askchapo

tbh I feel like there aren't really a lot of white people that talk in AAVE. For the most part white people, especially younger ones, have just adopted a couple words and phrasings that slightly differentiates their speech from the stereotypical transatlantic accent, but to call that AAVE is really selling AAVE short.

Whether or not that's racist, I'm torn. I mean there is a discussion to be had about the gentrification and co-optation of language, but a lot of those terms have also at this point entered the general American lexicon. I can't really fault some random middle-schooler for not knowing the history of "based" or something. I think even "cool" comes from AAVE. But there are a lot of people calling stuff gen Z slang or Internet slang, when really it's AAVE (which further problematizes the use of "slang" to refer to these things, since AAVE is not "slang.")

I also feel like the Internet's embrace of these words has just made them corny as hell. They've become meme words, and I feel like they subsequently become marked as unserious, almost joke words. I can't use the word "bet" anymore thanks to a bunch of white tiktokers wanting to talk like Black people. Every time I hear "sus" I think of amogus. "Woke" - I mean we all know the story of the fall of "woke," need I say more? Anything white people touch immediately becomes uncool. I will never take anyone who uses the word "cap" unironically serious again.