Producing white comfort through “corporate cool”: Linguistic appropriation, social media, and @BrandsSayingBae
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Jennifer Roth-Gordon
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Jessica Harris
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.
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Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Racialization and the national body: (Re)defining selves and others in changing contexts of liberal democratic governance
- “#JeSuisSirCornflakes”: Racialization and resemiotization in French nationalist Twitter
- “They are just a danger”: Racialized ideologies in Northern Italy and the Philippines
- Talking “like a race”: Gender, authority, and articulate speech in African American students’ marking speech acts
- Racialization and gender in Tumblr: Beyoncé as a raciolinguistic semiotic resource
- Producing white comfort through “corporate cool”: Linguistic appropriation, social media, and @BrandsSayingBae
- Commentary
- Commentary: On affect and race under capitalism
- Book Review
- Looking like a language, sounding like a race: Raciolinguistic ideologies and the learning of latinidad
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Racialization and the national body: (Re)defining selves and others in changing contexts of liberal democratic governance
- “#JeSuisSirCornflakes”: Racialization and resemiotization in French nationalist Twitter
- “They are just a danger”: Racialized ideologies in Northern Italy and the Philippines
- Talking “like a race”: Gender, authority, and articulate speech in African American students’ marking speech acts
- Racialization and gender in Tumblr: Beyoncé as a raciolinguistic semiotic resource
- Producing white comfort through “corporate cool”: Linguistic appropriation, social media, and @BrandsSayingBae
- Commentary
- Commentary: On affect and race under capitalism
- Book Review
- Looking like a language, sounding like a race: Raciolinguistic ideologies and the learning of latinidad
