To Tame A Wild Tongue Summary

Another subversion of “White language”, so to speak, creating new definitions because they were labeled as the defined, is still seen today in the form of the African American Vernacular English dialect (AAVE) – otherwise known as Ebonics. Revisiting Gloria Anzaldua’s To Tame a Wild Tongue, we find that her experience with “linguistic shaming” is something also encountered by African Americans as AAVE is often looked down-upon as “ignorant speech” due to its deviation from the “standard” American dialect. As a result, linguists have found many Black Americans will often code-switch, adjusting their dialect accordingly to what they perceive as “socially acceptable” in their current setting (DeBose). In a sense, the way Black Americans are pressured …show more content…
This particular section of twitter users is discussed by journalist Farhad Manjoo in his 2010 article, “How Black People Use Twitter”, where he notes that young Black users tend to have a much tighter network of interactivity, saying that “They form tighter clusters on the network—they follow one another more readily, they retweet each other more often, and more of their posts are @-replies—posts directed at other users. It's this behavior, intentional or not, that gives black people—and in particular, black teenagers—the means to dominate the conversation on Twitter.” Manjoo goes on to further detail a study done by PhD student Brendan Meeder at Carnegie Mellon University, in which Meeder found that these closely-knit networks used twitter “like a public instant messenger” -- whereas the typical twitter user would expect a one-way flow of information in the form of new organizations or celebrities broadcasting information to, normal, everyday users who ‘follow’ them (leading to a discrepancy in the number of accounts one follow versus the amount of followers one …show more content…
One of the driving forces that keeps Black Twitter in the mainstream spotlight is perhaps its use for political activism, as seen with the #BlackLivesMatter movement, which is a result of the development of broadcast technology and the rise of mass media. Much like ugly truth that went into the lenses of news cameras, and out the screens of black and white television tubes to expose the horrors of war in Vietnam and the injustice towards nonviolent Black protestors that popped the idealized, post-World War II culture bubble, the hundreds of videos featuring racism and police abuse that have appeared on Twitter since the early 2010s have shown Americans that there is still a deep racial divide in this country. Interestingly, the African American vernacular often used in internet memes have become widely adapted by many millennials across many ethnicities and economic backgrounds on social media today. Perhaps much like rise the of Hip-Hop that helped drive racial integration with White youths in the 1990s, the widespread culture of internet memes could be a driving force in closing the cultural