When West Dates East

Since this has blown up and become news, I’m going to lay out here all my interactions with FanX (Salt Lake City’s Comic Con).  

On May 6, this piece ran in the Salt Lake Tribune. The next day, I emailed Blake Casselman. He’s been the person I usually dealt with whenever I was invited to attend FanX as an author, and in my experience, a good guy. My email: 

Blake replied promptly. I’m uncomfortable generally posting private emails, but he was polite and seemed supportive. In it he included a bullet point list of the things FanX was doing to address the issue of harassment and he invited me to pass it along to any other concerned authors. Not included was any mention of what I had requested: a public statement clarifying or refuting Dan Farr’s public comments. My reply: 

He replied that a statement from Dan Farr and Bryan Brandenburg would be coming out shortly. (At this point, 16 days later, it still hasn’t come out.) I thanked him. He asked me if Bryan could be in touch with me too and I said yes.

In the meantime, FanX posted their new harassment policy. Blake pointed me to it. My email reply: 

On May 17, I was one of many people who received this email: 

I read the confidential report that they put together on the sexual harassment accusation from fall 2017. Since it’s confidential, I won’t post it, but there were a number of red flags for me and a lot of language that seemed to belittle the accuser and protect the harasser. I was surprised that Bryan and others thought that the report would be the final word and satisfy everyone. My email response to their report:

I was going to try to let it go, because I have a deadline this week and I really needed to get back to work. But I was so troubled, a few minutes later, I emailed him this: 

Since Bryan Brandenburg went ahead and tweeted a screenshot of my first email to him along with his reply (although he deleted parts of his email and didn’t announce that–more on that later) I will post his full email here.

I have questions about the first paragraph. Yay that they’re taking action! But…what about this time? When the accused is a best-selling author? Do rich, powerful men get a pass? Do they work under a separate policy? And I’d like them to acknowledge publicly: do they have a personal relationship with Richard Paul Evans? Are Dan or Bryan friends with him? Are they part of his fraternity for men “Tribe of Kyngs”? Is that clouding their judgment?

But that last paragraph: 

I can’t count everything problematic with it. My response to Bryan and the last time I communicated with him: 

(for full disclosure, his emails wrap weird, so screenshots were way too long and I’ve cut and paste his email into another document and screen capped those, but I have the original emails if needed) #receipts

I was so bugged by that crazy email that–without revealing who or what organization–I tweeted the last paragraph of it, not including the first paragraph in case it was confidential information: 

I figured Bryan Brandenburg didn’t see anything wrong with what he wrote me, and I honestly hoped that if he saw a general negative reaction to his email on twitter, he might be sparked to take a closer look, invest in some introspection, and be sparked to make a change on his own before we went public. Nope. (A fellow author saw my tweet and told me that she got the exact same email! They actually felt good enough about that sexist paragraph to cut it and paste it into an email for someone else!)

But I got a call right after this from a reporter at the Salt Lake Tribune, and discouraged by Bryan’s email, not believing that any real change was going to happen with people who write emails like that unless they’re forced to change, I decided to give an interview. 

Soon after that I received an email from Dan Farr, co-founder of FanX. Nothing explosive in it, he was polite and made an offer to speak to me, via email, phone, or in person, to explain, etc. My response: 

During all this, I’ve been emailing and texting with other authors, who unbeknownst to me initially, also had been communicating with FanX about their harassment policy. They had also been given the runaround. Lots of people were trying to work privately with these guys for weeks and sometimes months. None of us were seeking to escalate this. Then FanX (presumably Bryan Brandenburg) started to subtweet me, followed by this tweet from FanX’s official twitter account: 

In this screen grab, I blocked out my private email address. He didn’t do me that curtesy. Four times he tweeted my email to him with my private email address. I don’t know if it was malicious or retribution for saying that I was going to speak to a reporter or for calling him on his sexist email, but I note that he took the time to notice the worst sentence of his email and delete that before tweeting it but didn’t take the time to notice my private email address and delete that. 

Also you can see from all my email correspondence that his accusation “because we wouldn’t apologize for not publicly banning someone” is a lie. But thanks for taking my concerns seriously, Brad! You’re a listener! </endsarcasm> #forgivememypettinessIamtired

FanX has not contacted me. To be fair, as soon as I saw one of the tweets where they put out my private email, I emailed Dan, Bryan and Blake telling them to never contact me again, so I am glad they are respecting that. I do not want to have anything more to do with them.

I have seen that Bryan Brandenburg put out a public apology in which he personally mentions me. I am sure he is sorry. This has been a PR disaster for him and his organization. After all this, I do not personally feel that an apology, made under duress, is enough to restore my confidence in FanX and its leadership. So I will not be attending the con (one of my kids really wanted to go and cried when she found out–that was really hard). I do not want to be the catalyst for taking down FanX. I really hope they turn it around. But there are years of problems (I’m just learning about the Orson Scott Card controversy–ask some FanX people about that) and a pattern of behavior. So I’m not sure what it will take for them to regain the confidence of many of us in the Utah fan community.

I’m going to preface this post with a content warning. This post is about child abuse. The video I’m going to link includes actually video footage of child abuse. It is one of the most upsetting videos I have ever watched. My post includes in depth descriptions of child abuse. 

This morning I watched a Youtube video discussing and highlighting what is happening on another Youtube channel. If you have the stomach for it, I’d suggest watching the video because Phillip DeFranco does a much better job of summarizing the situation than I can. 

For those of you who can’t watch, I’ll give you a very brief rundown. 

The Youtube channel DaddyOfFive is a combination family vlog and prank channel. In a recent video, the parents pull a prank where they pour invisible ink on one of the kid’s floors and then make him think that they believe he poured ink all over the floor. They scream and swear at this little boy, shouting things like “What the fuck did you do?” while the boy cries and cowers, looking genuinely terrified. Even the best child actors could not pull off looking as genuinely devastated as this child does. 

As DeFranco highlights in his video, although all the children are pranked, it seems that this one child (Cody) takes the brunt of the cruelty. In many videos he is seen being hit, kicked, pushed, and pinned down by his older siblings. In one video his father pushes him face first into a book case. In one video Cody begs his family to stop, saying that he’s tired of this. In another video his parents scream at him and tell him he’s the only one in the family who can’t “take a joke”. 

In response to some of the flak they have been getting, the parents uploaded a video about “Blocking All The Haters”. They goad the children into saying on camera that they aren’t being abused. Now keep in mind, the kids have been told that all the “Cool stuff” they have been getting is because of the Youtube channel. They know that if the pranks stop, the cool stuff goes away. Most of the children chime in that they are not being abused. Cody hardly says anything. The oldest boy says, “At least you aren’t beating us”. 

What is happening to Cody is child abuse. It is emotional, psychological and physical abuse. It is torture. And the worst part of it all is that it is monetized. The parents are being paid by advertisers to abuse this child under the guise of “It’s just a prank, bro”. 

So what can we do?

First of all, we can report the videos on DaddyOfFive’s channel for containing depictions of child abuse. If you decide to help by doing this, please be sure to flag the specific instances of abuse such as Cody being pushed or the parents screaming vulgarities at the children. 

Second of all, we can let the companies advertising on this channel know that we won’t be buying anything from a company that sponsors videos of child abuse. 

the ones that destroy my soul

I’m sure I don’t have the answer on this, and I’d love to hear from @allthingslinguistic and @superlinguo, as they’ll have a better idea how academic linguistics weighs in on this.

One thing to keep in mind throughout the following discussion: No one owns a language.

Language is a tough nut to crack because it simply is. The natural languages on Earth weren’t created by any one person—or any group of people—and they simply evolved into different forms, with no cutoff between one language being one thing (e.g. Old English) and then something else (e.g. Modern English). If you want a very cut and dried example of appropriation and its effects, there’s a wonderful (and short) example in the movie Bring It On (the cheerleading one starring Kirsten Dunst).

For those who haven’t seen it, Kirsten Dunst plays a white cheerleader at a high school in San Diego. Eliza Dushku plays a new recruit who transfers from a school in LA. On viewing their practice Dushku calls out Kirsten, saying that all of their routines have been stolen from a black cheerleading squad at a high school she’s familiar with in Compton. Kirsten is unaware of this—as is everyone on the team—because it’s their coach that stole the routines and presented them as something new and original. Once they realize this—and meet the squad they’ve unwittingly disenfranchised—they determine to create new original routines.

This is a handy example because it’s nice and neat: The white group stole something from the black group that the white group would not have come up with on their own. Furthermore, the theft is demonstrably detrimental, as the white group is at a school famous for its cheerleading which has a lot more visibility on the national stage, so they’re a shoe-in for competitions; the black group is not. Also it’s very clear that the white group itself isn’t at fault: there was a single person at fault (the coach), and the group was unaware. Making things even better, once the group is made aware, they make the conscious decision to abandon the stolen routines, and even manage, via their status, to raise the visibility of the disenfranchised group, allowing them to compete on the national stage (and, as I recall, they win, too—the group from Compton).

Now let’s move back to language. Part of what makes language muddy and situations like the one in Bring It On simple is everything can be identified in the latter: The group from Compton created the routines; one single person was responsible for stealing the routines; it is easily demonstrable that the theft benefits the privileged group and disenfranchises the original creators. With language, it’s rarely ever clear who invented what. It’s also rarely ever clear who was responsible for a linguistic element moving from the in group to the out group. It’s also near impossible to say what the damage is when some word or phrase moves from one group to another. Only one thing is clear: Everyone is Kirsten Dunst in this scenario. Language comes and you use it. You don’t know where it came from or why: It’s just there.

Take the examples you listed above—“fam” and “woke”, or another one of my favorites, “bae”. No one can say where precisely they came from, but I can tell you this: If you know those words it is already too late. They’re out. They’ve hopped the fence. No one can control them anymore. This article cites a website that tracks the use of words in rap songs, and it claims that “bae” has been showing up in rap songs since 2005.

Let me say that again: In rap songs. Published rap songs that anyone can listen to. Unless the first rapper to use it in a song actually invented it, it seems likely that the word was already in use and had spread quite a bit. If it started out as a regionalism, it was now a colloquialism. When it gets to a popular medium like music, though, it’s likely that someone will hear it and not know that it started out as a regionalism. If you hear a word you don’t know all you know is that you don’t know it. Once you know it, though, you can use it. And unless someone specifically tells you not, you will.

Now, when can someone tell you not to use a word? That’s an interesting question. I always rely on the general tenet that one shouldn’t make fun of or disparage others. If it can be demonstrated that using a word does precisely that, intentionally or unintentionally, that’s reason enough to tell someone not to use a word (ahem, Washington football team). Furthermore, these things can be successful. Stewardess is one example (a gendered and, given the associations, a somewhat disparaging word). When I was growing up, everyone used it. Now no one does: Everyone uses flight attendant. I don’t know how it happened, but it did, and it was damn effective. Same thing happened with gyp (meaning to cheat). I used this all the time as a kid, because I learned it and used it. Everyone did. I had absolutely no idea that “gyp” was short for “gypsy”, and that the etymology was “to behave like a gypsy towards someone”. If you’d asked me then, I probably would’ve thought you spelled it jip, because institutional racism against the Roma people is so much more prevalent in Europe than it is in the United States. When someone finally told me that that’s where that word came from, I was shocked, because the notion is so remote to most Americans. But I did immediately stop using it. And I’ve noticed it’s simply not common anymore, which is a good thing. I’m in California, so I can’t speak for the rest of the US, but I don’t see it a lot online, either.

These movements can also be overt, and can often be effective. When I was in high school, “gay” as an insult was extremely common. There were groups that actively campaigned against that, though (as a basketball fan, I loved that this commercial was played regularly during games), and, YouTube comments aside, it’s been pretty effective. “Gay” as an insult is nowhere near as common as it was. In short, if it’s a societal push, you can actually banish words from the lexicon.

Back to the question that opened the previous paragraph, should we not be using “bae”? Tough to say if it’s hard to say who “we” is. That is, using “gay” as an insult is clearly disparaging to homosexuals. Using “bae” for one’s significant other, though, doesn’t really disparage anybody. That is, unless one is using the word to mock a hypothetical black user of the word, in which case the message shouldn’t be don’t use “bae”, but rather, uh, don’t mock anyone for the way they speak. When it comes to teasing people for comedy, they’d better be on even footing with you (so it’s just as likely that they could be teasing you), and you shouldn’t ever mock something someone has absolutely no control over, such as the circumstances of their birth, the color of their skin, or the way they speak their own language.

This should, in my opinion, take precedence over trying to puzzle out who came up with which word, and whether or not one is sufficiently a part of a given group to use it. Especially in casual usage, it’s not clear what advantages a non-black English speaker is gaining by using a word like “bae” that a black English speaker is missing out on. Being a rapper paid to use language is one thing; being a person with a Tumblr is another.

Also it’s important to separate vocabulary from grammar. AAE isn’t just a set of vocabulary: It’s a distinct and consistent way of speaking the English language. One can use a noun or two without coming anywhere close to trying to use AAE.

Also when it comes to vocabulary it’s important to have a bit of perspective. Words like “fam” and “woke” and “bae” are quite new in the general public consciousness. They may be here to stay; they may not. Other words from AAE and elsewhere have come and gone, and others have come and stayed, but no one is complaining about those that have stayed. For example, both “old school” and “back in the day” are from black English—and fairly recently, too—but they are absolutely a part of English now. You can’t even say “back in the old days” or “way back when” anymore without it sounding folksy. I knew “back in the day” had moved into common parlance when I met my wife @thisallegra who used it all the time, but who apparently had no idea it came from black English (I, of course, remembered it from the song, which is the first place I heard it, since I listened almost exclusively to rap between 1991 and 1994). If she was just using it without any idea that it should be tagged as a regionalism, it was already on its way to becoming standard English.

I do have a theory as to why it stuck around, though, and this’ll take me to “bae”. “Back in the old days” has always suggested old-timeyness. You could say it, and it conveyed the same meaning, but it carried a sense of…not disparagement, but non-seriousness with it. That is, if you say “back in the old days”, you can expect whoever you’re talking to to take what you’re saying with a grain of salt. There’s actually no such judgment with “back in the day”. If anything, it suggests reverence. I don’t recall any such expression that existed before that (or nothing as compact), meaning that the expression filled a gap: It was useful. That’s why it made the jump.

And that brings us to bae. The most common way to refer to one’s significant other is “boyfriend” or “girlfriend”. These are gendered terms. Of late, we’ve been pushing to find non-gendered terms for roles and words that, previously, have been gendered. What doe sone do for “boyfriend” or “girlfriend”? What’s English got? Significant other? Too clunky. Boyfriend or girlfriend? I’ve seen it (e.g. “Do you have a boyfriend or girlfriend?”), but it’s both clunky and exclusive (it refers to someone that is either male or female and that’s it). S.O.? I’ve seen it, but it’s not common. Baby? Still reads as female, most of the time (one of the many words that isn’t gendered but still has de facto gender coding). So what else is there? Using someone like honey? Too specific.

Think about it. This was a pretty serious gap in English. We just didn’t have a good word to refer to a significant other without referring to their gender. Pretty lame. English speakers the world over have had ample opportunity to come up with something to fill this gap. No one did. Until bae.

Is it any wonder that people everywhere are using “bae” now? It seriously codes as completely gender-irrelevant. It’s pretty useful that way (e.g. I’ve seen that meme where it says “when you’re waiting for bae to text you back”, and it can pair with any image, regardless of gender. It’s great!). And my read on it (feel free to comment) is that there is absolutely no default gender for “bae”. It’s not a term that mainly refers to men that can be used for women, or vice-versa. You can use it to refer to any person who identifies as any gender. Far from worrying about whether or not we should use it on account of cultural appropriation, we should find the person(s) who invented it and give them a damn medal. Since it’s language, though, we’ll likely never know.

Guys, 

I recently read an upcoming YA book w/ a Chinese character which honestly drove me a little nuts. 

This character said “wah” and “ai-yah” without subtlety, had lines like “…husband comes first!”, along with many other classic moments. 

Yes, the book takes place in the 1800s. But I’m getting tired of only seeing certain types of Chinese women being depicted in literature.