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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   28987 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 7, 2023

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It's meant to be idiot speak, and if you think that sounds like Black English, I think that's more of a reflection on you than me.

This reminds me of some miminy-piminy pursedmouth posting at Neil Gaiman about "ooh a building in one of the episodes of the TV adaptation of 'Good Omens' which you co-wrote has anti-homeless spikes", trying to show off how Virtuous they were and take a scalp of a Big Gun as well, and being tutored that the particular object they pointed out in the screengrab was, in fact, a Victorian boot scraper.

Try harder to be Woker Than Thou.

While I personally thought you were going for baby talk and not something racial, I don’t think @gemmaem is being unreasonable here. You are literally putting words in your opponents’ mouths. Do you have any reason, other than your absolute enmity, to believe that these tumblr-dwellers actually Can’t English Good?

Don’t act so surprised when people mistake your exact flavor of caricature.

Do you have any reason, other than your absolute enmity, to believe that these tumblr-dwellers actually Can’t English Good?

Because anyone who seriously argues "why is everyone talking about the part where I said about killing someone instead of my cool graphics?" Can't Anything Good.

You are saying that if someone says stupid things in one area, they must be overall stupid. This doesn't follow.

Like @raggedy_anthem, I do not believe you intended to sound Black. Because AAVE is an alternate dialect with different pronunciations and rules of grammar, and because it is primarily spoken by members of a socially disadvantaged class, the stereotypical “idiot” pronunciation has sometimes shifted towards that (actually fairly complicated and internal-rule-abiding) dialect. This isn’t on me or on you. It’s on the pre-existing history of seeing Black Americans as social inferiors.

Given the surrounding social environment here, I don’t expect to gain points for wokeness. I do think that it’s useful to avoid normalising racial caricature, even unintentionally.

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