My professor gave me a rewrite prompt, follow it please
The great news about your draft is that you are half way to your final paper already! You have identified an ideal topic and material, and you have a good research question. You have even already identified bibliographic material and written a lit review of it (more on this below).
You could safely use the existing first paragraph of this for your draft. There are some swaps to make thereafter, however (although I’d say a good half of the paper is good to go and can be repurposed).
The major thing that needs to be added is a closer, textual/discourse analysis of exact moments of the controversy (who, precisely, said what where, and how did others, including Awkwafina herself, respond), with one (or more) examples of Awkwafina’s uses of AAVE that stirred controversy. Your goal will NOT be to assess what features are AAVE yourself, but to look at how/in what context Awkwafina is using what others identify in their criticisms as an AAVE voice.
You mention that there are critics and defenders in conversation, metalinguistically evaluating Awkwafina’s speech (in general and in specific roles or performances), so that’s perfect. Put meat on those bones and collect/curate examples—not as isolated quotes but as interactional data (like we have been doing in class, seeing in readings all semester). You are not, ultimately, deciding who is “right” but reflecting more generally on the issues involved in this kind of seeming “crossing” or “appropriation” and the ideologies behind it (e.g. that only Black people can/do naturally use AAVE vs that anyone growing up in Brooklyn or the Bronx, from a non-elite background, might naturally speak what others hear as AAVE).
So, you need to add a paragraph to your intro introducing and describing the material you will analyze and what your argument about it will be.
Now for the rest of your draft: I think your second section after the intro, a lit review, starts off wonderfully. But as it proceeds, not all of your sources really speaks to this particular kind of case. May I suggest that you swap in the following external reading, about reasons why non-Black people who are also not white might choose AAVE to align themselves with Blackness (and in contrast to whiteness):
Bailey, B. (2001). “The Language of Multiple Identities Among Dominican Americans.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 10(2): 190-223.
It’s available full-text through the WMU Libraries, if you search for the article title. It’s an “oldie” (there are more recent articles) but I happen to think it would provide a great counterpoint to the Roth-Gordon et al article (I love your discussion of it).
I think you can safely cut/condense some of the later “lit review” including those lengthy 2nd & 3rd sections. Then you will want to write a new section (or new version of the “Awkwafina and the accent controversy”) to present your analyze of actual materials—describing the performance that upset (some) people and the discourse about it, “pro” and “con.” Then you can draw conclusions, including more general implications that interest you, anchored in your data analysis.
