By “DJ Ferguson”
“Sounds like a white Southern smoker doing an impression of African American Vernacular English (AAVE),” was my first thought hearing the voice of the character played by Nora Lum (Awkwafina) in the Crazy Rich Asians trailer. Apparently, she was just going for a white Southern accent for some reason, or so she said. But this white Southern quality of her voice in the role made the noticeable dip into AAVE churn up very uncomfortable memories of Blackface and Minstrelsy in that region. If there was any mild irritation about the way she has presented herself across her career thus far, this role would turn the gnat into a horsefly.
One of the primary objections to Lum’s comedy and comedic music is that it lends to the idea that Black English/AAVE = joke. At the same time, in past interviews Lum has expressed great concern and care not to take on roles where she’s being made out to be a “minstrel” of her own people by doing a (Fu) Manchu Chinese accent or where the creative handling of Asianness/Asian Americanness isn’t done with the appropriate care and consideration.
Lum’s ‘blaccent’ seems relegated to her work in comedy, but in at least one interview Lum’s grandmother could allegedly vouch for the fact that she speaks this way at home. In another, Lum says she had to learn how to carry herself more appropriately in professional settings and had to repress her preexisting speech patterns and mannerisms. She also graduated from the same high school that produced other problematic faves such as Azealia Banks and Nicki Minaj. Because of this, we can charitably operate under the assumption that she naturally speaks some version of African American Vernacular English that happens to be an ear-sore to many native speakers of AAVE.
I don’t subscribe to the kind of linguistic chauvinism that would make me believe in “bad English” or “broken English,” so I’ll credit the “off” nature of what we’re hearing to linguistic influences from her Han Chinese heritage. The “stereotypical” Chinese sounding “broken English” Lum would be loathed to make fun of in a movie is called “Chinglish.” Like AAVE, I’m sure it has a myriad of regional and class variations. I’ve talked to a few Asian friends about this, and in the discussions the term “African American Vernacular Chinglish” (AAVChi) was floated as a description of what happens when AAVE is absorbed by Chinese Americans where they inject varying degrees of Chinese influence. What we’re hearing could possibly be a Queens variant of this hypothetical accent/dialect.
But to fixate on hard differentiations between those who “put on” our music or culture to sound “modern” or trendy or edgy or funny, and those who speak and create from a place of authenticity only serves to further legitimize more specific forms of appropriation over the movement to delegitimize appropriation as a whole. The line where engagement with Black culture becomes participation in anti-Black appropriation is when either the “forced” or “natural” productions of Blackness is owned by non-Black people to serve White or non-Black wealth or profit. Â
When authenticity becomes a fixation, it becomes acceptable for a white man to get in front of a camera and declare himself a ‘Rap God†as long as he’s sufficiently fluent in AAVE. Did he work to perfect this persona or grow up being this way? What’s a better choice between a bad sounding “real†accent/dialect and a perfected “fake†accent/dialect? Which one do they have to perform 24/7 before we’re convinced it’s “real†and decide to give it a pass on that basis? How long do they have to put on and keep up the “fake accent†before it becomes second nature? Or does it only count if they grew up speaking that way?
Whether natural or artificial, AAVChi is a Black cultural production created outside of a contract with the native speakers of AAVE, and existing without guidance or direction by said speakers. It is both Black and Asian. I find the casual use of the term “bastardization†dehumanizing to actual persons born out of wedlock, but there’s something very telling about its use as a more crude definition of appropriation. Even though the “blaccent” and permutations thereof are the offspring of the Black community and rightfully under our care, we don’t really “own” them. We and our “children” function as the collective property of the United States and American Imperialism.
In 1954, with her family’s survival hanging in the balance after the death of her husband in the Korean War, South Korean singer Lee Nan-Young (best known for “Tears of Mokpo”) assembled two of her young daughters and her niece into “The Kim Sisters” to perform for American G.I.s. After some initial success reciting American music, acquired with great difficulty by Lee, their popularity with the Americans skyrocketed when the trio started reciting Rock and Roll songs. The young Kim Sisters were eventually brought to the United States for what would be a very profitable musical career, and some now consider The Kim Sisters to be the very first K-Pop group.
By 1954, the Rock and Roll industry, despite being born in Cotton Plant with Rosetta (Tharpe) Nubin, had largely been turned to lily white by Euro-American colonizers. Bill Haley and The Comets were #1 on the charts. The music that would become Rock and Roll was a sacred gift from The Black God of The Crossroad to Robert Johnson, but it had become a vehicle to boost the morale of genocidal imperialists. What was taken from the “uncivilized†was being performed by those they were working to impose white civilization onto.
The sort of minstrelsy Lum claims to avoid brings to mind the long history of Orientalist circus acts, as well as the kind of audiences The Kim Sisters would sometimes have to pander to through self-Orientalism. The Kim Sisters didn’t speak English and probably didn’t even appreciate the significance of the lyrics at that time, but more importantly they weren’t in a position to have already known that the cultural artifacts given to them weren’t for white imperialists to give, not for them to build wealth with, and not for them to recruit other non-Black people in their wealth building projects. But when powerful white men hold the keys to our survival, no one makes it out ideologically pure.
The question is not whether others can authentically come in contact with what has been “bastardized,†it is how do we reunite these illegitimate Black “children” with their Black “parentsâ€?
When Seren Sensei accused Bruno Mars of appropriation, so many of us rushed to Bruno’s defense. We shunned our own Sister because we loved Bruno, and we loved Bruno because unlike others who participate in the appropriation of Black culture, he cites his sources of inspiration.
But Sensei dug into a particularly uncomfortable truth about the nature of appropriation: authenticity, artificiality, quality, giving props, even individual advocacy or activism—none of it matters. Seren’s analysis about Africans who aren’t Black American (Akata) is certainly lacking, but she was definitely on the money about non-Black PoC.
In response to Seren, some non-Black PoC brought up “Black people appropriating Asian culture.†There does exist Orientalist appropriation that Black Americans can participate in, insofar as we’ve internalized the notion of Blackness as property of a genocidal Settler Colony. The key word here is that we can “participate” in appropriation, as opposed to doing the actual appropriation. Any “appropriation” by Westernized Black people depends on the presupposed anti-Black appropriation of African land and people, and the fruits thereof that make modernity possible.
The “Great Divergence” between the West and the rest of the world and China’s subsequent “Century of Humiliation” both required anti-Blackness as the rise of The West depended on slavery. Black people can participate in appropriation, but we’re merely participants in white appropriation in a world built on the appropriation of Blackness.
When it comes to Asians and appropriation of Black genres of music, a similar point had been made that Asian Americans aren’t necessarily doing the appropriation per se, but rather, certain corporations are, and that we should focus less on non-Black artists and more on the mostly white owners. There is some truth in this. As much scrutiny as we’re placing on non-Black artists, we should be putting several times as much on non-Black executives and owners.
However, this argument by itself serves to erase the responsibility of non-Black people to actively help work toward returning Black ownership to Black culture that they can easily make money off of, and obscures our uneven status in a fundamentally anti-Black system.
I say “easily” not because non-Black artists don’t have to work hard or make quality content, but because our content can always be used to build off of when our work and labor is continually being separated from us. Hell, my great grandfather’s legacy of contribution to the Chitlin Circuit in Indianapolis by building venues for Black jazz musicians (Indiana Avenue) was all but legally burned down by the city through legal maneuvering. Now I’m left to reevaluate my feelings about Frank Sinatra, a great Italian American Jazz musician whose work I admire and who by my own standard, also participated in anti-Black appropriation.
My ambivalence isn’t due to the lack quality or authenticity of Sinatra’s work. The positive feelings about his music stem from my own recognition of the Blackness of it alongside what he added. Whatever negative feelings I have are because of the systematic separation of Blackness. Separating children from parents has never been difficult for America. It’s second nature. But separating Black children from Black parents is a specialty, and when America can’t do that, it separates us from quality parent-child relationships. This separation also defines appropriation.
Non-Black People of Color just fit right into these preexisting machinations. On their way to escape the Orientalism that frames Asianness as a box that limits individual potential, non-Black Asians will assert and emphasize the “Americanness” or “fill-in-cityness” of their own Black cultural productions and identity. This always serves to reassert American ownership and entitlement to Blackness, regardless of how authentic that claim is.
Asians who claim to have been authentically influenced and shaped by Black culture aren’t absolved. Instead, the fact of their authenticity obligates them. Asians who perform or put on Black culture can just remove it, but for Asians who supposedly can’t as easily, they’re now obligated to the people whose culture shaped them into the persons they are.
The Black people who jumped to Bruno’s defense were operating under the assumption that taking ownership over Black music is just when you falsely claim it originated from you or fail to cite sources. The reality is the system and the culture Bruno is operating under is taking ownership of us and our work regardless, building non-Black wealth with it regardless, undermining our capacity to build wealth with it regardless, advancing non-Blackness and whiteness within Black genres regardless. It’s his and other’s responsibility to help reverse this. Ownership is not a metaphor.
Minus the Patriarchal/Patrilineal component of the concept, Black Americans are owed filial piety, (a term borrowed from Confucian philosophy for a virtue of respect for one’s parents, elders, and ancestors, though not unique to it) from folks like Awkwafina and Bruno Mars, not censorship nor just props and pandering. Gratitude, not to American nationalism (Colonialism, Imperialism, and anti-Blackness), but to the people whose very struggle to survive with some sense of dignity and cultural continuity against these forces allowed others to do so similarly.
This gratitude would mean sustained anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism; a radical shift in political and existential priorities. Instead of clamoring for inclusion into whiteness and/or a recognition of equality to whiteness, they would be working toward inclusion into local and global Indigenous resistance to colonialism. They would be committing to their own heritage, history, ancestors, culture, and color(s), and to the unique ways they can help empower this revolution more than empowering the empire that enacts the violence against Black people locally and globally.
Instead of merely asking whether they have a right to engage in Black culture, we should ask how the engagement of others actually serves Black interests, including the reversal of anti-Black appropriation. How is their work forging a connection, a community, or formulating a contract between our peoples independently of whiteness and anti-Blackness? How could they ever allow our languages, whether a perfect reproduction of AAVE or a hypothetical variant like AAVChi, to be summoned like a party trick to make someone else rich or someone else laugh? If that’s the “real” them, then it’s all the more sacred and all the more reason not to monetize it without us or our direction.
Regardless of who wears our accent, how can the burden be responsibly shouldered in a way that respects both the native speakers who take offense and the native speakers who don’t? Both Bruno Mars and Awkwafina have demonstrated an understanding that our culture belongs to us, so how can we tangibly put this into practice moving forward?
The answers to these questions mark the end to bastardization and the beginning of legitimization and (re)unification.
Suggested Readings:
Muqing M. Zhang, “Performing Blackness Won’t Fill Our Asian-American Culture Deficit [OP-ED]“, Colorlines, 2018
Kenyon Farrow, “We Real Cool?:On Hip-Hop, Asian-Americans, Black Folks, and Appropriation“, Kenyon Farrow, 2018
sadie cruz, “There’s More to Seren Sensei Than Skewering Bruno Mars for Cultural Appropriation“, Vice, 2018
“DJ Ferguson” is a Black American (Akata), freelance writer who studied Philosophy at Ball State University. Would love to produce content like this for a living , so please help fund RaceBaitr!
