“What Up Doe!” Ain’t Just Slang
Black American words and phrases often become part of our overall American society, many times in the wrong way.
Issue #123 OpEd by Keith August 29, 2022
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When you hear somebody say “What up doe!”, you automatically know it’s a Black thing just from the way it sounds. Because it’s hard to imagine your average white person strolling through the neighborhood when suddenly, in response to a neighbor’s greeting, said average white person responds “What up doe!” And presto! A cool new phrase is born. Just like that.
Never happened.
But not only is “What up doe!” a Black thing, it’s a Detroit Black thing. And believe me when I say we Black Detroiters take great pride in that, and in the fact that it’s well-known who launched that phrase. Just like we launched Motown, Techno, and brother Dabls’ incredible Bead Museum. We did it again.
The Urban Dictionary defines the emphatic “What Up Doe!” as Detroit slang for the noticeably less colorful and moderately expressive “What’s up?” or “How are you?” (note the use of the exclamation point versus the question mark), but I would argue that this phrase is way past slang; it is culture, and culture moves and shapes the world.
Consider the transformative power of artistic expression as demonstrated through music, painting, sculpture, dance, and fashion. You remove artistic expression from the landscape and right away we are existing (but just barely) in the equivalent of a nuclear wasteland. Everything goes from peacocks and rainbows to gray, gray, and more gray. Not even shades of gray, just gray. If you remove the impact of Black artistic expression from artistic expression overall, especially in the United States, you may get a color (?) shift from basic gray to a few choice shades of gray, but that’s all the improvement you’re likely to get.
And apparently, I’m not the only one who feels this way.
Harvard University’s own Professor Henry Louis Gates, who has over the years become one of the most celebrated and certainly most recognized authorities on Black history and culture, is now putting that authority to use, not simply to defend the relevance and importance of Black English but to elevate it.
Because like I said, this goes way beyond just slang. Same as with Black music and its history of (mis)appropriation (otherwise known as straight-up theft) on a regular basis by white artists who could not have created anything approaching jazz or blues on their own, so much of Black dialect has spilled over into common usage to the point where it becomes forgotten who was ‘cool’ to begin with.
We discussed the newest misappropriation of a “Black word,” especially the word “woke,” in our latest podcast episode.
From The New York Times:
A project of Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research and Oxford University Press, the dictionary will not just collect spellings and definitions. It will also create a historical record and serve as a tribute to the people behind the words, said Henry Louis Gates Jr., the project’s editor in chief and the Hutchins Center’s director.
“Just the way Louis Armstrong took the trumpet and turned it inside out from the way people played European classical music,” said Gates, Black people took English and “reinvented it, to make it reflect their sensibilities and to make it mirror their cultural selves.”
The idea was born when Oxford asked Gates to join forces to better represent African American English in its existing dictionaries. Gates instead proposed they do something more ambitious. The project was announced in June, and the first version is expected in three years.
Word.
Do you have some favorite Black words or phrases that have become part of the overall American language and culture? Let us know in the comments!
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