hungee
1,000Just trying to answer a question currently trending in Google search, the people want to know!
@TonyBaloney I also find it incredibly racist that you would suggest people who speak in AAVE are uneducated, check your privilege
@SkyVelleity It seems very likely to me that the vast majority of those "is we getting food stamps" searches aren't from a legitimate phenomenon of low-income people using AAVE or non-conjugation but rather a self-reinforcing virality loop where people who see the supposed search recommendations get curious and try to search it up themselves.
Just quickly checking the Google Trends history, the frequency of searches for the phrase appears as a low level of activity beginning mid-October (not October 1, when the shutdown actually begun, but I guess you could explain that by saying that the shutdown wasn't expected to be so long at the start), at around 6% of the current peak, before jumping massively in a single day, suggesting that the vast majority of the search activity is coming from people who think it's a real phenomenon, and only 6% could plausibly be actual searches. A sudden jump from 6% to 100% suggests the viral spread of meme, not a consistent pattern.
Also interesting is that before the breakout on Oct. 25, the 2 most interested states in the search were Louisiana and West Virginia, 2 of the 3 states most dependent on SNAP. After Oct 25, interest was more evenly spread throughout the country. It's also pretty interesting that West Virginia is highly represented in both, despite being 90% white and 3% black.
So again, another instance of the boogeyman of black "welfare queens" being more present in the anxieties of the public than in reality. And the association implicit in the post between speaking AAVE and being low-income and dependent on government assistance, not just black, is obvious, no need to be disingenuous about it.
@spiderduckpig the spike on the 25th is probably because that was immediately after USDA announced it will not be using emergency funds to cover SNAP, which is when there was a spike in searches.
If you compare American English to AAVE, AAVE/AE both surge on the 15th/16th, and there is a spike on the 25th after the USDA announcement
Incidentally, the AE/AAVE breakdown mirrors population statistics for SNAP recipients.
if you think people started searching this as a joke, this consistently, without pause, ever since the 15th, at about 20% the rate people are consistently searching in AE, simply because of a meme which I haven’t seen circulated in years, with no one searching “is we getting meme” until the 25th, then it is safe to conclude for every hundred searches for “are we getting food stamps next month”, there are 20 people in earnest searching “is we getting food stamps next month”, and I don’t see what is racist about representing the wonderfully diverse culture of the United States of America and its citizens.
That doesn't really make sense, your own chart shows that "Are we getting..." only increases from a range of 50-75 to about 80-100 between pre-Oct 25 and post-Oct 25, an increase of only about 50%, whereas "is we getting..." increases from a range of 5-8 to 100 in a singular day, which is at least a 1250% increase. Wouldn't you expect the two to increase proportionally to each other if the vast majority of those "is we getting" searches were real searches? All that shows to me is that there is a small background level of people searching "is we getting," followed by a massive surge in popularity simply due to a meme.
As for the reason why "is we getting meme" specifically spiked on Oct. 25, that's probably because this tweet was posted that day and got 2 million views.
https://x.com/hayasaka_aryan/status/1982238184567140464
I really don't care for identity politics, I just dislike it when people are disingenuous and don't say what they really mean.