A beautiful bro-ment: Ryan
Lochte, left, and Michael Phelps give each other the traditional
arm-wrestle bro-shake at the U.S. Olympic swimming trials in June 2012.
This is the chant of the bro, an equally parodied and celebrated genus of young men. (They've been designated "bros" mostly because, well, they say "bro" a whole lot.)
The usage of "bro" as a term of endearment isn't new, obviously. (As the indispensable points out in a useful short history, people have been abbreviating "brother" this way for centuries, although its iteration as a synonym for "friend" — or more accurately, "friend-dude" — is much more recent.) Over the last decade or so, though, "bro" has evolved into a shorthand for a specific kind of fratty masculinity. Baseball cap with the frayed brim (possibly backwards), sky-blue oxford shirt or sports team shirt, cargo shorts, maybe some mandals or boat shoes. Y'all know who we mean. .
The other day, the Code Switch team fell into a winding conversation about bros, as we're wont to do regarding all sorts of seemingly trivial topics. After a Code Switcher described a person of color as being a bro, some of us wondered whether the description even made sense. Uh, weren't bros fratty white guys? Could dudes of color be bros independently of white bros? Or are they just like That Brown Friend in all those beer commercials — bro-y due to his social proximity to white bros?
Is bro-ness, well, raced? We asked folks to conjure up an image of a typical bro in their mind's eye. What race is that dude in your head? Most people nearby said that guy was probably white.
We tossed the question out to Twitter.
Lots of people told us that yes, a bro is definitely a white dude. (But per Bryan Lowder at Slate, .) Other people said that while most of the bros in our popular culture are white dudes, you could find plenty of bros of color in the real world at places like USC. (Alas, even in bro-dom, people of color are underrepresented in the media.) Some folks suggested that there were lady-bros — . And, of course, many people drew the distinction between bros and the term bruhs, which has a different (but occasionally still fratty) connotation among black folks speaking to other black folks.
Click Here to Read More: http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2013/06/21/193881290/jeah-we-mapped-out-the-four-basic-aspects-of-being-a-bro?ft=1&f=1001&sc=tw&utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter
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