Scroll through TikTok and you’ll hear it immediately: “it’s giving”, “period”, “no shade”, “clock it”. All of it usually packaged as “Gen Z slang”. The rebrand is convenient. It makes the language feel fresh, natural, ownerless. But it isn’t ownerless. Much of what is now labeled “internet slang” comes directly from African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and Black queer ballroom culture, traditions with history, structure and stakes.
AAVE has long been policed in ways people conveniently forget once it becomes profitable. Black children have been corrected in classrooms for saying stuff like “He be working” instead of “He is working”, even though the habitual “be” follows a consistent grammatical rule. Students have lost points on essays for sentence constructions rooted in their home dialect. They’ve been told to “fix” the way they talk to sound more educated, more professional, more acceptable. In some cases, linguistic bias has shaped disciplinary action, academic tracking and perceptions of intelligence. The message has been clear: your language is wrong.
Yet once that same cadence, vocabulary and rhythm leave Black mouths and appear on non-Black influencers’ feeds, they’re no longer “incorrect”. They’re funny. They’re charismatic. They’re marketable. Brands replicate the tone in captions. Corporations tweet in stylized AAVE to seem relatable. Suddenly, what was once stigmatized becomes trendy. It stops being “improper” and starts being “Gen Z”.
Ballroom culture has undergone a similar flattening. Emerging from Black and Latino LGBTQ+ communities in Harlem, ballroom wasn’t just performance, it was refuge. Houses operated as chosen families for queer and trans youth rejected elsewhere. The language developed there carried layered meaning. “Reading” wasn’t just random insults, it was sharp social commentary. “Throwing shade” wasn’t just sarcasm, it was artful subtlety. The documentary Paris Is Burning documented the complexity of that world, long before social media repackaged it.
Take “clock it”. On TikTok, it’s tossed around for minor call-outs, usually paired with a sloppy hand gesture and the wrong finger entirely. But in ballroom spaces, especially among trans women, being “clocked” often meant being identified as not being a “real woman”. That carried risk. It could mean humiliation, exclusion, even danger. The term emerged from lived vulnerability, not meme culture. Reducing it to a punchy reaction phrase strips away its history and its weight.
This isn’t harmless borrowing. It’s extraction without acknowledgement. AAVE and ballroom language are treated as aesthetic accessories, detached from the Black and queer communities that built them. And once they’re algorithmically amplified, their origins are erased under the lazy label of “Gen Z”.
Language doesn’t just appear. It comes from somewhere. And pretending it doesn’t is part of the problem.