What I was initially objecting to was the plucking of signifiers like accent/dialect outside of their context and employing them without that kind of sensitivity and awareness.
But who could satisfy standards like that? I’m sure that I would find a middle class Oxford graduate talking patois hideously embarrassing were I to meet him. However, I wouldn’t want to generalise from that probable fact the rule that “borrowing the tropes of coolness from another race ultimately kind of racist”. I like those early Cream recordings, but I wouldn’t assume that Clapton was a racist because he played guitar like a black person. Even in order to say something like that in the specific, rather than the general, you would have to know a lot (obviously, I’m not talking about the linguistic short-hand we all employ in our day-to-day lives. As I said, I’m sure I would have found it embarrassing too). You would have to know that the person was borrowing these tropes in order to be cool, where appearing cool is understood in only the most mercenary and shallow way, and, reaching inside that affinity, understand that it rests on a one-to-one identity of said tropes with black people. Far too much knowledge to merely assume, in other words.
Putting an accent on
is weird, and extremely common. We all do it all of the time. But this is a trivial fact—you can’t short-circuit these things and go straight to the generalisations: “imitation of the way other races act is racist”. I think the formulation of that proposition is more troubling than the act of imitation itself. If I pretend to be a woman, because I think women are cool (or anything), is that sexist? It might be, I suppose. But it depends on the specifics, at which point this is either going to get complicated or circular or both.
Finally, I’m not saying that you shouldn’t react to the way people speak or don’t speak. I work at a university, and I spend most of my day walking around sneering at the idiot teenagers. I wouldn’t have it any other way, but I try to be careful about leaping from a visceral feeling to abstract categories. I’m sure that they’re not all idiots; it just looks that way from where I’m standing. And where am I standing? There’s a kind of stupidity to the white Oxbridge rasta, but there’s also a kind of equivalence. Dreadlocks are probably okay, listening to reggae is probably okay, but the accent takes identification a bit too far for comfort—the accent is where I draw the line. Okay, not all the time, I still use it for comedic or ironic effect, but that’s because I “get” it, unlike the naive dupes who just feel affinity and go for it.
But this little bit of output gap, this space between ironic cool and occluded mimicry, this is no more or less arbitrary than anything else, no more or less constructed and held temporarily in place by social ties. My own accent: Is it authentic? More authentic than the white rasta’s? Than yours?