By Kevin D. Williamson
Sunday, August 26, 2018
I saw a bumper-sticker on an expensive car in an upscale
shopping area, which read: “Female Asian
Driver: Good Luck Everybody Else.” My first thought, times being what
they are, was: “Man, I really hope that that car does in fact belong to an
Asian woman.”
Turns out this is a fairly popular bumper-sticker — it is
a reference to a Family Guy bit —
that you can buy, inevitably, on Amazon. Amazon is very useful for shopping,
and its review section also provides excellent reading material, including this
one from the reviews of that bumper-sticker: “Great bumper-sticker! Funny gag
when my unsuspecting girlfriend found it on her car!” The line between
brashness and abject stupidity is blurry, and blurrier still after you’ve been
smacked upside the head by your girlfriend.
Asian-American women put up with an unbelievable amount
of stereotype-based nonsense, some of which strikes me as pretty amusing,
though it’s probably less amusing to them. (A woman of Taiwanese background
once explained to me her first-date protocol for identifying and weeding out
men with an Asian fetish. It probably would have been funnier as a movie scene
than in real life.) But, in this age of heightened social sensitivity,
Asian-American women can also easily end up being social-justice offenders,
particularly in the eyes of those with a professional commitment to being
offended.
Nora Lum, better known as her rapping alter ego
Awkwafina, is having her turn in the barrel. At issue is a scene in Crazy Rich Asians in which she employs
stereotypically African-American pronunciations and mannerisms when giving a
friend a you-go-girl pep talk. Lauren Michele Jackson, writing in Vulture, insists that “her persona has
veered too close to black aesthetics for comfort. . . . It is not just an
interracial matter, revived whenever a white rapper hits the Billboard charts or Nicki Minaj dips
into Orientalist aesthetics, but an intra-racial, intercultural,
cross-cultural, cross-regional, and diasporic one as well.”
Well.
One of the interesting things about Black English is that
nobody really knows where it comes from (or where it is going, a question known
in linguistics as the “divergence/convergence controversy”). One theory is that
Black English developed out of the convergence of the different African
languages spoken by slaves. Another theory holds that Black English is rooted
in old British English, having maintained certain features that are no longer
common in standard American or British English. Many of the features associated
with Black English are common in Appalachian usage as well. (The cultural linkages
there are complicated. Thomas Sowell, in Black
Rednecks and White Liberals, posits that the worst parts of dysfunctional
black-underclass culture are holdovers from white-redneck culture imported from
the South during the Great Migration.) There’s a whole wide, interesting body
of academic literature on the subject.
John McWhorter, a professor of linguistics at Columbia,
writes:
A white person’s depiction of Black
English may still rankle, and I have often sensed that the rub is that the white
person may think Black English is the only way that black people can talk, that
they are somehow impervious to mastering standard English. And that prejudice
was definitely real for a great while. Now, however, educated whites are quite
often aware that black people can talk in two ways depending on circumstance.
And not just black people, of course. “Code switching,”
the habit of matching one’s usage to one’s audience, is universal. To take one
entirely theoretical example, a white guy from West Texas may speak differently
at a family reunion than at a job interview at National Review. A person who speaks a mix of Spanish and English
at home may use more or less Spanish depending on his interlocutors. And Black
English is not used by black Americans exclusively. Crazy Rich Asians is a comedy, and Awkwafina is a comedic persona,
but it would be no means out of the American character for a native of Forest
Hills, Queens, U.S.-born with Chinese and Korean ancestry, to employ Black
English from time to time. Or much of the time — the variety of the American
scene is endless. HGTV star Joanna Gaines has a Korean mother and a
Lebanese–German father, and talks like a woman born in Wichita, Kan., and
raised there and in Waco, Texas. Which is (also) what she is.
I understand why people of Mexican background are
offended at the sight of drunk frat boys parading around in sombreros and why
the “Colonial Bros and Nava-Hos” Thanksgiving party at Cal Poly was
ill-considered. Ethnic humor is always safer when it comes from members of the
group in question: When researchers suggested that a 9,300-year-old skeleton
found near the Columbia River in Washington were Caucasian, the editors of this
magazine sternly demanded the repatriation of “any martini shakers or penny-loafers
found at the gravesite.” (Kennewick Man was later determined to be more closely
related to Southeast Asians than to Western Eurasians.) But those lines aren’t
always clear: From one point of view, Awkwafina might be seen as lampooning
black speech; from another, she might be seen as lampooning Asian Americans who
borrow from black usage, which some do.
It’s a wonderfully mixed-up country. Jazz and hip-hop are
musical forms with distinctively American roots, but that doesn’t mean that
Dave Brubeck or the Beastie Boys were engaged in the musical equivalent of
blackface. This is a country in which Ralph Lifshitz, a Jewish kid from the
Bronx, could mass produce WASP wardrobe staples, sell the country-club set
their own fantasies back to them under the name Ralph Lauren — and become a
favorite designer of young black men in the process. Americans, being largely
good-natured people, are torn between the desire to learn about and appreciate
other cultures (including other American cultures) and the mandate to “stay in
your lane.” How that is really supposed to work, I don’t know, but I doubt that
Ralph Lifshitz played a lot of polo in the Bronx.
My colleague Kat Timpf keeps a pretty good catalogue of
all the things deemed “problematic” in these thin-skinned days: hoop earrings
and nameplate necklaces on white women, a
television show about eating spicy chicken wings, etc. It is a never-ending
project. There isn’t that much organic outrage in the world; it is by necessity
manufactured.
If only there were some easy way to distinguish between
the decent and well-intentioned and the callous and hateful. Perhaps we should
consider the philosophical maxim of Raylan Givens: “If you get up in the
morning and you meet an a**hole, you met an a**hole. If you meet nothing but
a**holes all day, you’re the a**hole.”
Social-justice warriors take note.
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