Last year, the comedian/actor was chastised for using a “blaccent” in one of her roles. Her appropriation of Black culture has earned her a nomination for an awards ceremony honoring Black achievement.
According to Yahoo!, Awkwafina has been nominated for “Outstanding Character Voice-Over Performance” in Disney’s Raya and the Last Dragon.
She isn’t the first non-African-American actress to be nominated for an NAACP Image Award. Mike Sturm from Medium, singer Justin Timberlake, rapper Iggy Azalea, and actress America Ferrera have all received nominations.
The nomination of Awkwafina is particularly irritating because many believe she built her persona and the foundation of her career on ridiculing Black people.
The actress posted she is “Extremely honored to be nominated at the @naacp image awards, alongside so many people I love, appreciate and respect.” She continued, “Thank you @naacp for all that you do and have done.”
She hasn’t responded to the vitriol she’s gotten online as a result of her latest nomination. The actress gave a hazy roundabout explanation of her usage of the word “blaccent” in an interview with Reuters.
“…it’s really something that is a little bit multi-faceted and layered, and so yeah,” she stuttered.
The NAACP has outraged Black Twitter by inviting Awkwafina to the proverbial cookout.
Awkwafina understands when to turn on and off her “blaccent” according to the project she’s working on, such as Marvel’s Shang-chi and The Legend of the Ten Rings, according to Twitter. In other projects, however, she employs the accent to compensate for her lack of comedic skills and to endear herself to white Hollywood.
As per Blackenterprise, in a 2017 VICE interview, she adamantly declared she would not take any role that would make a “minstrel out of her people.”
“I’ve walked out of auditions where the casting director all of a sudden changed her mind and asked for accents. I refuse to do accents. I don’t ever go out for auditions where I feel like I’m making a minstrel out of our people.”
But she apparently has no problem mocking others.
