Just as Amandla Sternberg’s video comes out and gets high circulation (at least in my social media feeds) as not just an amazing piece of digital writing by a black teenage actress but also as some damn correct reporting…

…we get Kyle at Coachella…

…a festival for rich Angelenos (in a poverty-stricken rural valley) who often come bedecked in boho, native-appropriating fashion. 

from Buzzfeed, “16 things you definitely shouldnt wear to coachella”

It’s important to note the not only visual, but linguistic character of Kylie’s appropriation of blackness here. From her caption, “bad bitch” and “bad bitch alert” are both phrases from hiphop and black youth discourse, with their practices of semantic inversion.  And Khloe’s previous Instagram post is a Dubsmash dubbing of herself and kylie lip synching as black men say “I love you, bitch/ I ain’t never gonna stop lovin you, bitch.” I’ve noticed this site quickly gain popularity over the last week, and jokes already often seem to be based around lip synching to heavy ethnic or regional dialect. This kind of linguistic sampling is not so different from what in iggy azaleas case has been called “verbal blackface.” 

Anyway, have a great weekend!!