{"id":66085,"date":"2021-05-30T05:00:57","date_gmt":"2021-05-30T09:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=66085"},"modified":"2021-05-29T18:32:11","modified_gmt":"2021-05-29T22:32:11","slug":"new-frontiers-in-cultural-appropriation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2021\/05\/30\/new-frontiers-in-cultural-appropriation\/","title":{"rendered":"New frontiers in cultural appropriation"},"content":{"rendered":"

John McWhorter<\/a> considers the notion that white people shouldn’t be allowed to use “black” words and phrases because it’s a form of cultural appropriation and therefore another aspect of white supremacy:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Screencap from NBC’s Saturday Night Live<\/em> highlights for “Gen-Z Hospital” skit.<\/p><\/div>\n

A little while ago, a Saturday Night Live<\/em> skit<\/a> depicted a multiracial group of teens communicating in what was depicted as “Gen Z slang”, with the doctor they were talking with having to “translate” his thoughts into it to communicate with them.<\/p>\n

A lot of people didn’t like it, because the slang in question was mostly of Black English origin. The complaint is that the skit was denying the black roots of these terms, and instead ascribing them to Americans in general \u2013 i.e. (shudder<\/em>) white persons. As in, yes \u2013 the problem was cultural appropriation.<\/p>\n

As I write, there are still people grousing on social media in the wake of that skit about whites “stealing” black language, with a leitmotif<\/em> being that we should apply our N-word taboo more widely. To wit, many propose that whites should not be allowed to use Black English terms because they are “ours”. Many who haven’t outright proposed this give the notion Likes, which suggests that a considerable group of people \u2013 and from what I can see, quite a few of them are white \u2013 concur with this line of reasoning.<\/p>\n

Let’s break this down. To do so we must understand the sorts of terms in question. The SNL<\/em> skit included, among others, yo<\/em>, bestie<\/em>, vibes<\/em>, feels<\/em> for feelings, salty<\/em> for irritated, bro<\/em> \/ bruh<\/em> and no cap<\/em> for “I’m not kidding” (as in, these are actual whole gold teeth, not golden caps on teeth).<\/p>\n

Is there a case that you should only use these terms if you’re black, or that if you use them as a white person you should “do the work” of thinking hard about whether or not it is problematic (blasphemous)?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

John McWhorter considers the notion that white people shouldn’t be allowed to use “black” words and phrases because it’s a form of cultural appropriation and therefore another aspect of white supremacy: A little while ago, a Saturday Night Live skit depicted a multiracial group of teens communicating in what was depicted as “Gen Z slang”, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[53,13],"tags":[1126,400,238,1020,99,101],"class_list":["post-66085","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-usa","tag-culturalappropriation","tag-language","tag-offensensitivity","tag-progressives","tag-racism","tag-tv"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-hbT","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66085","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66085"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66085\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":66087,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66085\/revisions\/66087"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66085"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66085"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66085"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}