Saturday, September 12, 2015
“Too Street”: Hypocrisy in Policing the Speech of our Actors
Bitter Gertrude: I just had an interesting conversation with someone whose white teens are using the slang words “finna,” “aight,” “brah,” etc. She characterized it as “shortening words to sound hip.” I’m almost certain she just didn’t know where the terms came from; I don’t think she was trying to be erasive. But it brought to mind how poorly we’re handling political issues around language, especially in the theatre.
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I think the fact that the author concludes with the note that she is not an exception to the problems at hand shows that she herself is truly aware of cultural appropriation. The first step towards solving this problem is awareness - of privilege, of culture, of where the things we say and do in order to seem "cool" or "hip" are coming from. Most of the white population which uses the language which African-Americans are criticized for probably does not consider it as potentially harmful to that culture which it comes from because to them, it is but a tool with which to climb the social ladder. The fact is, when a black actor is told by directors that he or she is "too street" or even "not street enough", this language feels like anything but a tool. The implications behind it run so deep; just think about what it means to be "street" as it is, and what that says about a person, because it is in no way all good. The first step toward recovery in the field of dialogue regulation has to be the acknowledgement of its harmful effects. Only once this is seen can culture begin to repair its linguistic repression.
There’s an interesting conflict in this article, and I definitely have sympathies for both sides. I see a conflict between those who want to provide a level of professionalism in their art, and those who want to preserve people’s culture with their art. And this conflict doesn’t even have to exist externally, it can exist within a single person. For example I definitely have an affinity for proper and measured language, the type that is generally and traditionally associated with scholars or academics. To me, intelligent language is a key to accurately articulating the concept you want to convey to others. But interestingly enough, I also use quite a bit of slang in my everyday life as well. And I do find value in this as a communicative tool. There are certain concepts, usually cultural ones, that are extremely common, but can’t be expressed though language of the ‘proper’ kind. I certainly think that there are merits to both ways of speaking, and there definitely is a harm in going overboard with either one as well. So, understanding each of their value, why do they have to be in conflict? We as theatre practitioners usually celebrate our diverse culture, why can’t we do that with this situation?
I mostly have a comment about her Shakespeare thoughts. I agree that people attempt to be faux British when they perform Shakespeare. But perhaps the people Shakespeare was writing about would've been more... "street". They were people who faced incredibly hard times, tragedies, and murders. Not kids trying to sound like the Kennedys.
But the idea of someone being regarded as too street, and where it came from, the author of JAmes Bond saying Idris Elba was "too street" to be James Bond. The term "street" is simply a racist dig against black people not as a comment of their character, but simply them being black. It is a low and degrading term that says "I don't want to say I don't want you because you're black" without really saying it.
I'm fascinated with the way that language and culture influence and create one another over time, and how the context of a society frames that back and forth in certain ways. Black speech is considered cool under some circumstances, but its use outside of a hip-hop song or TV show is often looked down upon. It is definitely not accepted in an academic setting, and it probably would not be okay for someone to use that facet of the English language in this comment box. The thing about language is that it is an ever-changing thing, an artifact of the current world that we live in, never set in stone even though that is the way we imagine it: as an immutable, absolute set of rules and words. This misconception of the nature of language allows the dominant cultural group to establish their way of speaking as the only true language, and all other versions of language from different socio-cultural backgrounds are treated as derivatives.
The winners always re-write history, and they get to do it in their own dialect.
I grew up in a very diverse area of New York, and slang has always been a part of my life. I never considered myself less intelligent because of my use of slang until I came to Carnegie Mellon University. I find myself being ostracized by my peers when I use slang words because they are all extremely articulate and have vocabularies that are much more advanced than my own.
I think the whole thing is dumb.
There’s nothing wrong with saying that I want to make mad bank over saying I would like to make a large sum of money. Slang is casual conversation, and honestly, easier for me to understand. When people talk in class, sometimes I cannot follow what they are saying because of their vocabulary.
With the prejudice against slang, it makes it harder for people like me to advance upwards in society. I grew up not knowing that my speech was considered “wrong” by society and now I struggle to keep up. If people weren’t so damn stuck up about being proper as if we were still in the Victorian era, then maybe the world would be a better place.
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