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

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.

Language and Social Justice in US Climate Movements: Barriers and Ways Forward

“…Unseld's observation that the term environmental justice "made people uncomfortable" suggests that discussions of racial injustice-however oblique-threaten White comfort. According to (Roth-Gordon et al, 2020), White comfort is generated in part by avoiding overt mentions of racial conflict. Constraining climate communication to an abstract scientific register is a strategy for White climate communicators to divert attention from the climate violence faced by people of color.…”

White Allies and the Semiotics of Wokeness: Raciolinguistic Chronotopes of White Virtue on Facebook

“…As I have observed through a few decades of participating in online and face‐to‐face discussions on race and racism, Black and other people of color are often tone policed (i.e., said to be angry or not rational/logical) by whites who see themselves as progressive and not racist. This often happens when the views expressed by non‐white participants appear to fall outside of the boundaries of “white comfort” (Smalls 2018; Roth‐Gordon, Harris, and Zamora 2020). As I explain in my analysis of the last example, Enlightenment rationalism is often weaponized as a tool of exclusion against racialized minorities rather than used to equally position voices.…”

“…In this way, the comment produces white comfort, which is enacted “not only through the avoidance of overt references to racial conflict…. 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” (Roth‐Gordon, Harris, and Zamora 2020, 109). As I argue in my analysis of Figure 5 below, white comfort is one of the undergirding logics of appropriateness in terms of constructing white virtue as achieved through individual acts of learning to hear and see racial difference.…”

Approachable or appropriative? Black Americans' perceptions of codeswitched advertisements using African American Vernacular English

“…Social media is not just a dynamic place of AAVE appropriation by general users, but by brands and corporations, as well. Brands are using AAVE lexicon and speech patterns to create "corporate cool," which they hope will allow them to relate to a younger audience (Roth-Gordon et al, 2020). Corporations believe that "Blackness sells," and they want to encapsulate Blackness and a way of being " 'hip, stylish, youthful, alienated, rebellious, [and] sensual'" (Roth-Gordon et al, 2020, p. 110).…”

“…where Black culture is used to entertain White people and make them even more secure in their position of power over the marginalized group of Black Americans through encouraged linguistic appropriation (Roth-Gordon et al, 2020).…”