You just revealed some racialistic misperceptions of your own. AAVE is a dialect, not a “dumbed down” anything.
True, in our culture AAVE is perceived by most (including those who speak it regularly) as socioeconomically inferior to SAE. So, your point is a good one – it was just missing a caveat.
And, I totally agree that some white Americans sound false (perhaps even insulting) when they try to speak AAVE, while others do not. See my comparison of Jason Williams and Quentin Tarantino’s “Jimmy” character in my previous post. I guess it mainly comes down to the degree to which the speaker has been genuinely immersed in AA culture.
But let’s not take this criticism too far. We should applaud the fact that, just in recent years, AAVE is seen as a “prestige dialect” by some whites, in some ways. And, we shouldn’t discourage people in general from trying to learn, and use, new-for-them dialects and languages. Just like when you’re learning Spanish or French, it’s a mistake to wait too long to try it out in the real world. Sure, you’ll make all kinds of mistakes, but don’t be nervous – that’s how you learn!
Perhaps I should take a softer stance regarding Jophiel’s thinking. Basically, he’s saying that Jason Williams (a white-skinned American who speaks AAVE fluently, due to longtime immersion in certain types of African American culture) shouldn’t use the “n” word when speaking AAVE with his black friends, but those friends can use it (and surely use it to refer to HIM, interestingly enough – if they do, that would strengthen the argument that it just means “buddy” in AAVE.)
I can see room for debate here. The word is just too tied to skin color in our world to be so completely divorced from any chance of implication, in any context. An interesting question!
What if we take it a step further, and picture Jason Williams talking to his equally white, equally AAVE-proficient brother* – both of them speaking AAVE to each other? I’m sure this sort of thing has happened. I mean speaking it “genuinely” and naturally, not as some sort of hip, ironic game. What then? It seems to me it would be odd for them to OMIT the “n” word whenever they needed to use a word meaning “buddy.”
I wonder if any serious scholar has studied this.
(*Hypothetical brother – I know nothing of Mr. Williams’ family.)
Well, we all kinda know what race is (even though our “knowledge” is rooted in personal opinions/experience/assumptions/societal norms), its just that we’ll never come to a stable agreement on something so socially malleable. Social concepts naturally change with time and context.