None of us know exactly how and why she acquired that accent. She was a Jazz major at LaGuardia high school, so a lot of her friends were probably Black and AAVE-speaking. There’s no reason to assume that she acquired that accent “for comedic affect”-whatever that might mean. If you hangout with a lot of people who speak a certain way, you start speaking that way yourself. I went to Boy Scout camp in the American South one summer, and came back with a Southern accent. I wasn’t trying to be funny, it just happened, and it sometimes comes back if I hang out with Southerners.
However, none of this is our business. The online “trial-by-lack-of-context” that automatically judges her as somehow sinning against wokeness because of this accent makes two important errors.
1)There are lots of Asians who grew up in the American inner city for whom this is the only way they talk. They have as much right to be represented on screen as Asians with Chinese or standard American accents. Awkwafina is the only person representing such people, and to force her to drop that accent is to erase and marginalize those Asians. It is prejudiced and bigoted to assume that such people are intrinsically offensive just because they exist—to insist that they must somehow prove that they have a right to speak the way they speak.
2) Awkwafina is a Rapper, and Rap is performed in AAVE, just as opera is performed in Italian. That doesn’t mean that only Italians have a right to perform opera. Mozart was a German who wrote operas in Italian, because the Italians were making the best music in Europe at the time. Even though the Germans had conquered and ruled Italy during his lifetime, Italians still accepted Mozart’s music and incorporated it into their own. Similarly, people from a variety of cultures are influenced by African-American Music, because it is one of the greatest sources of musical genius in the history of the human race. When people from other cultures perform that music, they will sing/speak it with some version of AAVE. To say they cannot perform that music because they have the wrong DNA is-once again-prejudiced and bigoted.
