Rickford and Rickford’s (1976) seminal work on “Cut-Eye and Suck-Teeth: African Words and Gestures in New World Guise,” describes a visual and oral gesture as cultural talk within Black Diasporic communities across West Africa, the Caribbean and the United States. In the 40+ years since, there have been few sociolinguistic studies on African American expression regarding embodied styling of speech, and related indexical meanings (Barrett 1999, Goodwin and Alim 2010), with one exception being studies of Black ASL, in which “the body supplies the grammar for the entire linguistic system.” (McCaskill et al. 2011).

The first part of this paper is an extension of embodied sociolinguistics with analyses of black gestural embodiment in United States contexts that are not part of the “traditional” linguistic system, yet contribute to semantics, pragmatics and meaning making of speech. We highlight several non-verbal gestures using the head, face, hands, eyes, and posture, oftentimes co-occurring with speech that are central to the production, perception, and social interpretation of language. 

The second part of this paper focuses on Jessica Krug and Rachel Dolezal, two white women, both by parental heritage and upbringing, and both of whom entered spaces in academia and social justice organizations with assumed Black identities. In 2020 and 2015, respectively, they were found to be camouflaging as Black women. We examine the ways in which the two women used the semiotic resources of Blackness, including embodied paralinguistic and gestural practices of Blackness, in addition linguistic, sartorial, tonsorial, and cosmetic behaviors. 

We show how Dolezal and Krug manipulated embodied, social, political, aesthetic, and linguistic resources to enact what they and others believed to be “Black” women, and argue that  appropriations of Black embodied expressions was used to further subjugate the Black communities in which Doezal and Krug entered.