SNL's "Gen Z Hospital" sketch accused of cultural appropriation of African-American Vernacular English

Yahoo!

Twitter users accused Saturday Night Live of rebranding African-American Vernacular English, or AAVE, as Gen Z slang on Elon Musk's episode “Love the relabelling of AAVE and a few assorted BLACK LGBTQ+ phrases as ‘Gen z’ speak,” one Twitter user wrote on Sunday. “Love to see the erasure in real time.” Another user wrote: "AAVE is not = Gen Z. AAVE is a cluster of dialects in which there are generational differences, especially in vocabulary, just as there are within any dialect of a language. And most white Gen-Zers are not fluent in AAVE. This sounds like a bunch of people faking French accents." As Yahoo Entertainment's Asia Ewart notes, "AAVE — a vernacular rooted in African and Caribbean Creole English dialects — was created in Black communities that were enslaved generations ago as a means to communicate with one another. Some words, like 'lit,' 'bae,' and 'slay,' have managed to enter the mainstream, often because they are popularized by Black musicians. And while appropriation of these terms has become so widespread, it’s entirely different when a for-profit platform that reaches millions of people across generations uses an entire language for comedy." UPDATE: Michael Che says "i meant no offense to the 'aave' community," adding he's never heard of AAVE and "look, the sketch bombed. im used to that."