The Clapback Mailbag: Talking White

Our weekly response to emails, DMs, messages and comments from our readers.

WAVE is proof that white culture exists.

This has nothing to do with a durag, a boar bristle hairbrush or a bottomless tin of Murray’s; that’s African American Vernacular English. However, according to a poll that ChatGPT probably made up, 92.7% of people who participate in the ancient African ritual that transforms a low Caesar to a map of the ocean currents can also speak White American Vernacular English (WAVE).

Despite what you may have heard from virulent reverse racists like Dr. Umar, CNN and 89.4% of unlicensed incense sellers, white people do have a culture. Where the fuck do you think mutton porridge came from? Who else but white people would invent water skiing when boats already existed?

If not for the linguistic contributions of people of Saltinian descent, we wouldn’t have words like “skedaddle” or “malarkey.” Generations of Black people have endured freezing cold temperatures while working in the forestry industry, but only a Caucasian mind could have coined the phrase “shiver me timbers.” While Black people may have invented rock and roll and the AAVE phrase “finna go,” our Yakubian counterparts had the foresight to use “let’s rock and roll” when they finna go.

Most people who speak AAVE as a first language are experienced at bilingual code-switching. However, because whiteness is often a default, many WAVE speakers don’t seem to realize when they’re using their native tongue.

To help them recognize their cultural deficiencies, this week’s Clapback Mailbag will translate every tweet, DM, comment and email to a dialect to which they can relate.

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Our first two responses are related to the article on the “Empathy Is a Sin” movement and highlight one of our most frequently asked questions.

From: Jim
Subject: No, seriously

Can you name one problem of the Black community that wasn’t caused by white people or racism?

Dear Jim and Mimi,

My grandmother had one of the stupidest beds I’ve ever seen. First of all, I don’t know if she saved every mattress she’d owned since the Truman administration, but her bed was so high that she probably needed a stepladder to go to sleep. It barely fit in her room. The headboard was made of solid carved oak, but the other end jutted out at least 2 feet because the footboard was rounded, which left an empty semicircle between the end of the mattress and the footboard into which a basketball fit perfectly. Fortunately, my grandmother got a new bed when I was about 7 years old. But I still have no idea why anyone would create a dumb-shaped piece of furniture.

Shortly after my grandmother’s old bed became my new bed, my cousin and I were doing what any 7-year-old would do. Sadly, I forgot to calculate the apex of the parabola when I launched the first-ever three-point shot toward my brand-new, secondhand basketball bed. The ball bounced off the ceiling, shattering my hand-me-down, full-length mirror that probably once belonged to Harriet Tubman’s grandmama. I don’t remember what happened next. Either my mama probably put me in solitary confinement, or I got rid of the evidence. My primary concern was the seven years of bad luck that I had just inherited.

When I was 8, the mirror made my cousin slam the door on my hand as I tried to prevent her from interrupting my groundbreaking experiment to see if a jar filled with fireflies could serve as a light source. The mirror got me cut from my high school basketball team. I couldn’t wait to turn 14 and escape the mirror’s wrath. A few weeks before my 14th birthday, my best friend, Gregory Prince, died from sickle cell anemia. No one could understand how I felt.

Well … maybe there was one person.

James Harriot, my grandfather, was born on June 19, 1919 in Lee County, S.C. After he was drafted to serve in World War II, he returned to our segregated hometown in Darlington County, S.C., he bought a plot of land and built his home with his own hands while serving as a driver for a rich, white man who owned a department store, a seed farm and a paper factory. The wealthy white tycoon saw my grandfather’s handiwork and put him on an all-white construction crew building a new addition to the paper factory. Halfway through the job, the foreman died. My grandfather had to essentially lead the project while being careful not to “offend” his less-experienced, higher-paid white counterparts. After the job was finished, my grandfather became Socono’s first Black full-time employee. He even convinced the owner to hire my grandmother as the company’s first Black female employee.

After working for a few years, my grandfather and grandmother asked for a raise, only to be denied. Even though they had worked there longer than anyone else, the man who owned the company said he would “get in trouble” if anyone found out that my grandparents’ combined full-time pay was more than that of one white man. So my grandfather saved his money and started a taxi business with the agreement that he would only drive Black customers. By contrast, the white-owned taxi company in town could pick up anyone. So for 20 years, my grandfather worked twice as hard as a white man to earn half as much.

Just before daybreak on Nov. 1, 1948, a car containing four drunk white boys with nosefuls of cocaine swerved into the oncoming lane, slamming headfirst into my grandfather’s taxicab at more than 70 miles per hour.

Now, some would say I’m privileged because, unlike most Black people, I grew up in a house that my parents owned mortgage-free. Others would wonder how I could complain about racism while living in a country where all six of my grandmother’s children graduated from college. Who complains about having a bed that’s too big?

Then again, had my grandfather received the GI Bill like white veterans, my grandmother wouldn’t have had to work into her 70s. Before 1950, the Social Security Act excluded domestic and farm workers, most of whom were Black. My grandparents’ employer justified their low pay by keeping them in those excluded categories, so even in death, my grandfather received half of what a white man would have received. Even worse, the parents of those teenagers worked at the same company as my grandparents. Not only did their faces remind my grandmother of her husband’s tragic death every day, but she also had to clean up after them.

Her husband survived the Red Summer of 1919, Jim Crow and the biggest war in the history of the world. And for everything he did for his town, his community and his family, the only thing this goddamned godforsaken country did not steal from her was that stupid bed.

But the mirror was my fault.

So there’s one.

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Apparently, a lot of people are really upset about having the day off to celebrate Juneteenth: