A white person I know and love once sent me a Bitmoji that said “Bye, Felicia,” and I stared at it for a minute, wondering what I had done wrong. The blonde cartoon posed with hands sassily on hips, the catchphrase spread playfully beneath. I felt my stomach freeze up. Slowly, it dawned on me that my friend thought she was just saying “goodbye.” I asked her about it. She had no idea at all where the phrase originated.
Not knowing where something comes from is not a crime. But before responding, I spent some time thinking about how moments like this come to be. A person who never saw Friday, whose relationship to black culture is tangential at best, uses an app that furnishes lots of cute sayings. Maybe she’s seen #byefelicia in a comment on Facebook or Instagram, typed by a black woman she knows from college under a particularly ridiculous Trump quote. It seems fun and harmless, so she starts using it herself and never thinks about it again. “Bye, Felicia” is no longer a pointed moment from a meditation on hood life. It is no longer from anywhere. By the time it reaches her, it’s just something from the internet.
This is what happens when bits of a culture are snatched up, repackaged, and separated from their context. It’s as though people are buying stolen goods from a reputable store. The initial crime of theft is scrubbed away, hidden behind whimsical fonts and bright colors. It is, in essence, the fencing of pilfered intellectual property. And it’s a key part of how our cultural order is maintained. If everyone in America started being really honest about how and where the language we use came from and how it got here, where would it end? What else would we have to admit was stolen?
This thought came back to me the other day when I heard Meghan Trainor’s megahit single “NO” in my car. It starts with a sung intro setting up the song’s narrative theme, namely that the dude fixing his face to holler at Trainor in the club is about to get all types of rejected. In fact, the scrub can’t even get a word out before she sings, “But let me stop you there.” Trainor delivers this line in a noticeably weird tone. She actively chooses to leave off the “t” sound in “but” and replaces the “th” in “there” with a “d,” making the line sound closer to bu lemme stop you dere. It sounds forced coming from her, as though she were practicing a language she just recently learned.
These may come across as random and idiosyncratic vocal choices, but they are not. They are the recognized phonic conventions of African American Vernacular English (AAVE), a variety of English spoken largely, though not exclusively, by working-class and middle-class African-Americans. AAVE has been studied by linguists who cite it as a correct and complete language system with consistent internal logic and grammatical complexity. Society at large, however, still persists in treating AAVE as a sign of low intelligence, which means that people who speak it naturally are regarded as less worthy of jobs and respect. Later in the song, Trainor goes all in, straight-out singing, “I be like, nah” — that’s the habitual/continuative aspect, a common feature of AAVE, for all you linguists out there. Trainor, who hails from Nantucket, noticeably loses these linguistic tics in her interviews. “Stop you dere” is such an awkward-sounding sentence coming from her that it can’t possibly be an accident. She doesn’t sound like a black person when she sings; she sounds like a white person trying to talk black.
