Producing white comfort through “corporate cool”: Linguistic appropriation, social media, and @BrandsSayingBae

Jennifer Roth-Gordon; Jessica Harris; Stephanie Zamora

doi:10.1515/ijsl-2020-2105

Article

Producing white comfort through “corporate cool”: Linguistic appropriation, social media, and @BrandsSayingBae

Jennifer Roth-Gordon , Jessica Harris and Stephanie Zamora

Published/Copyright: September 11, 2020

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From the journal International Journal of the Sociology of Language Volume 2020 Issue 265

Abstract

Drawing on branded tweets that linguistically appropriate slang, African American Language, and hip hop lyrics, this article examines how corporations rework black culture to create “corporate cool” as part of their advertising strategy on social media. We examine three processes that corporations engage in to associate themselves with “coolness” while managing levels of racial contact and proximity for their audience: 1) racially ambiguous voicing, 2) “bleaching” black bodies out of images, and 3) the forging of “racially tinged” intertextual connections. While previous scholarship has analyzed how acts of cultural and linguistic appropriation reap profit for white people and continue to stigmatize already racially marginalized groups, we describe how these seemingly innocent cultural and linguistic references harness a corporately constructed black cool to produce a sense of white comfort. We argue that white comfort is generated not only through the avoidance of overt references to racial conflict, as the term “white fragility” suggests, but also through well-worn, familiar, and comfortable reminders of racial difference and domination that are offered at a safe distance from actual black people and contexts of racial violence.

Keywords: linguistic appropriation; social media; voicing; intertextuality; whiteness

Corresponding author: Jennifer Roth-Gordon, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA, E-mail: jenrothg@email.arizona.edu

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Published Online: 2020-09-11

Published in Print: 2020-09-25

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https://doi.org/10.1515/ijsl-2020-2105

Keywords for this article

linguistic appropriation; social media; voicing; intertextuality; whiteness