What's the Tea with AAVE in the Mainstream?
This week’s feature for Ars Poetica’s Writing Series for BIPOC Voices is written by Andrea Byrd. All pieces within the series have been curated by Shakilya Lawrence.
“It be like that” or “It is what it is” is usually what’s running through Black people’s minds when we’re faced with a double-edged sword that is appropriation. Speak up—and be labeled as bitter, aggressive, judgmental, and hostile. Stay quiet—and let it continue until it takes over our community, culture, and sense of refuge.
Where does one go when they run out of options?
For Black people, we cling to our culture and traditions of the vernacular, which has been strengthened and passed down throughout generations. AAVE is the informal language we use to communicate with on a day-to-day basis. However, the internet has claimed AAVE as its brainchild—making the language that Black people spent years cultivating within their community ultimately popular in mainstream media.
Photo by Duncan Shaffer on Unsplash
AAVE is the acronym for African-American Vernacular English and it is a collection of modified phrases, words, grammar, and accent features originating from and related to Black lifestyle practices and customs. There are two hypotheses on how it originated: the Dialectologist Hypothesis and the Creole Hypothesis. They both expose the implications of African colonialism as the root. Specifically, they both focus on how AAVE is a culmination of the lives of the enslaved while assimilating into the white American social-structure. Still, according to The Oxford Handbook of African American Language by Donald Winford, the South was a hotspot for AAVE’s evolution. The roots were “in the Chesapeake Bay area (Virginia and Maryland), and later, in the Carolinas and Georgia”. The dialect continued to evolve as American society changed, and today we can thank inner-city neighborhoods and Black ballroom culture for further elevating our vernacular.
Black people who grow up in households that use AAVE are commonly patronized when using it in professional spaces like school or work settings. We’re often told that it’s unprofessional or portrays unintelligence. This pressures us into code-switching to better assimilate into a white-dominated spaces. Code-switching is the practice of alternating between two or more languages in conversation. The concept is a means that displays how well one (Black people) can fit into whiteness. We are told to ‘talk proper’, to not use “slang”, and this contributes to double-consciousness, the “sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others”. These are anti-Black sentiments, rooted in the systemic racism seen in America. Black-Americans have their own established means of communication, but it’s not recognized by others as a respected practice. Instead, it’s associated with a coon caricature—an ignorant, poverty-stricken negro without an education. However, when white or non-Black people use AAVE terms like “chile” or “sis”, it’s a hip and cool gesture. We need to retire this flawed concept of logic that we all participate in. If we can strip the system of its walls so that we can see the real problem, we may be able to help others with their cultural-consciousness. Until white and non-Black people are being universally denied jobs, money, and education because of their choice of words and use of the vernacular, we have work to do.
Photo by Duncan Shaffer on Unsplash
Partaking in AAVE without acknowledging its origins directly aids in Black erasure. By acknowledging that the system of white supremacy preys on the Black community, you have to be aware of the microaggressions and double standards upheld. Flaunting freshly stolen culture in the faces of the people you stole it from is not cool or “aight”; it’s unbelievably trifling. It furthers the idea that standing with us means that you only want to have access to the good things about being Black while standing by when we are ostracized and targeted for our skin color. Thus, proving that their activism is merely theatrics, used to hide the covertness of their fake solidarity. You want our rhythm, but not our blues.
Those outside the Black community think that they can use AAVE to show “appreciation”. What they don’t realize is that it’s counterintuitive. Instead, they end up outing themselves as performative and as appropriators because they are perpetrating a lifestyle that they’ll never have access to. To fast fashion brands like Fashion Nova, AAVE is just a trendy, cool slang to reel in the younger demographic. Additionally, their influencers and consumers use the language, believing it comes from them—the internet culture. The problem is that these brands can’t keep the same energy. They’ll issue out solidarity statements for the Black community, but still continue to profit off the usage of AAVE. It’s not a coincidence.
Internet culture has birthed things like clickbait, memes, texting language, but AAVE is not one of them.
via Twitter thread with @bleachwithpulp + @SadLeftist
People who defend their right to use AAVE claim that it’s something that was invented by the white LGBTQ+ community or came about by pop-culture/”stan” culture. This trend of defending AAVE usage by nonblack people has recently become increasingly more common on social media, especially Twitter and TikTok. TikTok is notorious on social media for allowing grave amounts of racism on the platform by its users. It is so common that there is a slew of apology videos and hashtags on the app of these TikToks. On top of dealing with racist videos and users appropriating their language, Black TikTokers have also notoriously been slighted by the platform’s algorithm even before the unlawful killings this year. Conveniently after being called out, TikTok attempted to fix the BLM hashtag on their app. The racism problem is still running rampant on their app today.
To set the record straight, AAVE is an act of kinship amongst Black people.
It’s a way we personally connect with each other. It came from our mothers, our fathers, and their mothers. We grow up hearing this language in our kitchens and our cookouts, throughout our neighborhoods and at social gatherings. There is a deep culture in our language that has persisted over time.
Don’t take the last thing we have left to save.
Andrea Byrd is a writer and poet from Chicago, IL. She enjoys writing articles, haiku, and flash fiction in her free time. She has been published by The Asahi Shimbun, Dream Noir, and Midnight & Indigo. You can also find more of her work on her blog, writingfordrea.com.
Socials // Twitter: @Andrea_R_Byrd IG:@officialandreabyrd