"Styling Blackness" lecture points out stereotypes
Kelly Ardis
Issue date: 2/3/10 Section: Features
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"The language used in it may be offensive," she told the attendees.
But when the crowd replied with a laugh and no one darted for the door, Bucholtz, a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, began her lecture.
The latest in the lectures in Language & Linguistics series put on at Cal State Bakersfield by Sigma Tau Delta, the International Honors Society, "Styling Blackness" took place on Jan. 21 at 7 p.m. in the CSUB Dezember Reading Room in the Walter Stiern Library.
In it, Bucholtz spoke about films featuring white characters speaking in "African American Vernacular English, or AAVE," as Bucholtz called it. These characters she referred to as "wiggers."
"The word 'wigger' is really problematic, but it is widely known," she said. "These films show white youth entering into alignment with black culture. In most films, the wigger is almost always male. Gender is key to how the wigger figure is understood."
Although she said gender plays a role in understanding these types of characters, in this lecture she focused primarily on films featuring white male characters. In these films, the "wigger" characters practice one of two ideologies: "fronting" or "keeping it real," according to Bucholtz.
"With fronting, the character is seen as inauthentic and compensating for gender failure," she said. "With keeping it real, the white male character gets in touch with his true self."
In both of these ideologies, the characters change the way they speak and adopt AAVE. Some of the characteristics of white Hollywood AAVE, Bucholtz said, include the deletion of the letter 'r' after vowels, pronunciation of "the" as "da," pronunciation of "-ing" as "-in," and the use of double or multiple negatives.
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