Tiktok 3: Why I care

Paratactic Primer:

My brother is nineteen. I have a coworker. My coworker is around nineteen years old. My brother and my coworker are the same age. My coworker is constantly watching tiktoks and reels. My coworker is constantly showing me tiktoks and reels. My coworker is constantly using new words. My coworker learns new words from tiktoks and reels. I began to notice a pattern. The pattern really bothered me.

Why I care:

Every so often, my young coworker would begin using new words, specifically ones taken from tiktok. Terms like “unc” and “lowkey,” which was very strange because he seemed to think that they were new words that came from tiktok, not realizing that they were words that black people, my people, had been using for years. These two terms are ones I specifically remember learning from my older cousins over a decade ago. There are many cases of AAVE being mistaken for simply “Gen Z slang.” I found myself becoming frustrated by this phenomenon. It was impossible to not feel somewhat victimized, like my culture was being stolen and twisted into a “trend” to be picked up by young (mostly white) people and then discarded once it was no longer popular. I did my best to educate my coworker, telling him that they were terms that black people had been using for decades. Lowkey, Periodt, Yass, Queen (a unique case that I may talk about in a future post), Slay, Bussin, Bet, Karen, Tea, Cap, Pushin P, Rizz (Another unique case), Deadass, took an L, and the two that makes me the angriest, YN and woke. These words and phrases came from black people, yet are often stolen and portrayed as being “Gen Z slang,” as if these words are new or random. My issue wasn’t that young people were using it, it was that it was being stolen and twisted in meaning and treated like a joke and then discarded. In the case of “woke,” it was taking a word deeply entrenched in the civil rights movement and very meaningful to black people, and twisting it to attack both black people and people who are in opposition to one’s ideology. I could make an entire post just on this, and I probably will. Anyway, black culture has a long history of being used for the personal gain of non black people (just look at the Kardashians), and this is just another case of this. However, it never really felt so personal to me before. My co-worker would ask me a simple question like, “are you an Unc?” and I would answer him by delving into a far deeper answer than he had likely anticipated, finding myself met with a glassy-eyed stare. I found myself feeling like “that friend that’s too woke.” He would ask me other questions too, like if I considered various celebrities, such as Candace Owens or Will Smith, to be a “coon,” and I would delve into it so deep, that I began to wonder if any of it would stick or if I was simply wasting my time. (Perhaps it is important to note that I had invited my co-worker to ask me questions about black culture and we even talked about the usage of possibly offensive words, like “coon” or “milkman.” He was Mexican and we often had discussions about his culture as well. It was an exchange, not a one-sided thing).

One final thing to note is that many of these terms originated specifically from black queer culture. I vaguely knew this, but it became abundantly clear in my research. I may delve deeper into this later and it is possible that I am uniquely positioned to investigate this as well, for various reasons I’d rather not say here. I’ve seen videos in the past about how the slang of gay white men was highly influenced by the vernacular of black women, but I have not done much research myself. We’ll see if I ever get into it.

Here, I have provided additional sources that I have read through when writing this post, in no particular order. I was not expecting to do so much research in a post about something so subjective and personal, but I think it is very important to add context for those who are less “in the know.”

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/woke-meaning-word-history-b1790787.html

https://www.naacpldf.org/woke-black-bad/ https://www.npr.org/2023/07/19/1188543449/what-does-the-word-woke-really-mean-and-where-does-it-come-from

https://www.dictionary.com/e/slang/deadass

https://www.businessinsider.com/where-did-highkey-and-lowkey-come-from-2015-8

https://www.dictionary.com/e/slang/low-key

https://www.npr.org/2021/07/01/1011899328/black-tiktok-creators-are-on-strike-to-protest-a-lack-of-credit-for-their-work

https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-evolution-digital-blackface/