperately like to have one, and I also don't know how to go about doing that.

Comments

[hellofriendsiminthedark]

I'm not black, but it's my understanding that AAE (it's been a trend for many years now to drop the V because there's nothing inherently vernacular about non-standard English other than that they and their speakers don't get taken seriously the way the standard does) refers to a specific brand of black American English, rather than being a collection of all black American Englishes/being a singular black American English which is universally spoken by black Americans. Specifically, AAE is urban... southern? Atlanta-ish? And while other black communities from other regions of the US do have non-standard English ethnolects, they're not all AAE and therefore don't all follow the grammar of AAE as it's been mapped by linguists. Like there were some interesting discussions when "hella" became popular (as in "hella gay," "hella cool," etc), because people called out appropriation of AAE (in the same vein as "on fleek"), but it turns out "hella" was a Jersey thing.

As a general rule across quite a lot of history, culture is produced within the margins of society and travels up the respectability chain of command until it becomes mainstream. The words we attribute to Shakespeare were actually already very commonly in use at the time by housewives and women, but Shakespeare was the first to professionally utilize them. Likewise, a lot of production of American culture happens in urban black spaces, which are also occupied by urban white people and black queer people who also have claims to regional culture. From there, black culture has an avenue to move into white spaces and non-black queer spaces, where they're more readily adopted into non-black, non-poor, non-queer culture.

A lot of measured responses to cultural appropriation discourse will tell you that the sharing of culture isn't in and of itself bad, and that adoption of trends is inevitable, and that the most important things are context/mutual respect/information. There is a lot of reactionary black activism which pushes scrupulosity and lashes out indiscriminately against anyone and everyone... but I think also there are sometimes miscommunications wherein a message like "if you would have made fun of a black person saying 'on fleek' before it was cool, you shouldn't say 'on fleek' now" gets butchered by the "everything is injustice, we must preserve our culture" crowd/misunderstood by the "I'm a scrupulous ally" crowd into "no one should say 'on fleek' unless they're black." And obviously, the first iteration of the message raises the point that there's something to be said about how many facets of blackness aren't acceptable until they're appropriated by more respectable classes! Which is the whole point of discussions about AAE- and black culture-related appropriation!