Reddit reviews The Everyday Language of White Racism
We found 5 Reddit comments about The Everyday Language of White Racism. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Wiley-Blackwell
You're asking a few different questions here, all of them interesting.
You may be interested in reading The Everyday Language of White Racism, which has excellent chapters on mock AAVE and mock Spanish.
>which also features the critique of people getting the slang wrong, which seems a bit prescriptivist.
I understand the sentiment, and to a certain extent agree, but there's a power structure at play. I'm a native speaker of AAVE because of my childhood speech community. I'm also white. When I hear other white people 'misusing' borrowed AAVE, it's cringeworthy.
It's also important to note that all of the borrowing you're thinking of is going to be 99% lexical. White people, in general, don't be borrowing things like habitual be (with the exceptions of one meme, which I'm convinced they don't fully understand). They don't be using the phonology of AAVE either - in fact, there's excellent research that suggests that in general, when they do borrow AAVE phonology, they still don't fully commit; so Philadelphians who borrow th-fronting don't do so in all the environments in which it's productive in AAVE in Philly (I wanna say Sneller et al 2014?). So, it's understandable to me that people feel like suburban, middle-class white people saying 'ratchet' just doesn't feel right, especially when there's the perception they're fucking up the phonology, don't understand the appropriate grammar, and in general aren't really interested in borrowing AAVE in a way that doesn't feel like it's being made fun of. Shit, they're busy trying to make on fleek sound French now.
> I'm wondering if there's any information on how slang generally propagates
This is a different question. I'm currently developing an agent-based model approach to the lifecycle of slang, but it's not yet publication ready. I'll definitely post it here when it's more complete. My approach is one using evolutionary game theory, treating use of slang as a bayesian signaling game with different (and opposing) incentives and payoff structure by player type. Translated: people have different goals in how they use certain terms, and how they want to see them used, and that use (or avoidance) signals something about the person.
> I'm not Jewish but having grown up in North London I say stuff like "Do you expect me to schlep all the way to Enfield?" - I'm not pretending to be Jewish, it's literally just in my idiolect.
You're also using it in a way that would make my Jewish friends, speakers of NYC (Yiddish-) English, mildly confused. For Yiddish speakers and those who have had contact with Yiddish (i.e., New Yorkers) schlep is ditranstive, and the obligatory argument is a theme/patient, not a goal - you don't schlep somewhere, you schlep something (somewhere). For instance, "I schlepped my books around all day, and never got a chance to even sit down and read any of them." You can also describe a tediously long trip as "a bit of a schlep."
The point, however, that you have a lexical item, schlep, meaning to go somewhere (far), is important, though. You're absolutely right that the fact you have the word natively is important, and often overlooked.
>At the behest of some friends I've tried to excise certain phrases like "throwing shade" or "thirsty" from my speech but if someone who ostensibly "owns" the slang uses it with me enough, it's hard not to also use it.
The interesting question for me is where you draw the line with slang. I think what people are reacting to is that it's slang that comes out of one dialect, and when it's used by people who don't speak that dialect, with the 'wrong' phonology, and often with not-quite-right meaning, it's disconcerting. When there's a power imbalance, I understand how it's upsetting to people. When that power imbalance is tied up with systemic racism, it ends up becoming a big deal.
I think /u/pb9o linked some excellent stuff as well, that demonstrates the difference between loving appreciation, and something that feels like theft.
I recommend reading this book. It might open your eyes to reasons that the facts you're stating mean more than you think they mean. For instance, why do Latin Americans practice baseball and black Americans practice basketball so much? Because of a free choice, or because of a lack of choices?
>While today's suburbs arose during a period when overtly White supremacist attitudes were still widely accepted in the United States, segregation was not an explicit goal of suburbanization. Instead, suburbanization was thought of as the pursuit of a better, healthier life for families. However, people of color were excluded from this pursuit, because even people who did not dislike or fear African Americans shared the view that their presence in neighborhoods "lowered property values." For this reason, until the 1964 Civil Rights Act, mortgages backed by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) were not available to African Americans. By encouraging residential covenants that prohibited resale to people of color, the FHA policed the suburbs against African American residents even beyond the reach of the jurisdiction it had over the holders of it's primary mortgages.
Emphasis mine. The above is from the introduction to a great book focused primarily on sociolinguistics, I highly recommend just because it's incredibly interesting, called The Everyday Language of White Racism.
One of the first things the author does in the introduction is move away from Folk Theories of racism (the relevant one here is "people just prefer to be among their own kind," although the main big one is that 'racism' can only be individual acts by unrepentant, hateful bigots; and that systems of privilege that operate based on racialist assumptions do not lead to 'racist' social structures).
Here's an interesting fact, continuing the discussion of where people live: mortgage lending by private bankers was not regulated until the 1974 Equal Credit Opportunity Act, and rigorous enforcement of anti-discrimination laws did not really get underway until the late 1980s (Massey, 2005).
It is a jump, but people do think that, and they do say "no problemo" informally (even though it's not even how Spanish-speakers would say it; most would say "no hay problema," and some who are bilingual and have picked up on "no problem" might just say "no problema," but it ends with an a in Spanish).
What I'm saying is that our language uses reinforce unconscious beliefs and social structures. This book explains it better than I can. I'm sorry I don't have a free resource more eloquent than myself. If I did, I'd share it.
Here are the books listed as being part of the course. Maybe you should read them instead of pulling umptions out of your ass?
Or are you scared of being brainwashed?
Maybe those books, and any discussion about them should be banned or ridiculed to the margins (without even having read them-- to keep "our" thoughts pure, you know) to prevent toxic ideas from spreading?