Maybe you’ve never seen the word wypipo. I’d never seen it myself until a couple of weeks ago. But just say it aloud, or even silently: WYE-pee-poh.
Still not getting it? Take a look at this:
Via The Lisa B Experience (Lisa Beasley)
No? Here; I’ll help: Wypipo is white people with a dash of baby-talk and a lot of eyeroll. It’s used almost exclusively by people of color, almost always as a term of condescension, disparagement, or outright hostility. Its origins, like those of many slang terms, are murky, but there’s a better than zero probability that it was born on social media, where eye dialect thrives. (I first encountered it on Twitter.) As a written word, it’s pretty recent: Urban Dictionary has only two entries, the earliest of which is dated January 29, 2016: “Twitter slang or dialect that with read aloud sounds like ‘white people’ which is its actual meaning.” The example sentence in that entry is: “Girl wypipo are crazy, they let their dogs lick their mouths.”
It will probably not surprise you to learn that usage of wypipo has grown exponentially since the events in Charlottesville, Virginia, during the weekend of August 12.
Wypipo is #NotAllWhitePeople – just the clueless and/or malevolent ones (which is to say: many). A wypipo – yes, it’s both a count noun and a mass noun – is likely to respond to “Black Lives Matter” with “No, no, all lives matter!” Or maybe “Blue Lives Matter.”
The ways of wypipo are often absurd and inexplicable.
Wypipo crazy. I'm not kicking metal with my foot. Feet ain't made for that. pic.twitter.com/XGL1Pk7lys
— Yac House P (@PhillyTheBoss) August 14, 2017
What is it with wypipo and wearing shorts in the cold?? https://t.co/lC3gnA5e5z
— SlimeGod ひ (@SlimeGuyEli) August 26, 2017
Or even cringeworthy.
It still sounds weird when wypipo use negro slanguage
— Ceazalito 27:12 (@cuzjaycsaidso) August 15, 2017
(Yes, I am aware of the irony: Simply by writing about wypipo I am falling into wypipo territory myself.)
plot twist: neo nazi white supremacist with asian tattoo bc wypipo pic.twitter.com/EByq6CsReg
— Daniel So (@SoDaniel) August 16, 2017
The most eloquent explanation I’ve found of wypipo is an essay by Michael Harriot for The Root, “In Defense of ‘Wypipo’,” published on July 19, 2017:
I am one of the few people for whom words cannot hurt. I don’t get outraged about much, and definitely not from words written by a person I’ve never met. If I write a “wypipo” article every day, it still won’t match the number of times I’ve been called “nigger” in some form or fashion. I promise you, however, that I am not trying to catch up.
I think the phrase and all the variations of it are sidesplittingly funny (the formal “Y. P. Pull,” the hipster “Why Pee Pole” and the Southern “Wipe E. Puh”). I make an effort to point out that the word doesn’t mean every single person of Caucasian descent. (Although, to be honest, it kinda does. Many of us people assume that all white people are wypipo—just to be safe. In fact, if you are upset by the previous statement because you assumed the phrase wasn’t referring to you—you’re probably wypipo.)
I especially like the variant spellings.
Harriot wrote that post in the middle of The Root’s Inaugural Tournament of Wypipo, “our scientific, peer-reviewed, double-blind quest to find the worst wypipo in the world”:
To be clear, this tournament is not about white people. In fact, most people of the Caucasian persuasion were declared ineligible for this tournament. We specifically limited this single-elimination, head-to-head contest to wypipo—the subset of citizens defined by privilege, the ability to wear flip-flops in all climates and an irrational empathy for animals while displaying antipathy for any group of people other than their own.
You can skip to the final round here. I don’t argue with the outcome, but I reserve the right to nominate my own candidate: the recently pardoned, but never-to-be-forgiven, Joe Arpaio. If you need a refresher course in his awfulness, read this Twitter thread from the Phoenix New Times, which has covered him for years. And if you want some insight into how he was brought down by the Department of Justice – only to be pardoned by the current resident of the White House – read this thread.
Android need to hurry up and get black emojis. Tired of using wypipo shit
— Ethereal•Healer (@TooChillToCool) August 15, 2017
_
Semi-related: Hotep.
I don’t think there’s “a dash of baby-talk” there; the pronunciation implied by the spelling wypipo contains nothing that wouldn’t happen normally in fast/colloquial pronunciations of white people in several varieties of American English (especially, but not exclusively, African-American and southern varieties).
The /t/ at the end of white would for many speakers be realized as a glottal stop [ʔ], assimilate in place of articulation to the following /p/, or just not be released before the lip closure for the /p/ begins; any one of these realizations would sound more or less as if the /t/ isn’t there.
And coda /l/-vocalization (whereby an /l/ at the end of a syllable turns into something that sounds more like [o]; Lauren Hall-Lew has some information about it here: http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~lhlew/vocalization.html) is also very common, though maybe more regionally specific. (It happens in Serbo-Croatian, too, but that’s not relevant here.) Most varieties of English have a velarized version of /l/ at the ends of syllables [ɫ], and /l/-vocalization is the next step beyond that—getting rid of the contact between the tongue tip and the alveolar ridge and leaving just the velarization.
Posted by: Q-pheevr | August 29, 2017 at 07:21 AM