when i make friends with new people theres a preliminary ‘no-sex reference zone’ but once theyre cleared that i will become the mOST INAPPROPRIATE AND SEXUAL MOTHERFUCKER
"And it’s even worse because Bill Cosby has the fucking smuggest old black man public persona that I hate. ‘Pull your pants up, black people. I was on TV in the ’80s. I can talk down to you because I had a successful sitcom.’ Yeah, but you raped women, Bill Cosby. So, brings you down a couple of notches. … I’ve done this bit onstage, and people don’t believe. People think I’m making it up. …That shit is upsetting. If you didn’t know about it, trust me. You leave here and google ‘Bill Cosby rape.’ It’s not funny."
—
Hannibal Buress, during his set Thursday at the Trocadero Theatre in Philadelphia
Here’s the problem with this. AAVE is not this completely separate dialect and culture that does not overlap at all with Standard* American English and mainstream American culture. Words, phrases, and styles developed by black American speakers filter and diffuse into the mainstream dialect. If white people weren’t allowed to use AAVE, we’d also have to get rid of words like “cool” and “rock’n’roll”. Do some white people use AAVE to mock and insult black people? Of course, and they’re racist scumfucks and need to be called out when they do it. But to genuinely adopt phrases used by black speakers because you find them useful and enjoyable in your speaking, is not racist or “appropriation.” And furthermore, for the vast majority of words and phrases, this happened naturally, without anyone consciously thinking to themselves “this is AAVE”. They just learned a new word or phrase, found it useful or cool, and started using it. When “hella” spread around the American dialect, very few people consciously thought “Bay Area young people invented this”, They just heard it and started using it, because that’s how language evolves.
Alright here’s the deal. Using bits and pieces of AAVE isn’t cultural appropriation. It just isn’t. First of all, AAVE speakers regularly come into contact with non-AAVE speakers and AAVE leaks its way into mainstream English use. To imply that they don’t is ridiculous. That’s the first problem here.
The second problem here is that “appropriation” is used entirely wrongly and entirely too often on this site. Cultural appropriation should only be used to refer to when one group (usually white people) CLAIMS the creation of another group as its own. That’s it. If it doesn’t fit that definition, it isn’t appropriation. And here’s why!
The third problem, and the reason people need to stop fucking using “appropriation” as a term so loosely on this site is because it allows us to ignore instances of racism by calling them something else- a more technical, academic seeming term. So
If you use another culture’s speaking pattern as a joke, that isn’t cultural appropriation. That’s being a racist. You’re literally making a joke about how other people talk. That’s racism. Not appropriation. RACISM. We have a word for that already.
If you use another culture’s sacred symbology or something like that, it isn’t appropriation. It’s being clueless at best and thoughtless/insensitive at worst. It isn’t appropriation. The basic problem there is not theft of another culture’s items: the basic problem is not participating in a culture on that culture’s terms.
If you use another culture as a prop or a joke, that isn’t appropriation. It’s racism. You’re pointing at a group and laughing. That’s just racism. Let’s not call it something else. Miley Cyrus isn’t appropriating black culture. She’s making fun of it. That’s racism. Easy.
If you use another culture’s symbology inaccurately, again that isn’t appropriation. It’s being thoughtless and inconsiderate but it isn’t appropriation.
If it isn’t one group claiming it created something it isn’t, then it isn’t appropriation.
There are several problems with insisting that white people participating in AAVE even in small portions is appropriation. 1- it lets white people off the hook for instances of actual racism by calling it something else, something which seems less intentional than it really is. 2- it assumes that white people already have a frame of reference for everything and should never have to refer to other cultures for ideas/concepts. That second idea is fucked up because:
It assumes that white/mainstream/Western culture understands everything already. That’s literally just colonialism wrapped up in a nice liberal package people can use to pat themselves on the back.
It ignores the fact that white culture (using that loosely, but I’m sure most people understand what I mean by this) actually doesn’t have a way to express everything. For example, “—— game strong” says more than just “you —— look[s] good.” There is no approximation in standard English. Standard English is not a perfect, all-encompassing language.
TLDR: use of AAVE in bits and pieces is not appropriation, and outside of tumblr I know very few black people who actually consider it to be appropriation. If you use it poorly, you’re just misinformed and will probably be laughed at. If you mock it, you’re just a racist. Stop calling every single instance of two cultures interacting “appropriation” because it allows us to ignore the fact that many times when people on here use it, we are referring to instances of racism and letting the racism itself go unaddressed by not calling it what it is. I only know a few black people ON tumblr who consider use of AAVE phrases to be appropriative or racist, and quite frankly I think that view 1- is simplistic and makes no sense and 2- would be laughed off by most black people who hadn’t been steeped in that narrative.
Last Night in Ferguson (10.21.14): A state senator was arrested (and mama may have been legally packing), one of the lead organizers, nettaaaaaaaa, was roughed up by police, and one of the main sources of footage/live feeds, Rebel Z, was detained in what seems to have been an intimidation and straight up harassment tactic. The police are out of control, and it’s only getting worse. If you think this is over, you need to look again. #staywoke #farfromover
Ferguson is still happening. Are you still paying attention?
“Hog-spitting – not just spitting,” Tonja Bulley emphatically clarifies.
“He just hog-spit at my baby. He hog-spit. He took everything out of him and spit in my daughter’s face. She is a minor. That’s the absolute worst thing you can do, when you spit on another human being. She was just saying ‘No justice, no peace’ and he hog-spit (at) and then smacked my baby. At that time — there was no more being peaceful.”
Bulley and her daughter, Brandy were released from jail last night after being arrested by police outside the St. Louis Rams game the previous day after a violent clash with football fans.
As the Rams were completing an impressive 28-26 victory over the Super Bowl champions Seattle Seahawks, Tonja and Brandy were outside the stadium participating in a non-violent protest calling for justice for Mike Brown, and the immediate arrest of his killer, Darren Wilson.
Tonja, known affectionately to her friends as “Tiny,” continued:
“We were peacefully protesting. We were saying something that this big, tall White man did not like. He should’ve been locked up, and they did not lock him up. One slapped my daughter and another hit her with his fist. Another woman threw her drink on me – and I retaliated. I’m not coming out to fight, but I have the right to protect myself.”
Tiny would eventually get punched and knocked to the ground. “I got hit by a couple people. I have a mark behind my ear.” She was initially charged with two felonies for throwing punches after the initial altercation. No violent Rams fans were arrested.
She says the racial double-standards were apparent: “We had a right to protest without anybody interfering. When the White people protest, there are no problems. Nobody is spitting on them. When we try to do it, the media goes around and acts like we started (the fighting.) We did not start it. I peacefully protest every day in Ferguson, and it’s never a problem.”
In Ferguson, Tiny and Brandy have been protesting since Brown was killed in August, and have become unofficial members of the Lost Voices—a spirited and well-known group of young leaders who led Sunday’s protest.
So one day a dwarf is talking to a human and finally realizes that when humans say woman, they generally mean “person who is theoretically capable of childbirth” because for whatever reason, humans assign social expectations based genital differences. (What a fucked up culture, the dwarf thinks.) But hey, better communication! So the next time the dwarf introduces theirself, they say, oh, by the way, I am what you call a “woman.”
And the trade negotiations just stop. They just stop cold. The tall people insist on speaking to the man, they insist on talking to the lady dwarf about all sorts of irrelevant bullshit, like recipes and childrearing and perfume
so the dwarf goes back home, enraged
and is like “BTW guess what happened, we’re all just going to be men forever now as far as the tall ones are concerned”
and everyone is justly horrified at this barbarism but they all agree to do whatever it takes to squeeze those tall bastards for all the resources they are worth
and the dwarves get surlier, and the trade agreements less generous
and the tall people are all “what a miserable and greedy race”
but really they’re just still nursing a grudge about how goddamn backwards and sexist the tall people are
because their best negotiator, one of their sacred cave people, got snubbed the instant she said she was capable of childbirth - and a mortal insult like that can never be forgiven
Just as an additional thought, we hear that women dwarves generally stay within the mountain and are a protected, guarded subset of the dwarves. There’s not many of them, so there’s an implication that women dwarves are too precious to be allowed out.
But what if this too is a mistranslation? What if the dwarves were talking to the Men and when asked “where are all your women?” they hit a wall. They whisper amongst themselves, and eventually come back with a question, “What’s a woman?” The Men are incredulous.
“Why, the members of your race that bear children, of course!"
More dwarven whispering.
They reach the conclusion that Men mean dwarves who are currently pregnant. Well! Of course those dwarves are currently safe within the mountain, well cared for and generally loathe to travel until the child is born. The Men take this to mean that all dwarven women are discouraged from traveling, and that their primary purpose is childbearing. Dwarves find this a satisfactory outcome, especially with the way Men treat their women, and so even when the misunderstanding becomes clear to them they never correct it.
I have never converted to fan-canon so hard before.
i had a crush on this guy and i decided to pull a Pavlov on him by offering him whenever i saw him this brand of candy he seemed to really like and after a while whenever he saw me he got excited for a second then you could see his expression shift to wondering the why the hell was he so happy to see me and i swear it was the evilest thing but also the most hilarious i made a guy like me by conditioning him into associating me to a candy he liked
trans people taking testosterone need to drink orange juice cause testosterone weakens your immune system!! trans people taking estrogen need to drink milk cause estrogen causes calcium to be absorbed less
Came up with this while working on the other thing, so I thought I’d take a break to draw this one out. I know their pre-scratch and post-scratch selves have no memory of the other universe, but that won’t stop me. This has probably been done before anyway.
Fun fact! Did you know Dirk’s bed has a pool ball motif? ………Well I found it interesting…
Oh and Lil Cal is incredibly creepy I’m never drawing him again sorry.
