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Blackish: Hegemonic Culture

1685 Words7 Pages

Ethnicity is a social construct that is used to group people together with a common ancestry or lineage. Similarly, being placed in an ethnic group is not based on objective means. Often times members within the ethnic group come to a common understanding on the requirements that each individual must fulfill. For the African American community these requirements may include language. African American English is used amongst African Americans “as a symbol of ethnic identity” or more importantly a uniting point to mitigate against a society that frequently discriminates their community (Mooney & Evans, 2015). In the television series Blackish, the main character, Dre, is an upwardly mobile black father often stuck in a perplexing limbo of trying …show more content…

Even though Blackish is a dramatization, Dre represents an overarching problem faced by many ethnic minorities where the speaker has a strong desire to identify with his ethnicity through common language, yet the speaker does not want to be discriminated against for aligning with a group that is stigmatized. African American English is “a set of communicating patterns and practices resulting from Africans appropriation and transformation of a foreign tongue during the African Holocaust” (Smitherman, 2000). In this paper African American English will be referred to as AAE and Standard American English as SAE. AAE has deep historical roots, but has evolved with the time and plight of African Americans. Now it is currently used by approximately 35 million African descendants. Due to the vast population, the generalization that all African Americans use a set of defined features would be inaccurate. However, …show more content…

Previously there has been an association that AAE is only used by inner city, uneducated, black youth (Pullman, 1999). However with the creation of Blackish, the series challenges existing social construction of AAE, because it emphasizes that language is more linked to creating solidarity between interlocutors than it is related to the education or status of the speaker. This is stressed by Dre whose status doesn’t match the previous social constructs. Dre uses AAE as a way to gain solidarity with other members in the black community as noted by his use of “brother” or multiple negations. Additionally, Dre does not use AAE in work environments, because he understands the stigma that is associated with the people that speak AAE. Dre’s dynamic of changing his language variety to gain status within a group represents the overarching theme that a variety is used to gain solidarity with others and is not confined to just a speaker’s

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