White Women vs Black Twitter: The Cultural War of…

American (and world) pop culture has stolen borrowed from black people for decades. From Elvis to Led Zeppelin to Justin Timberlake (hear my bit on Timberlake duets here) to Katy Perry on SNL this weekend, white artists have taken what black people have created and made it their own (doing the same thing, but with a white face to make it more palatable to the American “mainstream”). It is like this country had 400 years of slavery, 100 years of Jim Crow and is now in the middle of its Pop Culture Sharecropping phase.  America basically cultivated the environment and the need for black people to thrive in sports, arts and entertainment (I mean did you see what the country did when it gave a qualified black man real power? It responded with Trump, basically white America saying to black people “Stay In Your Lane” like an angry, old, white LaVar Ball.  But all of these cultural appropriations that have made America what it is today, still required talent and time. Elvis may have used old black music, but he still was a talented artist.  Nowadays, the Internet has exponentially sped up the rate at which vernacular and culture get taken while simultaneously broadening the spectrum of people who take it beyond the talented and into the mediocre.  In this clip comedian J-L Cauvin (me!) summarizes how average white women are on the vanguard of co-opting black Internet culture and vernacular.  Enjoy it – it’s lit and savage (hands clapping emoji)!