Non-speakers deploy AAVE features tactically to critique whiteness and build alliance.

Evidence

The speakers use various elements associated with African American youth language, including idiomatic phrases like keep it real (line 2368) and lexical items like whitey (lines 2373, 2378), as well as a few emblematic grammatical structures such as the zero copula (they always back stabbin, line 2370). None of the participants in this interaction is a fluent speaker of AAVE, and indeed not all participants use AAVE features. But in the context of this discussion – a critique of whiteness – AAVE becomes an effective instrument for rejecting dominant racial ideologies. — Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall, Identity and Interaction, 32

Categorization

• XREF: Directly serves the reader’s stated purpose of capturing the micro-mechanisms of identity ‘routing’ in real conversational data.