By Alec Dent
Tuesday, September 03, 2019
Late last week, BuzzFeed published an article on
the phrase “sksksksksk,” which was . . . about as silly as you’d imagine. The
long and short of its argument? Among today’s youths, “sksksksksk” is a popular
slang term that originated in the black community, and if you’re white and use
it, you are “appropriating language from black communities.”
The concept of cultural appropriation is hardly new, but
the linguistic policing that serves as the basis for the BuzzFeed
article takes it to a new level. Accusations of cultural appropriation are
usually leveled against white people who adopt elements of another ethnicity’s
culture in a way that is perceived as making light of that culture’s history
and traditions. (I say “perceived” because, of course, perception does not
align with reality in every case.) But sksksksksks is different. It has no rich
history; it is a rather young phrase, which, the author admits at the very end
of the article, started in Brazil as a variant of “kkkkkkkk,” a standard phrase
Brazilians use to express laughter in text. What’s more, English, like any
language, is built on adopting new words and phrases into the
mainstream. And by necessity, in order to become mainstream, a word must cross
racial and cultural divides.
Though its roots are Germanic, the English we speak today
was heavily influenced by French and Latin as well. It has changed over time
thanks to the exchange that takes place when cultures meet and interact, from
the language of Beowulf to that of Chaucer’s poems to that of
Shakespeare’s plays to that of Donald Trump’s tweets. Language does not evolve
for better or worse, though the last entry on that list may suggest otherwise
to some; it simply changes with the times. Naturally, in a country as diverse
as the United States, a great deal of cultural interaction and exchange takes
place. Words and phrases that are adopted into the mainstream as slang often
become so thoroughly embedded in the language that we forget where they came
from.
Though other languages may still affect English, much of
the linguistic evolution that occurs in the United States is internally driven
by regional, dialectical, and subcultural differences. “OK,” for example, is
thought to have been created during a Boston-centered abbreviation craze that coincided
with a national fad of intentional humorous misspellings in the late 1830s, it
being an abbreviation for “oll korrect.” “Hipster” comes from the term
“hepcat,” a word coined by black jazz musicians in the early to mid 1900s to
describe those in the jazz scene who were cool and in the know. “Gnarly”
started out in the West Coast surfer community but burst into the mainstream in
the ’80s. The groups that coined these terms have all made contributions to our
language, which in turn belongs to all of us. That their creations became
widespread isn’t a sign of malevolent word-stealing but of the
interconnectedness of American society and the aggiornamento of American
English.
The Buzzfeed article gives a few more examples of
phrases white people have supposedly “appropriated” from black people in recent
history: “Spill the tea,” “throw shade,” “and I oop.” It isn’t an anomaly,
either; I’ve seen similar concerns expressed in The Oprah Magazine and
at HuffPost, and in college I heard people rail against white appropriation of
black slang all the time. It’s an argument that seems oddly removed from the
reality of how language works.
I agree that true cultural appropriation is wrong and
should be guarded against. Caucasians have been historically privileged in
American society, and it would be wrong of us to commodify or in any way
diminish the cultures of historically oppressed peoples. But the use of
“sksksksks” by white teenagers isn’t offensive; it’s merely part of the natural
evolution of language. And that’s the tea, sis.
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