Aren’t black circles what you get under your eyes when you’re really tired?
I don’t think clearing up the usage of a particular popular slang term is as dramatic as speaking for an entire race and assuming a universal identity. Would you be speaking for the entire white race if you cleared up to a bunch of black people that “stoked” doesn’t necessarily mean “high on marijuana”? Or would it be reasonable for you to be confident that that term was pretty much used the same way nationally?
No he doesn’t. But I can’t ever imagine anyone accusing him of “acting white” because he doesn’t say skreet, either. Plenty of people “sound black” without using street slang and ebonics, and he’s one of them.
Bryant Gumble, in contrast, is called an oreo because he speaks like a stereotypical white guy. He has that whole nasal thing going on that is often seized upon by comedians.
My point is that neither guy strikes me as more intelligent than the other, but Gumble is much more likely to be accused of “acting white” than Sharpton is. Coincidentally (or not), the public is also probably more apt to see Gumble as more intelligent because he sounds stereotypically white. Hence, the “acting white” insult is assumed to be about intelligence when its not.
Then some of us are fucked. Unless I think about it my normal discourse tends towards precise and formal. I don’t intend it to be a means of displaying my education, nor to intimidate people. But I’ve been told, time and time again, that it is percieved that way.
Once people get to know me, I can relax back to my normal discourse, and they seem to accept that I don’t mean anything confrontational about it. Until that point is reached, however, it’s usually more effective, and more positive for me, to simply try to shift my normal speech patterns.
I’m not talking about trying to affect some kind of persona that I don’t have - I never try to use ‘cool’ or ‘hip’ because I know it’s not a voice I can use. I’d be putting on a set of someone else’s clothes, and everyone would see how poorly it fits.
But that doesn’t mean, to me, that adjusting one’s speech for one’s audience is necessarily talking down to people. It simply seems good manners.
Funny you should choose that example. I first heard stoked when I went to college in Florida – I presume it originated as a surfer word, cause that’s who used it. I told someone back home I was “totally stoked” about something and they had no idea what I was talking about b ut guessed from context that I was pleased – this would be much more difficult with the idiom that is the subject of this thread. Language gets corrupted/evolves (read WordCourt or do a search for ‘prescriptivist’ on this board to see many a debate over what somethign “means.”), why should idioms be any different? Hell, given that idioms are just that (i.e. not literal), they are more open to a variety of interpretations.
I see. Would any of the following likely be accused of “acting white”
Oprah Winfrey
Tavis Smiley
Juan Williams
Barack Obama
Bill Cosby
Chris Rock (he’s got the nerdiest voice of damn near anyone I’ve ever heard)
Will Smith
Even still, “acting white” doesn’t, through any immediate logic, convey “doing well in school”, so there’s no reason to imagine that it probably spread that way somewhere when it was once unfamiliar.
I’m not sure I follow the second half of this. No idiom conveys its meaning through “immediate logic,” because idioms are not literal. Stoked, used idiomatically, has nothing to do with tending to a fire. It’s intended meaning was inferred from context (my friend inferred that I was pleased when I told him I was totally stoked). From context, White American (mistakenly) inferred the intra-racial slur “acting white” to be: acting in a manner associated with academic success and/or demonstrating characteristics of being well-educated. White America did not provide the context. The speaker did/does. I am not trying to attack you by stating you don’t speak for black Americans everywhere. I’ve heard the phrase “acting white” used in contexts completely inconsistent with the defintion you are advocating as universal.
I’m not one to accuse anyone of “acting white” so I may not be qualified to answer your question, but out of this list of people, the only person who I could see being accused of that (by a large number of people) is Oprah. And only because she sometimes does that whole OHMYGOD! thing. My assessment has nothing to do with how erudite she sounds.
Tavis, Juan, Barack, Bill, Chris, and Will…none of those guys makes me think they would have had to deal with the “acting white” thing very much. I could be wrong, though. I dunno. You didn’t ask about him, but I could see Dave Chappelle getting it because I get a sense he may have been a geeky kid, and his blaccent accent isn’t particularly strong. There’s a midwestern blandness to his diction.
I was going to bring him up, but figured Chris Rock kind of fit that bill and he would just be duplicative. I know that sounds weird with Juan and Tavis on there but Juan has been very crititcal of many elements of hip hop culture while Tavis really just comes across as a black Charlie Rose. Good interviewer, asks some tough questions but doesn’t appear terribly partisan. Tavis also yuks it up sometimes, Juan not so much. The Barack thing surprises me kind of, but then it shouldn’t. I was at his rally at Tech a couple of weeks ago and he had a very strong following among Atlanta’s considerable black intelectual crowd, but when he tries to “be real” he does kind of come across as plastic. I like the guy a lot and want to see him do well, so I hope his stump speech improves. It’s not good when your warm up guy is better then you (even if your warm up guy is Joe Lowrey).
Well, at an economically depressed public high school in the barrio of East Austin in the late 1980s, all the things you mention were “cool,” but not incompatible with doing well in school (with the possible exception of skipping class, though I can verify that a bunch of us went to our teachers and told them we were skipping school on senior skip day. They told us to be careful.)
Our salutatorian fenced car radios. Most of us were sexually experienced, or at least had girlfriends/boyfriends so we could lie about it. There was a crack house across from school, and weed wasn’t a big deal, if you smoked it or not. You sure as hell didn’t do it at school, because we had cops and the occasional drug dog coming through. Gold Star paint was the popular narcotic, and those folks rarely made it to school, and certainly weren’t considered cool.
Our top ten graduates, if I remember correctly were: 2 White, 2 Asian, 1 guy who was half White and half Asian, 3 Black, and 2 Latino. I will certainly place myself in the slightly nerdy class, but only one of us was really considered “uncool.” And he was a weird duck, period. We were known and popular, played sports, worked jobs afterschool, had disputes with some kids, and not others.
I guess the term “cool” was so diffuse, that if you weren’t extreme in any direction and had friends, you were generally considered thus. Either that or you were just “unknown.”
I already mentioned my experience teaching in inner-city Houston. I supervised a research project at a local high school east of Boston last year. We interviewed about twenty students, almost all African-American or recent Black immigrants. When we asked kids to describe themselves, they all mentioned their grades and were proud of their A’s and B’s (while occasionally glossing over their C’s and worse).
I think there’s the archetype of the “nerd” - socially awkward, oddly clothed, and smart without much effort, brownnosers - and when kids see each other close up, they realize how often smart kids can be socially adept, wear cool clothes, and work hard. Similar to a lot of my athlete friends, who probably spent the most time worrying about grades so they could be eligible to play. They were eager to disprove that they weren’t “dumb jocks.”
As for the kids who aren’t involved, that might be where the derision comes from. But by high school those kids are rarely part of the expansive social network, because they’re not in school, where kids spend most of the day. Just my anecdotal experience here.
It’s interesting you have Tavis on the list. I can’t guess who the “most likely” would be, but he would definitely be the “least likely”. He’s an example of a well-spoken black people who sounds identifiable black. My ears register him as coming out of the southern black church tradition of oration.
They provided the context of overhearing people who weren’t speaking to them. And “demonstrating characteristics of being well-educated”, which I won’t argue is a usage of the term, is not exactly the same as “being academically successful”, which I am arguing, so don’t slip that “and/or” in so easily.
That’s why I said “‘White’, in this usage, doesn’t mean academically successful”. I wasn’t claiming that the idiom is only used one way, I’m claiming that simply “academically successful” is not one of its usages, and in those instances where outside observers misinterpreted it that way it was actually being used as a synonym for dorky. I’ve also admitted that dorkiness and academic success easily overlaps. So when have you heard the term used inconsistently with what I’m saying, because the anecdotes you’ve given so far don’t contradict me?
Obama does for me too. Ain’t nothing Bryant Gumble-esque about him at all.
That’s why he’s on there. I wanted to list some people who, if they called me on the phone, I would know they were black. I recognize his voice as that of a black man. I recognize the voices of Rock, Smith, and Winfrey as the voices of blacks. Cosby, Williams and expecially Obama, I would not place immediately as black.
really? there’s nothing “southern” about him either.
Ooh, I want to play!
Oprah - I think she is respected and acknowledged as being “down,” though her topics on her show might suggest that she is the White middle-class woman’s best friend. I also think her vocal opposition to hip hop, and especially the way she treated Chris Bridges (Ludacris) had people questioning her “Blackness.” The discourse has advanced that hip hop is very naughty indeed, so I think she’s in the clear. Most of all, I think a lot of people see her kind of disconnected from a Black reality - she’s rich as hell, she’s not married and has no kids. So a lot of issues that Black people deal with on a daily basis, she doesn’t. (Again, this is just among the folks I roll with in my neck of the woods.)
Tavis - he’s what a lot of us call “country.” He is 200 percent Black, couldn’t escape his Blackness if he wanted to. As monstro notes, he’s got a lot of church-rearing evidence in him.
Juan Williams - maybe by some, because of his political beliefs. However, he’s not terribly out of step with what a lot of Black folks think, so I would say generally, no.
Barack - if you saw him on that clip when Sharpton’s Blackberry goes off when he’s speaking, and he joshes with him that Hillary was calling, I think that earned him a lot of cred among Black people. My sample is skewed because he’s a Harvard Law grad and most of my friends are Harvard affiliated. But I think he is accepted like a lot of biracial or first-generation Black Americans are. It seems you have a choice where you can either say, “Hey, I’m one of you,” or go the Tiger Woods route. (Not criticizing, but I’m pretty sure that you would have a hard time finding someone Black who thought that he had a strong Black identity.) He’s chosen to ally with Black Americans - his wife is African American, goes to a Black church, etc.
Bill - always Black. I think many are somewhat disappointed with his approach from a few years back, but I think most Black people I know think he has legitimate positions. He just didn’t articulate them very well, initially. He has some scandals as well, which I think in some ways endears him to a lot of us. (Yes, that is a crazy sentence.)
Chris - his commentary on issues of race make him perhaps one of the most prominent commentators on the issue of race, entertainment or otherwise. Knowing where he came from, what his comedy is about, who he is (was?) married to - he’s firmly in the family, as we say. (I know gay folks use that term as well, but I’m not using it that way.)
Will - back in the day, he totally came across as a nerdy person (and it seems that he did indeed do quite well in school - I heard he got into MIT). But I never sensed that he was considered to “act White.” Geeky, nerdy, yes, but again, he has a Black wife and his choice of projects usually represent Black people in a good light.
I think you have to look at people who take very public positions that are contrary to how a lot of Black people think - your Ward Connerlys, John McWhorters, and Clarence Thomases - who might be considered to “act White.” It’s more than what one does for a living, or how one speaks. It’s those things, but also a commitment to ideas that work against the (perceived) best interests of Black people. Personally I don’t think these people are “acting White.” I’ve actually spoken with McWhorter before and found that we agreed on a number of things.
Just my $.02…
“Being well educated” is practically synonymous with “being academically succesful.” How likely is the scenario that one is educated without succesfully assimilating knwoledge and displaying that assimilation? *Good Will Hunting * was a fictional movie. If the former is a usage of the idom then it’s no leap for the for the latter to be as well.
:mad: It sure is, but that’s not what you said.
according to the OP, 'geeky, nerdy" is “acting white.”