Give Me Back My Language! The Harmful Nature of Language Appropriation for American Minorities
The bad news? Language appropriation is harming minority populations across America. The good news? We can change that.
Introduction
The term “cultural appropriation” is one with which many people are familiar. When we talk about cultural appropriation we often discuss it in terms of the physical. For example, young people these days are taught about the harmful nature of using someone else’s culture as Halloween costumes, and we are often warned about the cruelty that cultural appropriation can inflict on people of other cultures. However, one thing that we don’t talk about very often is the idea of appropriating language. For hundreds of years, dominant cultures have been stealing language from the people that they oppress in order to profit off of those oppressed cultures. Whether it be white authors from the 19th century, or rap artists today, in America the dominant class (white people) has been appropriating language from minority groups, especially black Americans, since our conception as a nation. While appropriating language may not seem as harmful as physical appropriation, stealing the intellectual property of other cultures and people in order to make a profit can deeply wound or even destroy those other cultures.
The Appropriation of Language in Novels
Dialects and Speech Patterns
Some of the earliest appropriation of language that occurred in the United States can be found in our early writing. White authors wanted to write black characters (usually a slave or helper character, almost never a protagonist of any kind) who spoke the way that white people perceived black people to speak, and so they often would include a dialect for their black characters. These dialects were harmful because they appropriated the language of an oppressed people without any clear understanding of where the dialect comes from, or why people spoke with that dialect in the first place. These white authors did not care about whether their writing of the dialect was accurate or offensive, they simply wanted to include the dialect in order to make their characters seem more “black.” This language appropriation led to harmful stereotypes against black men and women in the United States, and many of those harmful stereotypes have persisted until the modern day.
In an effort to combat the appropriation of their language, some black authors have chosen to include those dialects that white authors had been trying to parody in order to reclaim their own words and speech patterns. One such author was Zora Neale Hurston, a woman who wrote very successfully during the Harlem Renaissance. Hurston, as a black woman, was familiar with the way that black people around her spoke, and she understood the cadences and syntaxes that black men and women spoke with in real life. She wrote black characters who spoke like real black people. For example, in her short story “Sweat,” one of Hurston’s characters Delia thinks, “Then she saw that it was the big bull whip her husband liked to carry when he drove. She lifted her eyes to the door and saw him standing there bent over with laughter at her fright. She screamed at him. ‘Sykes, what you throw dat whip on me like dat? You know it would skeer me — looks just like a snake, an’ you knows how skeered Ah is of snakes’” (Hurston 1022). Her knowledge of dialects, as well as her experience writing black characters and her courage to write black dialects, allowed her to push back against racist white authors who were poking fun at the “black” way of speaking and reclaim her own language. Unfortunately, even this pushback by Hurston and other black authors did not stop the appropriation of language that black Americans have faced in this country since the beginning of America.
Language Elitism
One of the most harmful effects that has developed thanks to the appropriation of language is the idea of language elitism. This language elitism rewards “proper” English and punishes those who use other forms of English. “Proper” English refers to the way that people speak professionally, which just so happens to be based around the way that white intellectuals speak, and other forms of English (such as African-American English or Asian-American English) are seen as inferior and indicating lower levels of intelligence. This elitism aids the dominant culture in continuing to appropriate language because it allows white people to decide when and where people can speak and write using their own form of English. White people are able to appropriate slang and other parts of language from black Americans and use them whenever and however they please, but black Americans are penalized for writing and speaking in the way that they grew up doing. Likewise, Latinx Americans are punished for writing in Spanish, or writing Spanish stories in America, even though Americans have been telling stories of Latinx people for generations.
Language elitism continues to have a large impact on the black community today. Black English is still seen as demeaning and uneducated, despite the fact that black English is prominent across the United States. Wai-Chee Dimock, a professor at Yale and an extremely talented writer points out the obvious in her essay, “African, Caribbean, American: Black English as Creole Tongue,” when she writes, “What difference does it make to think of black English, in particular, as being dotted by clumps of African languages? … Should black English be seen as an ungrammatical deviation from standard English, or should it be recognized as a coherent departure, a law-abiding phenomenon unto itself, with a grammar of its own, and a claim to political, cultural, and educational legitimacy?” (Dimock 280). Dimock’s question makes perfect sense, and asks readers to consider the reason that black English is shunned while white English is accepted. With only a few words, Dimock conveys the dangerous side-effects of accepting language elitism.
The Appropriation of Language in America
Stealing Words from People of Color
Language appropriation does not only exist in the literary world. In fact, one could argue that most language appropriation occurs outside of text. While it is true that white authors often steal language for their novels, white people generally steal language for profit and personal gain at a much higher rate. And it’s not just white people in the real world. While white society, as the dominant culture in America, does tend to perpetrate most of the language appropriation that occurs in the world, other groups like to steal words from their fellow minorities as well. The main difference is that other minority groups do not have as much power to profit off of other cultures, so most of the harm that comes from appropriation traces back to white Americans. As Angela Reyes puts it:
Many scholars argue that slang terms rooted in African American culture…are taken up by mainstream Americans because non-mainstream lifestyle and speech are seen as inventive, exciting and even alluringly dangerous (Chapman 1986; Eble 1996). Yet that non-African Americans benefit from appropriating the verbal dress of a group that has been the target of much discrimination and racism in the United States is a complex subject that deserves more attention from scholars of language and ethnicity…While non-African Americans may gain local social prestige through peppering their speech with African American slang terms, they do so without suffering the daily experiences with discrimination that plague the lives of many African Americans (Reyes 509–510).
Reyes really gets to the center of the issue here: appropriation occurs when people are able to pick out the good parts of a culture and not have to deal with the bad parts. This applies to language appropriation because white Americans are able to use black slang and language without the fear of police brutality, violence, or discrimination.
How White People Have Commodified Black Music
Another area of society that leaves room for language appropriation is music. While the notes and rhythms of the music are not words, they are a language of their own. And the actual words of the music, the lyrics that are often extremely personal and written about personal experiences, add to that language. And when it all comes together, and the music is totally complete, that’s when the appropriation occurs. White musicians are extremely guilty of language appropriation in music, especially when it comes to black music. Since black Americans began to create their own music hundreds of years ago, white Americans have been around to steal it. Wesley Morris, in his article, “Why Is Everyone Always Stealing Black Music?” illustrates this phenomenon by explaining, “Playing black-music detective that day, I laughed out of bafflement and embarrassment and exhilaration. It’s the conflation of pride and chagrin I’ve always felt anytime a white person inhabits blackness with gusto. It’s: You have to hand it to her. It’s: Go, white boy. Go, white boy. Go. But it’s also: Here we go again” (Morris para. 4). Even though black Americans are extremely proud of their work in the music industry, they are still not happy that their intellectual property and such an important part of their culture is being stolen by white Americans.
When black musicians started singing the blues, white people immediately stole it. When they moved on to jazz, again, white people swooped in and stole it. Even today, with rap music, white people have again come in and appropriated black music. Rap music was developed as an art form by black musicians, and it was meant to portray the anger and hurt that black Americans were experiencing at the hands of white Americans. Rap music was supposed to be an outlet and an escape for black artists. Instead, white rappers came onto the scene and totally commodified rap music. Rappers like Eminem and Macklemore appropriated not only the words and the language of rap music, they appropriated the entire genre. For years, rap music was kept out of the mainstream and was thought of as “ghetto” music. After the introduction of Eminem, rap music immediately became much more mainstream, and white people have now completely appropriated the very soul of rap music, which has changed the way that black Americans are able to interact with their own form of music.
The Effects of Appropriating Language
How Language Appropriation Complicates Cultural Appropriation
For a long time, there has been pushback against the idea that cultural appropriation even exists. Many people, especially in America, believe that “cultural appropriation” is a term that was made up specifically to make white people feel bad. It has been a long, constant struggle to convince those people to understand that cultural appropriation does exist, and that it is really harmful to any minority populations that are affected by it. We have started to make some headway, as more and more people are understanding that cultural appropriation is wrong and harmful, and as more and more people are refraining from participating in cultural appropriation. Unfortunately, adding the idea of language appropriation to the issue of cultural appropriation makes it much more difficult to keep some people on board with the idea.
Even though cultural appropriation is defined as, “taking traditional knowledge, cultural expressions, or artifacts from someone else’s culture without permission. This can include unauthorized use of another people’s dance, dress, music, language, folklore, cuisine, traditional medicine, or religious symbols” (Kivel 61), many people only see cultural appropriation as the stealing of another person’s physical manifestation of culture (i.e. dressing up like a Native American for Halloween or having your hands painted with henna). When these people are told that stealing from another culture’s language is also cultural appropriation, the pushback becomes much more intense. While many people are willing to accept the physical boundaries, those same people are often not willing to accept the intellectual boundaries of cultural appropriation.
How Cultural Appropriation Harms Minorities
In his book, Uprooting Racism: How White People Can Work for Racial Justice, Paul Kivel writes, “Cultural appropriation is often an extension of genocide, enslavement, forced removals, and land theft, as settlers take what does not belong to them. It can be the final step in a genocidal process that continues long after a nation or culture has been physically defeated” (Kivel 61). Immediately, the ramifications of appropriation are obvious in his writing, as he points out the potential suffering and death that can accompany cultural appropriation. However, that potential suffering can also stem from language appropriation.
When the settlers came to America and decided they needed more land, they appropriated land from the Native Americans and created a national genocide. When those same settlers decided that they were tired of dealing with the Native Americans, they performed a cultural genocide as well. They stole Native American children from their homes and sent them to boarding schools (Riney). These boarding schools, however, were not cushy boarding schools that were to the benefit of the Native Americans. Instead, white Americans used these boarding schools to strip the children of their language and culture, which left them with nothing. This destroying of language allowed the white Americans to create a divide between the older generation of Native Americans and the younger generation. Once that divide was set, the white Americans were able to take any language and words that they liked from the Native Americans and set fire to the rest of the language, as well as much of the Native American culture. The cultural genocide of Native Americans continues even today, through the urbanization of Indigenous people. According to Tommy Orange, author of the novel There There and a Native man:
Getting us to cities was supposed to be the final, necessary step in our assimilation, absorption, erasure, the completion of a five-hundred-year-old genocidal campaign…We were not Urban Indians then. This was part of the Indian Relocation Act, which was part of the Indian Termination Policy, which was and is exactly what it sounds like. Make them look and act like us. Become us. And so disappear (Orange 8–9).
Even today, in 2020, Native Americans are still struggling to fight their way out from underneath harmful stereotypes in addition to trying to secure their rights and liberties in America.
How Studying Literature Can Help Facilitate Change
Why English Majors are Right for the Job
In my time as an English major, I have read more books than I can count. I have read at least half of the books in the “literary canon” (a fancy way of saying the classics), and I have read a ton of books that I had never even heard of before college. More importantly, however, is the fact that as an English major, I have read a myriad of different novels written by people of color. I have read novels, short stories, and essays from black authors. I have read poems and articles from Asian Americans. I have read books written by Muslims, Jews, and Christians. I have read books by people of color, and I have loved them. But more than that, I have learned from them. I have learned about other cultures, other languages, and other people all across the world. And I have learned about the cultures and languages that exist right here in America.
My time as an English major has helped me to broaden my own knowledge in a way that I didn’t even know was possible! And here’s why all of that is important: because it has taught me a lot about appropriation. The more I read about other cultures, the more I understand what cultural appropriation really does to other populations. And I’m not the only one. English majors across the globe are learning about other cultures and other people, and through our reading we are learning compassion (Hesford). English majors can help to stop language appropriation, and every other kind of appropriation because we care. We want to help create a change because we have read all about how different the world could be.
How to Shift from Appropriation to Appreciation
The next step, for English majors and for Americans as a whole, is for us to start educating ourselves as much as we possibly can. White Americans especially, as the main perpetrators of language appropriation in the United States, must put aside their pride and their desire for profit and power in order to understand the true value of other cultures. The best way to eliminate language appropriation is to take the time to learn about new cultures, people, and languages. The more we understand different cultures, the more we will respect those cultures. English majors, as the ones who have the most experience learning about other cultures through literature, can help to encourage others to gain that respect for other cultures and people. The path to the destruction of appropriation lies in knowledge, understanding, and respect. When you appreciate a culture, it becomes much more difficult to appropriate that culture. If we, as Americans, can come together and appreciate each others’ cultures, we can start to move toward a culture of appreciation rather than one of appropriation.
“What better way, then, to gain an understanding of a people than to read the literature their culture has produced. The result in many cases will be a spirit of kinship as common problems are seen to be handled in similar ways … Students can benefit greatly from the revelation that other cultures have developed viable alternatives to those customs and institutions which we take so much for granted” (Dieterich 143).
Works Cited
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Dieterich, Daniel J. “NCTE/ERIC Summaries & Sources: Teaching Cultural Appreciation through Literature.” The English Journal, vol. 61, no. 1, 1972, pp. 142–147. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/812926. Accessed 27 Apr. 2020.
Dimock, Wai Chee. “African, Caribbean, American: Black English as Creole Tongue.” Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature, edited by Wai Chee Dimock and Lawrence Buell, Princeton University Press, 2007, pp. 274–300. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv39x8t1.14. Accessed 3 May 2020.
Hesford, Walter. “Overt Appropriation.” College English, vol. 54, no. 4, 1992, pp. 406–417. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/377832. Accessed 27 Apr. 2020.
Hurston, Zora Neale. “Sweat.” The Oxford Book of American Short Stories, edited by Joyce Carol Oates, Oxford University Press, 2013, pp. 1022–1030.
Kivel, Paul. Uprooting Racism: How White People Can Work for Racial Justice. New Society Publishers, 2017.
Morris, Wesley. “Why Is Everyone Always Stealing Black Music?” The New York Times, The New York Times, 14 Aug. 2019, www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/music-black-culture-appropriation.html.
Orange, Tommy. There There. Vintage Books, a Division of Random House, Inc., 2019.
Reyes, Angela. “Appropriation of African American Slang by Asian American Youth.” Journal of Sociolinguistics, vol. 9, no. 4, Nov. 2005, pp. 509–532. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1111/j.1360–6441.2005.00304.x.
Riney, Scott. “Education by Hardship: Native American Boarding Schools in the U.S. and Canada.” The Oral History Review, vol. 24, no. 2, 1997, pp. 117–123. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3675557. Accessed 4 May 2020.
Scurlock, Addison N. “Monroe School Children in American Indian Costumes.” Smithsonian, Scurlock Studio Records, Archives Center, National Museum of American History. Smithsonian Institution, www.si.edu/object/archives/components/sova-nmah-ac-0618-s04-01-ref1497.
