It's kind of funny because for the past year or two there's been a massive ongoing furore in media fandom (the global community of ppl who write fanfiction online), bouncing back and forth between it and SF/F fandom (writers, readers, editors...), circling around manifestations of race/gender/class privilege in genre narratives and the community experiences centred around these genre narratives - sometimes it's a conversation, sometimes it's a witchhunt. In the parlance of this shakedown, the effect agrammar describes - the way ppl look at Ezra Koenig or the Chinese-American college girl** in his audience and describes them as white - is "erasure", and considered the most sinful manifestation of privilege, because the most unthinking and the most difficult to counter. (If saying "look I'm right here and not who you think I am!" doesn't do it, what possibly will?)

EDIT -- I've taken out that last bit because disingenuous: I'm not boggled that Nitsuh is (what looks like to me) reinventing the wheel. Media/SFF's way of INTERROGATING THE TEXT I tend to think is quite awful, getting your blame game in my soup etc. but music writers sometimes insist on having this conversation even when they haven't interrogated the text because there is NO TEXT TO INTERROGATE (not in the same way, at least. And you'd disagree with that, no?).


** This is who I think of as the typical Vampire Weekend fan, not "white" at all.