Sorry to Bother You is a raciolinguistic tour de force. A thread...
Sorry to Bother You is one of the only films I’ve seen that frames codeswitching as an ideological and not merely linguistic practice—that is, “talking white” isn’t simply about talking like white people, it’s talking like white people imagine themselves to talk.
Sorry to Bother You points to the ways that codeswitching is not merely a temporary, ornamental, or idiosyncratic practice, but rather a fundamental component of ALL language use. This means that EVERYONE codeswitches, but with different stakes and in different conditions.
Sorry to Bother You recognizes that everyone is using language to engage in strategic presentations of self—labor superiors and subordinates, activists, radicals, strivers—everyone.
Sorry to Bother You brings attention to complex intra-racial dynamics such that Blackness, Whiteness, etc. are not singular phenomena but rather internally stratified in ways that serve to reproduce broader racial formations of power that do not simply reduce to class.
Sorry to Bother You highlights the conceits involved in encouraging racially minoritized populations to master the “codes of power,” & the ways such alleged mastery is a false theory of change that often leads to cooptation & reproduction rather than transformation.
Sorry to Bother You presents an intersectional analysis of linguistic, racial, class, and gender hierarchies that refuses to provide simple solutions or paths toward emancipation and equality.
Sorry to Bother You features the erotics of social movements, including labor movements, in which cults of personality allow people, especially men, to masquerade as radicals while engaging in self-serving, individualist projects.
Sorry to Bother You challenges Marxist assumptions about class emancipation by underscoring the crucial Afropessimist insight that racialized populations—particularly Black folks—are positioned as non-human animals, not laborers, & no one is talking about emancipating the cattle.
Sorry to Bother You is a filmic realization of John Jackson’s point in Racial Paranoia that understanding the systemic reproduction of racism requires the imagination of realities that defy normative perception.
Sorry to Bother You creates the discomforting Chappelle Show moment where audiences of the film, through their consumption & laugher, inadvertently participate in the enactment of that which it critiques.
