Opinion | Black English Doesn't Have to Be Just for Black People - The New York Times - 0 views
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, the question is why a white guy like Rife is doing that, instead of switching into a more vanilla version of colloquial white English.
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It was peculiar for a white person to process Black English that way, to the point of making personal use of it, until roughly the late 1990s. But things have changed.
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It is reasonable to imagine that Rife thinks his audience processes his Black English usage as a warm method of interpersonal bonding in the same way he seems to. In fact, a tweet of his suggests that he hadn’t even been conscious of what he was doing until apprised, and doesn’t even think of himself as shifting into something “Black” at all.
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Rife is not posing or ridiculing; he’s connecting. Linguists call it accommodation. A non-Black speaker these days may do it with a Black audience.
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Except that these days, that ideal may seem a tad 1.0. Under the new identitarian mind-set, where we cherish coming together less than we cherish a diversity of identities, many see someone like Rife as culturally appropriating Black speech, something that isn’t his. “Mimesis is a kind of negation,”
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There is simply no way that whiteness and Blackness will mingle as they have in music, cuisine, gesture, greeting styles, dating, matrimony and multiracial identity, and yet for some reason be halted at language.