Icon by @ThatSpookyAgent. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. The X-Files. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.
“It was when I was 12 and I got cast in The Hunger Games, and people called me the N-word and said that the death of my character, Rue, would be less sad because I was black. That was the first moment I realized being black was such a crucial part of my identity in terms of the way that I was perceived and how it would affect any line of work that I wanted to pursue. I often find myself in situations where I am the token black person. It can feel like this enormous weight. I have definitely had moments when my hair felt too big or like I needed to make myself smaller and easier to digest.”
“i don’t judge people based on race, creed, color, or gender. i judge people based on spelling, grammar, punctuation, and sentence structure.”
i hate to burst your pretentious little bubble, but linguistic prejudice is inextricably tied to racism, sexism, classism, xenophobia, and ableism.
ETA: don’t send me angry messages about this…at all, preferably, but at least check the tag for this post before firing off an irate screed.
no one seems to be following the directive above, so here’s the version of this post i would like all you indignant folk to read.
no, i am not saying that people of color, women, poor people, disabled people, etc, “can’t learn proper english.” what i’m saying is that how we define “proper english” is itself rooted in bigotry. aave is not bad english, it’s a marginalized dialect which is just as useful, complex, and efficient as the english you’re taught in school. “like” as a filler word, valley girl speech, and uptalk don’t indicate vapidity, they’re common verbal patterns that serve a purpose. etc.
because the point of language is to communicate, and there are many ways to go about that. different communities have different needs; different people have different habits. so if you think of certain usages as fundamentally “wrong” or “bad,” if you think there’s a “pure” form of english to which everyone should aspire, then i challenge you to justify that view. i challenge you to explain why “like” makes people sound “stupid,” while “um” doesn’t raise the same alarms. explain the problem with the habitual be. don’t appeal to popular opinion, don’t insist that it just sounds wrong. give a detailed explanation.
point being that the concept of “proper english” is culturally constructed, and carries cultural biases with it. those usages you consider wrong? they aren’t. they’re just different, and common to certain marginalized groups.
not to mention that many people who speak marginalized dialects are adept at code-switching, i.e. flipping between non-standard dialects and “standard english,” which makes them more literate than most of the people complaining about this post.
not to mention that most of the people complaining about this post do not speak/write english nearly as “perfectly” as they’d like to believe and would therefore benefit by taking my side.
not to mention that the claim i’m making in the OP is flat-out not that interesting. this is sociolinguistics 101. this is the first chapter of your intro to linguistics textbook. the only reason it sounds so outlandish is that we’ve been inundated with the idea that how people speak and write is a reflection of their worth. and that’s a joyless, elitist idea you need to abandon if you care about social justice or, frankly, the beauty of language.
and yes, this issue matters. if we perceive people as lesser on the basis of language, we treat them as lesser. and yes, it can have real ramifications–in employment (tossing resumes with “black-sounding names”), in the legal system (prejudice against rachel jeantel’s language in the trayvon martin trial), in education (marginalizing students due to prejudice against dialectical differences, language-related disabilities, etc), and…well, a lot.
no, this doesn’t mean that there’s never a reason to follow the conventions of “standard english.” different genres, situations, etc, have different conventions and that’s fine. what it does mean, however, is that this standard english you claim to love so much has limited usefulness, and that, while it may be better in certain situations, it is not inherently better overall. it also means that non-standard dialects can communicate complex ideas just as effectively as the english you were taught in school. and it means that, while it’s fine to have personal preferences regarding language (i have plenty myself), 1) it’s worth interrogating the source of your preferences, and 2) it’s never okay to judge people on the basis of their language use.
so spare me your self-righteous tirades, thanks.
Oh my gosh YES, this post got so much better.
this is sociolinguistics 101. this is the first chapter of your intro to linguistics textbook.
and
and yes, this issue matters. if we perceive people as lesser on the
basis of language, we treat them as lesser. and yes, it can have real
ramifications
Maryland Police Officer PULLS OUT HIS GUN On A Black Man for not pulling over on the highway!
This video was posted on facebook by a man who was pulled over by the police officer. On the video you can see a black man , who is trying to understand why he was stopped.
The officer asks him to show his license and registration, yells at him and asks to pull the window down, although it is already down. Man looks so scared and does everything officer asks him to, however he didn’t have his registration and that is when he was asked to get out of the car.
Meanwhile throughout the whole conversation officer is pulling a gun at the man in the car, however , as we see it clearly, he doesn’t pose any threat to the officer.
Trump
was asked to weigh in on his supporters’ actions on Fox & Friends
Sunday morning. “Maybe he should have been roughed up,” he said. “It was
disgusting what he was doing.”
The Republican frontrunner compared
what happened at his rally to a Black Lives Matter protest at a Bernie
Sanders event, which prompted the Democratic candidate to release a
detailed racial justice plan. “This is not the way Bernie Sanders
handled his problem, I will tell you, but I have a lot of fans and they
were not happy about it. And this was a very obnoxious guy, a
troublemaker, looking to make trouble,” Trump said.
Trump continues to rise in polls, because I guess this is the sort of thing Republican primary voters like, and this is the guy they want to be the President of the United States of (some of) America. What the actual fuck is happening right now?
Suppose a client walked into my office and told me that police officers in his country had choked a man to death over a petty crime. Suppose he said police fatally shot another man in the back as he ran away. That they arrested a woman during a traffic stop and placed her in jail, where she died three days later. That a 12-year-old boy in his country was shot and killed by the police as he played in the park.
Suppose he told me that all of those victims were from the same ethnic community — a community whose members fear being harmed, tortured or killed by police or prison guards. And that this is true in cities and towns across his nation. At that point, as an immigration lawyer, I’d tell him he had a strong claim for asylum protection under U.S. law.
What if, next, he told me he was from America? Black people in the United States face such racial violence that they could qualify as refugees.
Over the past decade, I’ve represented and advised hundreds of noncitizens facing deportation. Many feared persecution in their home countries and sought protection in the United States. To win them asylum status and the right to stay, I showed that my clients had a well-founded fear of future persecution by the government or by groups that the government was unable or unwilling to control. In one case, I successfully argued that if my client returned to his home country, he could be unjustly imprisoned and physically harmed on the basis of his religious beliefs. Black Americans know the risk of unjust imprisonment and physical harm all too well.
According to U.S. asylum law, that persecution must be on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political opinion. In many cases, courts have said that violence by police officers, unjust imprisonment, rape, assault, beatings and confinement constitute persecution. Even nonphysical forms of harm, such as the deliberate imposition of severe economic disadvantage, psychological harm, or the deprivation of food, housing, employment or other essentials, help make the case. In one instance, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit ruled that an individual who had been arrested, held for three days and then falsely accused of a crime had been persecuted. In another case, it ruled that persecution included ethnic discrimination so severe that the petitioner was unable to find a job in his chosen field.
Does this sound familiar?
I’ve had this thought so many times! It’s incredible that this appeared in a major US newspaper.
Author and journalist Jessica Hopper isn’t shy about speaking up about all of the ways in which the music industry oppresses and attacks those in the margins. And so earlier this week, when she tweeted, “Gals/other marginalized folks: what was your 1st brush (in music industry, journalism, scene) w/ idea that you didn’t ‘count’?” people listened. And then they responded, in droves, with tweet after tweet containing jaw-dropping stories about sexism, racism, misogyny, condescension—and much, much worse.
Hopper’s been diligent about retweeting responses to her initial tweet, and cumulatively, they paint a picture of an industry where anyone who’s not a straight white man is belittled for even existing.
Honestly though, I think this highlights a major problem with white people in the theatre community. There’s this enormous sense of entitlement. Since most of the existing canon and the field is tailored for white people, white people are used to getting their way all of the time and so when a good show comes along that’s written for people of color, white people just can’t stomach the idea that there’s something shiny that they can’t have and so they make excuses and disrespectfully appropriate the few works created with actors of color in mind.
The entire central plot of Once On This Island is that Ti Moune, because of her dark skin, can’t be with the light skin boy that she loves. It takes place in the Caribbean, the characters have names like “Asaka” And “Agwe,” they sing calypso music and speak with accents, there’s a whole song about colonialism and the dynamics of colorism and classism, yet a version of the show exists where all references to race are removed so white people can do the show. It’s a very clear cut example of appropriation. White people like the superficial aspects of the show (the music, the story) but it’s fundamentally unsuitable for an all white cast, so instead of respectfully understanding that this isn’t their place, they sanitize the show to make it palatable. It’s borderline disrespectful.
The Wiz never specifically mentions the race of its characters, but everything about the show indicates that it needs an all black cast. The characters speak ebonics. The score features r&b, gospel, and soul. The entire original Broadway cast and the entire cast of the film were black. The entire concept of the show is centered around the idea that it’s an African American retelling of The Wiz. And yet white people do the show all the time, and in the process, miss the entire point. The Wiz was born out of the idea that for children, even broad fantasy that was supposed to be universal and not bound by the conventions of the real world, was still predominately white, so the point of The Wiz was to express the universality of these stories by taking a story usually thought of as being a white story (The Wizard of Oz) and giving it new context to make it a parable for black audiences. A white production of The Wiz misses this entire point because a white production of The Wiz is unnecessary because there’s already The Wizard of Oz.
Even Dreamgirls, which is in no uncertain terms about the struggles of African-Americans in the music industry, is often appropriated and whitewashed. Every white person who can kind of belt thinks the world needs them to sing something from Dreamgirls. This is especially ironic because a major plot point in Dreamgirls is that black culture creates beautiful music that white culture appropriates and sanitizes to its detriment. I don’t understand how anyone who genuinely watches Dreamgirls would think it’s okay for a white person to sing a song from the show when there’s literally a scene in the show where a white person steals one of their songs and it devastates the characters who originated it. For a white person to sing a song from Dreamgirls is to fundamentally misunderstand the entire point that the show itself makes.
I hear “but the song doesn’t mention race there’s no reason a white person couldn’t sing it” and I hear “I can’t understand the history of racism in the world that’s created a system where actors of color have been historically marginalized and I choose to ignore that due to the original context of this song it would be disrespectful and tone deaf of me to sing it because it’s pretty and I’m white so I deserve everything pretty.” I was in a class once where a white girl sang a song from In the Heights, and when she was done the teacher told her to find a different song because even if the song didn’t specifically mention race, everyone in the room still knew the context and knew she was too white to be singing it. No matter how good these songs are, you should in all good conscience know that it’s not your place to be singing them.
A white girl once said to me “I can’t wait until the day when I just wake up black and I can sing all of these amazing songs” and if that’s not entitled tone deaf and insensitive I don’t know what is.
It does bear mentioning though that because the existing musical theater canon is so predominately white, people of color can’t appropriate songs or shows from white people. You can’t appropriate the dominant culture, you can only assimilate into it. I’ve heard people argue firsthand that it’s okay to cast a white girl as the Vietnamese Kim in Miss Saigon because Audra McDonald was cast as the white Carrie Pipperidge in Carousel. Number one, Carrie isn’t specifically a white character so already the analogy is flawed. But number two, there’s a major difference between the two because the only reason that Carousel is a “white” show is because for so many years white people were the default for any show not specifically about race. Casting a person of color in a traditionally white role isn’t appropriating roles from white people, it’s normalizing the theatre to make it reflect real life where people of color actively exist and do things.
