NPR lives in a strange, government-funded, hushed-voice realm apart from polite society.
So when cultural references usually trickle towards them, it’s always gotta be a few years too late.
Case in point: NPR discovers that there’s this thing called “bro”.
This confuses NPR, so immediately they jump to the first thing they can think of: race.
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?
NPR for some reason can’t comprehend that this isn’t 1860.
Lots of people told us that, yes, a bro is definitely a white dude. (But per Bryan Lowder at Slate, bros aren’t necessarily straight.) 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 — think Melissa McCarthy in Bridesmaids. 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.
You really want to have these people over for a party now, right?
Eventually, NPR discovered that “bros” have a certain Venn diagram of broness: Jockish, Dudely, Preppish, and Stonerish, eventually landing at Ryan Lochte as the ultimate bro.
And this is what happens when space-cadet college professors try their damndest to understand the equally space-cadet kids sitting right across the room from them.
