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The Construction of White, Black, and Korean American Identities through African American Vernacular English
Author(s) -
Chun Elaine W.
Publication year - 2001
Publication title -
journal of linguistic anthropology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.463
H-Index - 49
eISSN - 1548-1395
pISSN - 1055-1360
DOI - 10.1525/jlin.2001.11.1.52
Subject(s) - vernacular , ideology , gender studies , white (mutation) , dominance (genetics) , sociology , race (biology) , context (archaeology) , identity (music) , african american , ethnic group , american english , linguistics , anthropology , history , political science , politics , art , aesthetics , law , philosophy , biochemistry , chemistry , archaeology , gene
Discussions of racialized language rarely consider the linguistic practices of Asian Americans. This article examines one Korean American male student's conversational use of lexical elements from an imagined version of African American Vernacular English (AAVE). Although the speaker's linguistic practices maintain the dominance of whiteness in racial ideologies in the United States, his particular uses of AAVE index his relationship with both whiteness and blackness. He thereby projects a distinctively Korean American male identity in the context of existing discourses of race and gender in the United States.