by Nahlah Abdur-Rahman
March 10, 2024
Lizzo calls out white people for using, and demonizing AAVE, and urges the Black community to start gatekeeping their language.
Lizzo has had enough with the cultural appropriation. The singer went to TikTok to voice her frustrations on white people using African-American Vernacular language (AAVE), asking to “bring back gatekeeping” in her rant.
Lizzo went to the social media platform to voice her frustrations on white people using and demonizing cultural slang used within the Black community. In her video, the Grammy winner critiqued a white TikToker for being irritated when she hears her dating prospects saying the phrase “type sh-t.”
“Or even better, why don’t we bring back gatekeeping?” questioned Lizzo. “So that AAVE is reserved for the people who created it and grew up speaking it. So that all these people that are now talking like Black people because they read words on the internet and don’t know the origin and don’t participate in the culture don’t overuse it and then things like this happen.”
Lizzo urged her users to bring back gatekeeping, or prohibiting others from using, AAVE. She emphasized how people who did not grow up within Black culture or identify as Black should abstain from using it.
She then referred to the concept of “ganglish,” a portmanteau of gang and English to also define slang. The singer noted that the term is a racist dog whistle for how Black people speak.
“Because ‘ganglish’ is definitely the new ‘thug,’” she said. “When police would call someone a ‘thug’ but it’s really a Black person, which is the new hard ‘r’ N-word. I know so many people who have said ‘type sh*t, type sh*t’ their entire lives. I’ve heard them talk like that for years before it became trendy on the internet to say that.”
Lizzo is evidently fed up with others policing and categorizing the language used by Black people within their own spaces, and hopes that the appropriators get the hint soon.
“But maybe if these internet people get sick of it we can just continue to use our dialect in peace…type sh-t,” joked the singer.
Lizzo’s call out is also touching on the difference between Ebonics and Gen-Z lingo. Other cultural critics have stated previously that they are not one in the same, as reported by the Washington Post. While certain Black slang has become more mainstream, Lizzo is urging it be kept in-house, before the words are used against the very people who created them.
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