“Unc” is, apparently, the latest gamer term or gen Z slang to enter our common parlance. Articles have argued it originated recently, from young people, who use it as an insult to old people. Except that’s not what unc means, and that’s not where it came from.

Unc, short for uncle (though it’s also been argued, incorrectly, that it’s a shortening of “uncool”), can sometimes be used for gentle ribbing, but fundamentally it’s a term of respect. It’s not a term you bestow upon yourself, but instead a natural consequence of getting older and still showing up tell the youngbloods what’s up. You wanna know who’s really unc? Denzel Washington. That’s not because Denzel is uncool or out of touch, but because he has had a long and illustrious enough career to earn the respect of the younger generation.

The old black man who used to run a record shop that closed during COVID where I picked up a copy of the album The Name Of This Band Is Talking Heads is unc to me. My dad, the kind of guy who went down to our local college campus to give advice to students in the encampment for Palestine, is unc. The nice older man who sits on a folding chair outside of his apartment and sometimes asks me to grab him a water bottle from the bodega is unc. I love that guy. Evan Narcisse is unc, and not just because he insists on wearing salmon-colored pants, but because he’s acted as a mentor to me ever since I started working at Kotaku, and I’d never pass up a chance to playfully razz him a little bit. 

You’d never know the meaning of unc or its origins in black culture if you looked to mainstream media, and sometimes even independent media. The Guardian attributes this slang to “gen alpha” and cites examples such as people calling Timothee Chalamet “unc” for turning 30, which isn’t really that old. This was then cited as the definition in my colleague Keza MacDonald’s article about “unc games,” though the article has since been corrected to include a reference to the term’s origins in African American Vernacular English. This article also references an article written by my old boss at Vice’s Motherboard, Emmanuel Maiberg, who wrote about Marathon as a so-called “unc game.”

These false etymologies get reinforced through incurious reporting. 

“As you probably know, unc, short for uncle, is a way to jokingly refer to old, potentially out of touch people,” Maiberg writes. “As far as I can tell, it entered the video game discourse in the form of this meme in which a soyfaced unc excitedly points at the hall of fame of so-called ‘unc slop,’ or, in other words, games that old people say are very good.”

Though I love the writing of both MacDonald and Maiberg, they are both doing something that I have observed in the online fandom for video games for some time. Black people who play video games talk about the games in the terms that they are familiar with, then other, non-black people who play games pick up these terms and run with them. Suddenly, these slang terms become “gamer slang” rather than African American Vernacular English, and these false etymologies get reinforced through incurious reporting. 

It isn’t that MacDonald or Maiberg themselves are the appropriaters. In fact, it’s hard to blame them for not knowing the origins of a slang term that has been so thoroughly appropriated already. But this is a cycle I have watched for a long time, and reporters writing about slang terms black people have used for decades as fresh and new is the end result of that cycle. They get to be discoverers and explainers of something that has already been discovered and explained.

More broadly, I’ve also seen this happen to words and phrases like “chopped,” “clocked it,” “the tea,” “no cap,” and “it’s giving.” All of these are slang terms that originate from African American Vernacular English—“clocked it,” “the tea” and “it’s giving” come from black queer culture in specific—but have now been categorized as “gen Z slang.” I have heard some people start to refer to the habitual be, as in “it really do be like that,” as a “meme” and it makes me want to tear my fucking hair out. We been saying that! That one’s ours!

Non-black people want to take everything from us except the weight of our history.

Appropriation of black culture is nothing new to the internet or the world. When TikTok dances were all the rage, Taylor Lorenz tracked down the originator of the popular “renegade dance,” a black teenage girl who had been all but forgotten as original choreographer of the short routine. The teenage girl who originated the phrase “on fleek” was also almost immediately erased as the term gained popularity as slang. Even farther back than that, I remember my African American Studies professor in college showing us a book cover for a book of essays on this very topic that he felt was illustrative of the way that black culture is extracted from our communities and then commodified: On it was a photograph of a white teenage boy wearing baggy jeans with his boxers showing, which was a style that was popularized in 90s hip hop culture. The title of the book is Everything But The Burden, as in, non-black people want to take everything from us except the weight of our history.

The internet has hyper-accelerated this extractive process of appropriation. Black teenagers spend more time on social media of all kinds than their non-black peers, and thus have made black slang much more visible than ever before. It’s not a surprise that AAVE has become the language of the internet at large, but also, it’s become much harder to track the flow of language and place it in its proper context. Because of how quickly trends form and then dissolve on the internet—remember “mob wife” and “office siren”?—slang is also picked up, stripped from context, and then discarded at much faster rates than when I was younger. 

It’s also much more difficult to trace the origins of these pieces of terminology, given that much of their dissemination occurs in short form video content on a platform that actively censors its search results. Like Taco Bell does with food, platforms like TikTok and Twitter are incentivized to strip context from language, because then it can be flattened into a saleable product that can be co-opted by corporations. (You can see this in the saga of West Elm Caleb, which turned from a funny story about a bunch of people dating the same guy to a tweet from the Hellman’s Mayonnaise brand.)

Seeing unc stripped of its meaning actually makes me a little sad.

In 2021, Sydnee Thompson at BuzzFeed wrote about the tendency of the internet to extract and then decontextualize black slang, saying that media outlets often cement that decontextualization that is already extant through their reporting.

“When media outlets — including BuzzFeed — and individuals who discuss memes and popular culture reproduce instances of Black American cultural appropriation, they lend them more credibility,” Thompson wrote. “The BuzzFeed Style Guide includes entries for many of these slang terms … and there exists a question of whether we should note their AAVE origins when they come up in a story. Doing so would help put concepts in their proper context and make it more difficult for culture vultures to appropriate with impunity.”

At least in the cases of “on fleek” and the renegade dance, the appropriated trends were short-lived, flash in the pan ideas. But “unc” is something embedded more deeply into black culture, and seeing it stripped of its meaning actually makes me a little sad. If there’s anything insulting about being called unc, it’s the kind of insult that’s meant to bring people closer together, not reinforce an artificial boundary between generations. It’s a word you use for people who are actively in community with you, not people you are trying to shut out. 

I’d love to be unc someday—to be so respected by younger people that they know it won’t hurt my feelings to call me old. When I call someone unc, I don’t want anyone to think I’m insulting the generation older than me, or that becoming unc is in some way a bad thing. That’s not what it means or has meant to me, and I don’t want its meaning to be taken away.

There’s a commercial I see when I watch television shows on streaming services for store-bought naan that drives me fucking crazy. The characters in this commercial repeatedly describe naan as “a delicious fluffy flatbread,” in a way that feels like they want to erase all the connections that naan has to a culture and a place. They don’t mention India, or Pakistan, or any of the Asian and Arab countries where naan is a typical accompaniment to meals. It’s a flatbread! A delicious, fluffy flatbread! In the same way that Taco Bell strives to divorce the food it produces from its cultural context—food that comes from nowhere and has no history—this commercial took a food I have always known as Indian and divorced it from Indianness. Dosa Divas is a game that allows me to release some of the anger I feel about this.

My relationship to the Indian diaspora is complicated. My mother immigrated when she was seven, and her family immigrated before the cap on Asian immigrants was repealed in 1965, meaning that there was no diaspora culture to greet her in America. Add to that that she married a Black man, a lot of Indian Americans just don’t want to have anything to do with me. No joke, I have had many other Indians either tell me I am not Indian or straight up stop speaking to me after learning these facts. 

While there are examples of diaspora media products that speak to me—the 2001 movie American Desi, a shortening of the phrase “American Born Confused Desi,” and the music of Heems and MIA—I feel alienated by stories that describe an immigrant experience I have never known. Food was often the one cultural connection I had to other Indians. My mom still makes the recipes she remembers from her youth, and we both follow the handwritten recipes in a notebook that my ammama left for us. But I also find that stories about food in the diaspora community are often pretty shallow, reducing a rich culture into a small number of foods that come from a very specific area of India, or god forbid, telling yet another story about white kids thinking your lunchbox is stinky. 

Dosa Divas is not a story about the worthiness of Indian food, nor is it about what white people think about Indian food. From what I’ve played so far, it is a story about how food gets commodified, repackaged, and divorced from the things that make cooking and eating an essential part of creating a community.

Dosa Divas follows sisters Amani and Samara as they take a roadtrip through a science fiction world inspired by Indian culture. Their destination is their old family restaurant, but on the way they discover that their other sister Lina has taken the family business and turned it into an evil corporation that sells meals in tubes. If Lina had the idea to repackage naan as delicious fluffy flatbread, I am certain that she would, but her mission goes farther than that—she wants to rid the world of cooking entirely so that everyone has more time to work sixteen hour shifts in the mines.

As Amani and Samara travel to their hometown, they encounter hungry people who desperately want dosa—and dosa they provide. In the first town, a fishing village, dosa is the thing that empowers people to repair bridges and start planning about how to fight off Lina’s corporate goons. Each dosa is carefully crafted by Amani and Samara together, from ingredients either found in the environment or bartered for. The cooking minigames have not outstayed their welcome so far, but more than the minigames, I love the many different recipes for dosa that you collect as the game goes on. You learn how to make spicy fish dosa and sweet banana dosa and savory veggie dosa, all of which can later be used as healing items during turn-based battles.

In combat, where you face off against Lina’s lawyers, each of the characters' skills and attacks are assigned a flavor value—essentially just taking the RPG genre convention of different elements and replacing them with Salty, Sweet, Sour and Savory. But by attacking an enemy and using their flavor weakness against them you can break their shields and make them Stuffed, allowing you to do more damage. So far it’s just complex enough to be fun without feeling unwieldy, but the (ahem) flavor text around these character abilities really makes them come together for me. Uncle Hinti, the disembodied character who delivers on-screen hints, tells the player that Stuffed enemies are too busy dreaming of a home-cooked meal to bother protecting themselves from attacks. Who among us hasn’t drifted into a daydream thinking about Mom’s idli and walked into scaffolding?

More than anything, Dosa Divas makes me ravenous. I wish more diaspora stories were about how our culture can and is commodified, rather than arguing for its worthiness or reinforcing a specific narrative of diaspora that excludes people like me. But it also, specifically, makes me hungry for dosa. My mom told me that ammama made dosa so thin and crispy and perfectly golden brown that she was gifted with a golden spatula—not very useful for cooking, but a compliment to her skill. I can still taste her dosa in my mouth, hot and oily and just a little bit sour. I can’t have those dosa again, but someday I hope to at least follow her recipe.

Marisa Kabas has an excerpt from looks like a fascinating new book by a former top USAID official:

Without introductions, Joel, who was eating a frozen Indian dinner, jumped right in. “In full transparency, we’re drawing down USAID,” he said. “We’d like you to walk us through your mission-critical functions so that we can close things out smoothly. What are the key priorities that we need to keep working on in GH, and the staff needs to carry them out?”

Draw down. Close out. The words he dropped so casually rang in my head. Our global health programs didn’t concern him, he was only interested in the quickest way to shutter the agency. I knew this was my only chance to make him see why our work mattered.

“Thanks, Joel,” I began. “With the current pause on foreign aid, we’re primarily focused right now on the waiver to restart our lifesaving activities. But emergency response is only a tiny fraction of our work. So much of what we do is to strengthen sustainable health systems around the world for long-term health improvements. Let me tell you about that work as well as some of the more urgent needs.”

Joel, who had been checking his watch, shrugged and took another bite of his microwaved paneer. Just as I was about to go on, Paul Seong spoke up. “I’d say just stick to the lifesaving stuff,” he said. Aside from Jason Gray, Paul was the only career official representing the front office in this meeting. My only prior engagement with Paul was the Ebola briefing on Monday after which he had asked for the names of the meeting’s participants, who had been the only staff spared from administrative leave that day. Paul had been a relatively junior foreign service officer until recently, when he had somehow ingratiated himself with our new political leaders. Now the political appointees seemed to look to him for strategic advice on how to tear down the agency, and he appeared to relish his newfound influence, which was affirmed by his seat at the center of the conference table. Joel and the others nodded their agreement.

Disappointed, though not surprised, I began to describe various life- saving components of USAID’s global health portfolio, highlighting how we prepare for and respond to emerging pandemic threats; support the diagnosis and treatment of tuberculosis, malaria, and HIV; and immunize millions of children from the deadliest childhood diseases. I spoke for about five minutes, focusing primarily on our infectious diseases work and hoping to keep the attention of people who seemed to have no experience—or interest—in global health.

When I finished, the room was silent, the political appointees looking at one another in what appeared to be disbelief. The silence was broken by Ken Jackson, who chuckled softly and shook his head. “Wow, there really is so much that USAID does that we never knew,” he said. “This is the story that needs to get out there.”

Joel, also smiling, chimed in next, echoing Jackson’s amazement. “I had no idea you did all this,” he said. “As a Republican, when I think of what USAID does in global health, I assumed it was just, you know, abortions.”

It doesn’t get any less depressing than this. The destruction of USAID in itself dispositively settles the question of whether Trump is the worst president of the 21st century — countless people will die because of the impulsive actions of amoral know-nothings.

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