There’s some very low nuance discourse happening rn around non-black ppl using a) aave and b) what are really loan words from aave and like... it’s a lot of white allies here REALLY not getting it.

For me personally it’s less like “NON BLACK PEOPLE SHOULD NEVER SAY TEA OR PERIODT!” and more like “say it if you want but understand we snobby like French ppl, so if you say it and sound stupid, you’ll end up getting clowned til you won’t WANT to say it.”

Or in other words, I want white allies to help create a social taboo against POOR USE of AAVE and slang borrowed from AAVE, not against white gays picking up words from Cardi B. It’s just... understand our culture is valuable, exclusive, and a gift. Treat it as such.

Also please learn the difference between AAVE which is a language (dialect) complete with grammatical and lexical features on the one hand, and specific (and recent!) slang that has roots in AAVE and/or Black culture(s) on the other.

If I said “that’s the tea” to an older Black person who has spoken primarily AAVE their whole life, they would not necessarily know what that phrase means any more than an old white person who has spoken primarily “standard” American English. So it feels weird calling it AAVE.

Whereas if I used the habitual be or “stay” or dropped the copula or a final g (“oh she out now, she be back in a minute, you know she stay wanderin somewhere”) that would be both intelligible and correct to a native speaker of AAVE but not someone who speaks solely SAE.

Incidentally, I imagine a key sign of AAVE mastery or fluency is knowing how to avoid confusion on whether “be” marks habit, futurity, or something else; also perhaps knowing that “be” = habitual but “stay” emphasizes frequency in a way “be” does not.

Okay one last thing: the reason there is a cultural appropriation freak out happening is precisely bc the mild, mocking social sanction against bad AAVE has failed/is failing. It’s frustrating to watch someone misuse your language and feel cool about it.

And this holds true for cultural appropriation generally: it goes back to the Flaubert line that human speech is a cracked cauldron. There is a kind of cultural friction that naturally strips language and cultural forms of meaning.

The thing ppl hate about “cultural appropriation” is how it accelerates the process bc a bunch of people who are a) more numerous than the group that invented the language and b) have a larger media platform just absolutely drag these vital forms through the mud.

The taboo is there to slow down that natural loss of meaning so that culture doesn’t become an ever accelerating arms race of esotericism that makes meaningful communication possible for the in-group before the observing or overhearing (overbearing) group can ruin the language.

btw this happens a ton wrt singing and that personally upsets me when a white person with DEEPLY mediocre vocals, not even good enough for the praise team, gets praised to high heaven by white ppl who don’t understand the tradition from which the style comes and its standards.