The apex of prestige television for the educated white bourgeoisie is still HBO’s The Wire. It’s a treasure trove of hard-boiled dialogue in African-American English (AAE, as the linguists call it). But though we love it — and I don’t except myself here — there’s much of it we’re not supposed to repeat. When Brother Mouzone, the show’s cold-blooded but bookish Farrakhanist hitman, tells his protégés that “the most dangerous thing in America” is a “n*gga with a library card,” it crackles and pops. I’ve repeated the line among friends. But saying it in the wrong context would be quite costly.
Likewise, as many white kids as black memorize the verses of Kanye West and Jay-Z, just as I memorized the verses of Outkast and the Notorious B.I.G. in the mid ’90s. But the prohibition on cultural appropriation — and the heightening awareness of appropriation’s obverse, “code switching” (the necessity felt by minorities to oscillate between patois and “proper” English) — puts us in a weird linguistic spot.
The result is a cumbersome etiquette in which both majority and minority cultures are forced to tell bald-faced linguistic lies to each other (“I never use that word!”) and perform shock and horror when others slip up. And the eager consumption of minority culture by whites — something a saner age might consider an act of empathy or even homage — is increasingly regarded as suspect at best.
There is an old sense of “vulgar,” which refers to the manner of the common people, and a new one, which is synonymous with “profane.” Could the new Age of Profanity be one in which the only truly vulgar words left can be heard by the vulgar, but never repeated by them? And to what extent is that bullsh*t?
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