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
4 - Say word?
race and style in white teenage slang
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
In Bay City High School’s elective Say No to Drugs course, students were trained by a team of teachers to become peer educators, writing and performing anti-drug skits at local schools. Some students, however, who were taking the course not out of interest but because it seemed easy, were quite forthright about their own use of drugs, specifically marijuana. As the class prepared to perform before an audience for the first time, several students asked a white middle-aged female teacher, Priscilla, what they should say if audience members wanted to know whether they themselves smoked marijuana. Priscilla recommended that they say they did not, admonishing them, “Remember, you’re role models.”
This advice elicited a reproving response from Al Capone, a European American junior. “You want us to lie?”
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- White KidsLanguage, Race, and Styles of Youth Identity, pp. 67 - 89Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010