Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Preface
- Transcription conventions
- Phonetic symbols
- 1 White styles
- 2 Listening to whiteness
- 3 Cliques, crowds, and crews
- 4 Say word?
- 5 I’m like yeah but she’s all no
- 6 Pretty fly for a white guy
- 7 We’re through being cool
- 8 “Not that I’m racist”
- 9 White on black
- 10 “I guess I’m white”
- 11 Audible whiteness
- Notes
- References
- Index
6 - Pretty fly for a white guy
European American hip hop fans and African American English
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Preface
- Transcription conventions
- Phonetic symbols
- 1 White styles
- 2 Listening to whiteness
- 3 Cliques, crowds, and crews
- 4 Say word?
- 5 I’m like yeah but she’s all no
- 6 Pretty fly for a white guy
- 7 We’re through being cool
- 8 “Not that I’m racist”
- 9 White on black
- 10 “I guess I’m white”
- 11 Audible whiteness
- Notes
- References
- Index
Summary
Introduction
One of the students who most intrigued me in Ms. Stein’s Life and Health class was a boy named Eddie, a wisecracking white sophomore. Every element of Eddie’s stylistic choices was flamboyant, from his class-clown persona to his colorful oversized clothing to his loudly advertised musical tastes. But what I noticed most of all was his speech style, which involved numerous phonological and grammatical features of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) as well as lexical items from African American youth slang.
I had undertaken my research with the original goal of studying teenagers like Eddie, European Americans who participated in hip hop culture. By the mid-1990s, hip hop had a significant impact on American (and global) culture generally, yet Eddie was the first white student I encountered at Bay City High who seemed unambiguously to be an aficionado of this style. Other white youth who embraced hip hop were generally much less extreme in their stylistic choices; indeed, I had completed several weeks of participant-observation before I realized that a number of the European American boys I knew were, like Eddie, avid hip hop fans. I soon learned that such students were often mocked by their peers, both black and white. Consequently, many displayed their identities through relatively small, often incremental clothing and speech markers.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- White KidsLanguage, Race, and Styles of Youth Identity, pp. 116 - 138Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010