Who's more of a colonizer really, the white girl I knew from Pensacola who said "tortilla" with a hard L and blushed over her redneck past because of it, or some NY celebrity chef who says it perfectly and has made a fortune from "Mexican-inspired fusion cuisine"
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Replying to @arthur_affect
Isn't the blushing the first step between one and two? I mean, I don't mind the "fusion food" guy, but I take some issue with the people trying to do something authentic, botching it and then being angry when called out (cue every British cook ever, by the way).
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Replying to @MudDude4 @arthur_affect
I will say that I'm less annoyed by the first example because they typically react to being corrected with interest and curiosity. I've been in some truly cringe-worthy conversations with activists. Not all of them white, either.
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Replying to @MudDude4
It's not that she didn't know the "correct" way to say the word, it's that in her community growing up that's the way the word was said and she was uncomfortable changing it
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Replying to @arthur_affect @MudDude4
I mean that's kind of my point She came from a community that was, by and large, dirt poor and that had eaten tortillas as a staple food for generations and that's just how they said it
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Replying to @arthur_affect @MudDude4
It'd be kind of weird for me to treat her embarrassment as a "teachable moment" or to try to guide her onto the path of someday learning to say the word "tortilla" correctly, as though it actually mattered
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Replying to @arthur_affect @MudDude4
It'd probably be different if I were of Mexican descent rather than just a cultural liberal who saw "incorrect" Anglicized pronunciations as déclassé and cringe I dunno I'm not really condemning people who get mad about this stuff, it's just... not my thing
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Replying to @arthur_affect @MudDude4
I guess part of this is my own lived experience of being corrected on language shit is having it directed against me pretty often and bristling about it in general
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Replying to @arthur_affect @MudDude4
Like, my immigrant parents were pretty bad about correctly pronouncing stuff from other languages - *not* just "white people" languages, any other language - and growing up I felt a lot of cultural cringe over that
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Replying to @arthur_affect @MudDude4
So if anything I feel like my "internalized racism" (I can in fact see the QTs, thanks) and my role as an enforcer of whiteness' standards was tied up a lot in my teenage self being all "Jesus Christ mom it's pronounced 'Palo Verde', how long have you lived in this country"
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The version of past me that was FURIOUS at my mom, that thought I could DIE, from hearing her mispronounce "La Jolla" or "Sudoku" or whatever, is I think the same part that thought my friend was cringey when she said stuff in a thick white Southern accent, and I'm not proud of it
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Replying to @arthur_affect @MudDude4
I guess I'll fall back here on the old Stuff White People Like blog and say that in a lot of ways the "whitest" white people are the ones who feel a deep cultural cringe toward "ignorant rednecks" and shit, who carefully cultivate the most flexible, cosmopolitan dialect they can
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