- Just ahead on Black Issues Forum, Black language has built worlds, from the church pews to the studio mic.

So why is it celebrated in culture, but silenced in classrooms?

We unpack the rhythm, the resistance, and the brilliance behind African American vernacular English, and what it really means when others borrow our voice.

Coming up next, stay with us.

- Quality public television is made possible through the financial contributions of viewers like you, who invite you to join them in supporting PBSNC.

(upbeat music) ♪ - Welcome to Black Issues Forum, I'm Kenia Thompson.

Language tells us the story of who we are.

It shapes how we see ourselves and how the world sees us.

Today we're diving into African American Vernacular English, or AAVE.

It's a language form that has built worlds in music, art, and everyday expression, yet it's often misunderstood, misused, or dismissed.

Joining me is Dr.

Mark Anthony Neal, a Duke Distinguished Professor of African American Studies and African Studies at Duke University, and someone who spent decades unpacking black culture, identity, and sound.

Welcome to the show.

- Always glad to be back.

- It's always great to have you.

You know, the first time I heard of AAVE was from my assistant, and I was like, what is this?

I'd never heard of this before, right, even as a professor.

And so, when we think about African American Vernacular English, AAVE, let's talk about what it means in cultural terms, and then share a little bit about where it comes from.

- I mean, very specifically, it's the way that we talk.

It's the way that we voice our experience.

And it's a combination of things, right?

It's African retentions, things that we have retained from our transport from West Africa.

The most famous linguistic example is the TH sound.

You know, so many interesting documentations of early black English, or AAVE as you describe it, where TH becomes an F sound, so instead of tooth, it's "toof."

But it's also about region, right?

Where individual black folks grew up, what the language was like there, so there's always this kind of southerness to black language, right?

And even when folks aren't living in the South because of migration patterns, you go out to Los Angeles, you can hear resonances of Louisiana and Texas for folks who've been in Los Angeles for generations.

The mistake about AAVE is that it represents some sort of cognitive disconnect, that folks who use AAVE aren't smart, that they're not speaking proper English.

And to your point, AAVE is governed by its own set of rules that make perfect linguistic sense in the context of AAVE, even if it might sound a little foreign or different.

The irony is that what we think of as standard American language, most British talkers think that Americans bastardize the language, right?

So because American use of English is a vernacular in and of itself.

- Yes, it reminds me, so I've shared before, I'm Haitian and our language is Creole, but for the longest time, that was seen as uneducated because it was broken French.

However, if you really take a look at it, we were able to formulate language after being stripped of our own tribal tongue, right?

To communicate with one another, and so that was that resistance.

- And that's what's important, language is a connection to culture.

If you lose connection to language, you lose connection to culture.

What we call things, how we talk about our experiences, whether it's sitting in the pews of a church or sitting in a hip hop cypher, or just everyday language in the barbershop or a beauty parlor, our language is connected to those spaces, right?

And if we don't understand the value of that language, we don't understand how it's necessary, yes, to be able to talk differently to different audiences, but you still have to connect language to the culture that you come from.

- Yeah, I wanna pause there because there's a piece that I wanna share that speaks to that.

Black speech has always had rhythm, it's poetry, performance, and presence, but when that same rhythm is taken out of context and repackaged by others, what's really going on?

I wanna take a look at this video called "Blaccent" published by PBS Digital Studios on the PBS Origins YouTube channel.

We're gonna share it in its entirety because it really dives into how the so-called Blaccent has become both celebrated and at times exploited in mainstream media.

Take a look.

[light drum music] - [Broadcaster] Have you ever noticed this phenomenon?

- You all gotta understand that I'm not paying for ****.

♪ Oh boy, it's a white boy summer ♪ ♪ Boy, boy, back yard ♪ - Hommie, get yo ass in here.

- You gonna roll up to that wedding, and you going be like, bok, bok, bitch.

- I be trending.

[loud beeping] - [Announcer] Blaccent.

- Blaccent is essentially right there in the name.

It's a portmanteau of black and accent.

So blaccent scent, or what I'm thinking of as vocal blackface are kind of interchangeable.

They're both instances of people who are not black adopting African-American English or African-American vernacular English.

- [Broadcaster] Seems like it's been in show business for decades.

[light music] ♪ Mamme ♪ ♪ Mamme ♪ - [Broadcaster] Yeah, so why do people keep using it again and again and again?

Let's get a "Historian's Take" on why entertainers use Blaccent.

♪ You ain't nothing but ♪ [audience screaming] ♪ A hound dog, crying all the time ♪ ♪ You ain't nothing but a hound dog ♪ - Elvis' recording "Hound Dog" is super interesting for a couple of reasons.

The first is that it is a cover, which is probably news to a lot of folks, because a lot of folks think of it as sort of an original Elvis track, but it's actually a cover of Big Mama Thornton.

Her version of "Hound Dog" that actually proceeded it by a few years.

♪ You ain't nothing but a hound dog ♪ ♪ Come snooping around the door ♪ - And then the second thing that makes it interesting is that it launches a young Elvis Presley onto the international stage in a major way.

And he becomes lauded as sort of the king of rock and roll, where Big Mama Thornton is largely forgotten by mainstream audiences as being one of the major architects of rock and roll.

During this time, radio was largely segregated, and it meant that black musicians and white musicians were rarely, if ever played, on the same radio stations.

So we start to see the first all black radio stations at the tail end of the 1940s and into the 1950s.

And the first black radio station was WDIA in Memphis.

- [Announcer] The place where the blues began in Memphis, Tennessee, WDIA, invites you to join us and asking the man upstairs to smile on us today.

- So even white artists like Elvis were huge listeners to stations like WDIA and these race music stations.

And they were being influenced by the new culture and the new sound that they were being introduced to.

- A lot of people when they heard Elvis thought he was black, didn't it?

- At first, yes.

- Yeah.

- [Host] Said he was playing black music.

He was a white guy.

- Yeah, but see, at first he was playing more like rockabilly.

He wasn't really getting into the things that he started to do later.

But when he started to do that, then he started to turn heads, including mine.

- The real issue at hand here is that there was an imbalance of power.

So while white artists were busy sort of adopting, covering and appropriating black artists songs and seeing huge profits from these covers, black artists were largely not seeing the same profits, not seeing the same success, and not having the access to the music industry that white artists were.

Early rock and roll was invented by black people.

Folks like Chuck Berry were duck walking and swiveling their hips before Elvis ever came on the scene.

♪ Unforgettable ♪ ♪ - Nat King Cole, he's being run out of town, ♪ beat up by mobs.

♪ Though near or far ♪ - Whereas Elvis, who's, you know, making young, white teenagers, swoon is seen as a sex symbol.

Someone who's edgy, someone who's ahead of his time.

So there is a double standard.

- [Broadcaster] Wait a second.

So Elvis sang like black musicians and became the king of rock and roll.

But it looks like the trend of white people speaking like black folks started even earlier.

- One of the earliest examples of vocal blackface was definitely the radio show "Amos 'N' Andy".

- [Amos] Andy, wake up, wake up.

- [Andy] Hello.

- [Amos] Then this.

- [Andy] Come in here and wake me up like this.

- It premiered in 1928 and it was wildly popular and successful.

Millions of Americans tuned in five nights a week to listen to these two white actors who got their start on the minstrel and vaudeville stages basically perform as black men.

There was this sort of racial tension and anxiety caused by the great migration.

Millions of people fleeing from the south in order to escape restrictive laws and racist laws, as well as class tension and anxiety caused by the Great Depression.

And so people were looking for ways, particularly white people were looking for ways to reinstate or reaffirm their control on the racial hierarchy of this country.

And I think that made the show "Amos 'N' Andy" even more appealing to these audiences.

- [Broadcaster] So appealing that they made spinoff movies.

- The Kingfish is coming over to talk over a big abolition.

- [Broadcaster] Cartoons.

- Amos.

- Andy.

- [Broadcaster] Even a TV show.

- Well boys, it looked like I was the big winner.

- The "Amos 'N' Andy" show actually led to the first all black cast of a television show in history.

And I think that complicates the ways that we have to look at its legacy.

These actors who were on the show were instructed to maintain the blaccent and maintain the sort of caricature of the earlier radio program because that's what made it successful.

And the producers of the show thought it was more authentic.

- How do you do there?

- Good point.

[ By forcing these actors into sort of a narrow role, they were essentially forced to adopt this really stereotypical version of themselves and reflect back to white audiences what they expected more than what was actually authentic to the black experience.

- Where's that husband of mine?

He didn't come home last night and left this note saying he was going away to make his fortune and he'd send me later.

- In some ways, it gave opportunity to black actors who were looking to express their talents, and in other ways it perpetuated the violence and the racial stereotyping of the original program.

- [Broadcaster] But Professor Bainbridge, this was the 1950s.

Surely we've made some progress since "Amos 'N' Andy", right?

- Don't sleep, don't sleep.

'Cause you might disappear inside that.

- That's slick, right?

- Yeah.

- She came back though.

She like, she likes you.

- The continuing controversy around awkwafina and her use of blaccent has a lot of different moving parts and it started very early in her career.

♪ My make your girl panties cream ♪ ♪ Yo, spreads hepatitis C ♪ - But she adopts sort of an African American accent while she's rapping.

And then after that she becomes better known for her acting than her music.

But even in television and film, she's still adopting this very particular African American vernacular English while she's performing.

And she's largely performing funny characters, comedic characters.

- You gonna roll up to that wedding, you gonna be like bye, bye, bitch.

- Seeing her gain success for using blaccent was extremely problematic.

But I also think she got more critique specifically because she was a woman of color.

And I think that people are more likely to hold women of color to a higher standard than they are other groups.

- [Broadcaster] Hmm, but it sounds like a lot of people on the internet speak with a blaccent now.

- When someone says like, period, cyst, whatever, snatch all that, that it's very much like internet culture.

- I think the argument that internet lingo or teen speak is synonymous with blaccent is actually quite harmful, and can be really a slippery slope, because in some ways it normalizes adopting an appropriating blaccent or adopting an appropriating black culture as just being the norm.

While some folks are saying, well, it's internet lingo, it's internet speak, they're also, you know, becoming huge TikTok celebrities and influencers off of doing these actions.

- 11, 10, nine.

♪ Bed beat what up ♪ ♪ Buzz though cut it, cut it ♪ ♪ Iced out ♪ - When a black person does adopt say, you know, AVE, they're seen as ungrammatical, less professional, less desirable, and less likely to be hired.

- [Broadcaster] Wow, that double standard is literally costing people their jobs.

So what can we do about it?

- I'm not a fan of dragging people online, but I do think holding people accountable could look a lot of different ways.

Going back to awkwafina, one of the ways she could have credited the black community for sort of some of the innovation that she was, you know, taking credit for with her blaccent, would've just been simply saying, sorry.

I don't profess to be an awkwafina historian, but I think it's important for us to think of gentler ways that we can engage with each other, and engage as communities of color, because we do have a shared destiny and also a shared sense of politics that makes it really important to think about solidarity.

So I wonder if there are just other ways of engaging.

- If you're looking to rewatch that piece at any point, it's called "Blaccent," hosted by Danielle Bainbridge.

She's an assistant professor of theater at Northwestern University, and you can find that video on PBS Origins' YouTube channel.

Mark Anthony, when we look at the tensions between the devaluation of AAVE, let's say, in our lived lives at work, and the appropriation of it in media, there's a lot of double standard.

- I think we have to be clear that what we see in terms of how black folks are expected to talk is an attempt to police black identity, to keep black folks from being fully authentic in their professional spaces and in their public spaces.

It creates a kind of anxiety amongst black folks about how to best present themselves.

- So it's a control.

- It's a control mechanism, absolutely.

But on the flip side, it is culturally valuable, economically valuable in the cultural space, in the popular culture space, because it's a spectacle of a non-black person sounding so black.

I mean, that was the thing about Elvis Presley.

How is this white guy sounding that way and moving the way he does?

The famous quote from Ray Charles, where he goes, "Elvis hasn't done anything "but shake his ass, and black folks been doing that for centuries."

So that becomes a kind of spectacle, and then it's connected to commodities culture.

So it's not surprising that folks who appropriate black culture, black language, black style, become much more well-known and famous than the cultural originators.

The other piece about this is that black culture is expansive.

And what happens in these moments is that you take a little slither of language, some small aspect of black life, apply it to all black folks, as if there's not a difference between how black folks sound in North Carolina and how black folks sound in New York, and black folks, just as three examples.

And it becomes a weird litmus test that when you have black folks who express themselves in the most diverse ways, it's often white folks who are going, "You don't sound black."

- I was just about to say that.

My whole life, I never sounded black enough.

And I'm like, "I'm just being Kenia, "so how do I sound black enough?"

And so often you get this surprised, "Oh," if we've spoken on the phone and they meet me in person.

- There's a confusion.

- There's a confusion.

And so we find ourselves having to code switch constantly.

And I say that that attributes deeply to, especially women, and she mentioned that in the video, this identity crisis.

But yet we see younger folks today taking ownership of that regardless of where they are.

- I think you've seen for generations now high-level black professionals understanding the value of code switching.

When they're in their corporate space, their business space, their professional space, they wanna make sure there's no misunderstandings about what they represent and what their ideas are.

They're gonna be most legible to their white peers talking the way that their white peers do.

But at the same time, when you're black in community and you want to be comfortable, and it's also, I think, for many black professionals, particularly middle-class black folks who've left "the hood," it's also a sign of authenticity to be able to go back home and talk the way that you were raised, the way your grandparents talked, the way that your parents talked.

- I'll take back the Creole example again.

Haiti is now taking ownership of this, teaching Creole, actually now having written form of it, and they're taking ownership in the classroom.

When we look at AAVE, is that being taught now, or is that being accepted in the classroom?

What does that look like?

- It's complicated because school districts are so different.

I was not necessarily a fan, when we used to talk about Ebonics a few years ago.

I was not a fan of teaching Ebonics in the classroom.

- What's the difference?

- It was really kind of a nice branding term.

- For AAVE.

- For AAVE.

And my feeling about AAVE in the classroom is that teachers need to be equipped to understand students and their ideas in whatever ways they present themselves in the classroom.

That's becomes what's most important, to be culturally competent enough in the classroom that you can pick up on the different modes of code switching, not just with black students, but even white students, who are coming from rural areas, who talk differently than white folks that we might hear on television.

For me, in the classroom, that's where it's most important, for folks who are being trained as teachers to understand what they're hearing is not a lack of intellect, it's not a lack of capability.

And I think we most empower young folks to understand the value of code switching.

As you mentioned, there are a lot of young, black content creators who understand that dynamic.

- Yeah.

What's lost when we take AAVE out of cultural context?

- You lose connections to institutions in history.

There are certain words that resonate for black folks because it's connected to a time and place.

And you have generations of young folks who don't know those words, who don't know those sounds.

It disconnects them to that history.

And that's part of always the ongoing challenge, that when you colonize a group of people, one of the ways that you disconnect them from land and history is to force them to speak another way.

The genius of blackness here in the US were the struggles that those early folks who came over here, forced over here, figured out how to still maintain a connection to home.

At the same time that they're trying to figure out how to survive in this new place.

- What about those that argue, we should leave that in the past, just like the monuments that have been taken down, we don't need to see those anymore.

- I mean, that's dangerous, right?

Because history repeats itself.

We're living in a moment now that feels very 1930-ish.

Right?

- Yeah.

When we think about media, film, television, podcasting, how does shaping both white and black perspectives of black speech, how does that shape what we see today in mainstream?

- I think for the mainstream, they're always looking for their sense of what authenticity is.

We hear this a lot in television, you hear this a lot in film.

It's a value, you know, we're in this interesting moment where historically, black artists, for instance, had to work very hard to cross over to white audiences.

Since the 1990s, and largely because of hip hop, white audiences have crossed over to blackness, right?

In ways that have been pretty unprecedented.

But at the same time, I think it's clear that we've had white performers of black vernacular, who just simply blow up in ways that we don't see black artists in the same time.

And I can't say that there's anything necessarily deliberately nefarious about this, but this is the reality.

White audiences are most comfortable watching folks who look like them.

I mean, that's just the reality.

- And I think most people are more comfortable among folks that look like them.

That's not a problem, right?

It's when you impact or hold back or punish those that don't, because of that reason.

- And then the flip side of the conversation is, are young black folks being charged with talking white?

- Yeah, so in the piece, Professor Bainbridge talked about the violence of imitation.

Do you see her points there that she made?

- Because in imitation, you lose nuance.

You lose context, right?

Black folks aren't just randomly walking around as stereotypes using quote unquote black slang, right?

There is a cultural and historical context for the way that we use language.

When you see a TikTok video, you don't see any of that context, right?

It just becomes a tagline that's funny, that then goes viral, and it loses all sense of the history behind it.

- And when we think about taking back ownership of just being myself, right?

I now feel empowered to walk into any room, black, white, whatever, and speak as Kenia speaks, right?

But is there still this level of expectation for black people to sound black among our own people?

- I think it always raises questions.

I can remember when Barack Obama first became a national candidate, and there were a lot of questions about his black identity.

Obama sounds like Obama sounds, but one of the things I think that's interesting about this discussion is that we're not just talking about language.

We're talking about facial expressions.

We're talking about gestures.

We're talking about how people walk.

And when black folks saw Barack walk, they knew that that was a black man.

That stride, that gait, that kind of gangsta lean, you know, his refined gangsta lean, if you will.

All those things, I think, play a part, because I think black folks are often wondering and suspicious when people have success in the mainstream, what did you have to give up in order to be successful?

- Do you think there's a level of envy?

Because, you know, if someone wants to be like you, talk like you, dress like you, walk like you, they must like you.

- Or likes the idea of what it feels like to wear you.

I mean, that's the irony, right, of this moment of appropriation.

So many young, non-black folks embracing black culture, but are not embracing the black experience in its full context.

Because when all is said and done in the context of law enforcement, the judicial system, immigration in this moment, right, they can literally just walk away from that performance and still be who they are.

Black folks still, you know, people of color don't have that kind of flexibility.

- Yeah.

Where do you see AAVE going?

Where do you, do we, do you see the retention of black vernacular and the integration in a more respectable sense in the future?

- Yes and no.

I think we see highly successful black professionals, you know, entertainers even, who are successfully balancing who they are, where they come from, and speaking to a mainstream audience.

What I worry about is that there's less of a connection for young folks to black culture of the past.

And the irony of it is that there are many young folks who have so much access to black culture, because it's so widely archived now, but have little knowledge of what's actually in that archive.

And for me, that's a challenge.

- Yeah.

This was a very interesting conversation.

I loved it.

Thank you so much.

- Thank you for having me, Kenia.

- Dr.

Mark Anthony Neal.

I appreciate your insights.

- Thank you.

- And I thank you for watching.

If you want more content like this, we invite you to engage with us on Instagram using the hashtag #BlackIssuesForum.

You can also find our full episodes on pbsnc.org/blackissuesforum and on the PBS video app.

I'm Kenia Thompson.

I'll see you next time.

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