As someone whose job, livelihood and day-to-day existence is dominated by language, I’m consistently amazed by it. I’m inspired by the way my friends, my peers, writers and speakers who I admire, and those before me in cultures I participate in use it. I’m thrilled by the way we’re able to convey the most idiosyncratic parts of ourselves through cues and linguistic choices, and ever more the grateful that I have the gift of experiencing that every day. With that said. I cannot sit by as I observe some deeply unserious linguistic evolutions occurring in online spaces, which I am not the first nor most skilled to critique.
This week I really loved this recent piece from charlie over at
(go subscribe, we have mentions now!!) detailing how over time the chronically online usage of specific terms with weighted and nuanced meanings has diluted their potency and misguided perhaps a generation of individuals interacting with them for the first time. I salute and affirm this notion, but have also observed a Great Migration of white people on the internet (and off it) who desperately clutch to any supplementary flavor in their vocabulary to make themselves interesting; in doing so, they have certainly repeated this process tenfold and embarrassed themselves along the way.We’re all aware that culture vultures are gonna vulture, but I realized this concept most concretely when hearing the language of some deranged stans discussing a recent album release. I scrolled past someone calling a certain song a “banger” when in fact, the song objectively remains nothing of the sort. I had to giggle for a second, then I considered that whatever 14 year old posted that has been set up to describe music in such narrow, removed and diluted terms that they probably did think that it sincerely was a banger.
So much of internet culture and the success and accessibility of pop culture at large is because of black people, and it seems that we never reap the benefits as everyone else absorbs it. Every week there’s a new meme or TikTok sound (with the choice exception of the hallowed 72 hours of “negroni sbagliato with prosecco in it”, remember that?) that’s literally just a black person’s voice, and becomes a self insert for god knows who to talk about themselves through that script.
This reminds me of the number of times I’ve heard nonblack people absolutely butcher AAVE in front of me for no other reason than to supposedly seem more endearing/comical/cool than they are, actively choosing to posture and costume themselves in the goofiest of ways. In my time at my PWI, I’ve heard “on god”s inserted in the most unholy places. Witnessed clunky blaccents emulate memes in bastardized imitations, knowing full well that the number of shares and reposts and containment breaches that brought that beautifully Black joke to someone else is vastly beyond my control. Y’all don’t even know what “bffr” means!
Of course, this modern day minstrelsy doesn’t stop at co-opted “internet” language, and has potent effects and implications. Last month, to my shock and gall, I watched three (white) students at my own university dress up in a Halloween costume as the Migos, complete with Sharpied-on face tats, tacky thick Spirit Halloween gold chains, sunglasses, and everything short of blackface to pose as their infamous album cover. These students were praised by their friends, posted by their Greek house in a festive photo dump, and put pics up on their stories to show how well their joke had been told. Takeoff died the next day.
The funniest thing about all of these instances is that nonblack people could have just sat there and ate their food, or calmed down and just minded their business for once. But the fact that time and time again they target, mock, overexpose and exploit black culture as a joke, proves that their unoriginality is often as cyclical as their violence.
This idea also makes me think of how the identity of whiteness so often demands attention in all the spaces it occupies. Complaining incessantly, grabbing and pulling from everybody else, and never letting a good thing rest that it might resurrect for its own purposes and self-serving devices. If white people don’t maintain the spotlight of the norms they’d prefer, their insecurity bleeds over into everybody else’s business when they feel the need to beg and steal and enter closed cultures to feel better about themselves in a more relevant world that is evolving out of their grip. If they don’t get it, they poke fun at it, and if they want it, they just take it anyway. White supremacy demands capital - socially, culturally, and in every aspect of interacting with others. When that bubble or insulated echo chamber bursts, people get desperate — and get embarrassing.
Not only is this unfortunately predictable for people like me who observe this behavior, but also in a way, affirming. I know that I’ll never need to prop my own ego up on dominance and caricatures of others, much less my wit or humor and self worth for that matter. And thank god for that, because all I can think of is what a miserable life that must be.