"Hey John, is this a B/black thing?"

I enjoyed the way linguist John McWhorter wrote up his discussion of a word Justice Brown Jackson used in her dissent in Students for Fair Admission v. Harvard University, (in which Harvard took a gentleman's F for failure to abide by the law, and whereby the ethnically discriminated-against students won*...).

Funny:

Although I disagreed with her dissent in the affirmative-action case the Court decided late last month, I (along with many others) took notice of a sentence in which she argued, in reference to the idea that the law must be colorblind, that “This contention blinks both history and reality in ways too numerous to count.”

There has been some perplexity about this usage of “blink,” in which it means “neglect, fail to acknowledge” — the idea being akin to the saying that “if you blinked you’d miss it.” There were some discussions of the usage online, and a friend even wrote me wondering sincerely whether the expression came from Black English. (It does not.)

 * Lest we forget, with all the mainstream-media mourning...

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ADDED:  You really gotta read the whole thing  I'm cracking up here:

But in addition to its interesting past, “blink” has something to say about the present and future evolution of language, as well. What, would you say, is the past tense of “blink”?  Don’t feel guilty if before you thought “blinked,” “blunk” briefly crossed your mind. “Blunk” is quite common in colloquial English...On some level, we want the past tense of “blink” to be “blunk” because it rhymes with “sink,” whose forms of present, past and past participle are “sink,” “sank” and “sunk,” or, recalling the song from “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” “stink, stank, stunk.”  

But something’s still wrong. If “blink” were patterned on “sink” and “stink,” then why wouldn’t the past tense be “blank”? ... The reason is that “blunk” is a symptom of something even more basic. Colloquial English in a sense doesn’t like having three forms of a verb where the difference between them is just a single vowel (“sink,” “sank,” “sunk”). 

English speakers are — subconsciously, of course — trying to use the language in such a way that each verb only has two apparent forms rather than three [Ed. note: efficiency is the English way...], just like the regular ones that use “-ed” for both past tense and past participle: “walk,” “walked,” “walked.” 

Colloquial English wants to be more regular, in other words.  [Emphasis mine.]

Quite often, the result is simply that the participle form is used as the past tense. This is why so many people say “sunk” for “sank” (“Our boat sunk”) ...

This is also why the grand old cabaret singer Mae Barnes sang “That’s when the fight begun” instead of “began” in the midcentury blues number “They Raided the Joint.” Likewise, the first ever transcript of a murder trial in the United States is one from 1800 in New York City. Though the pattern of the verb “run” is “run,” “ran,” “run,” some witnesses in the transcript use “run,” the participle form, as the past tense form, as in “I took up the candle and run to the door to see which way they went” and “He immediately run upstairs and instantly returned.”  

The comedian Milton Berle starred in a radio show after World War II, and in one episode a character uses the past participle “come” as the past-tense form of the verb, saying, “The other night he come out drying himself with a flounder” and “He come home after being gone for two weeks.” We might associate this usage with Black English — and it’s true that it can be found there — but it’s also good old-school white Brooklyn. The character in the Berle radio show, for instance, is white Irish. And as it happens, an apparently white witness in the Sands case used “come” in this way, as well, saying, “I heard the gate open and a sleigh or carriage come out of the yard about eight o’clock.” 

 I got that from context clues:  who goes on a week-long bender and "come home after being gone for two weeks?"   Point is... diversity's where you find it, to paraphrase Madonna (who likely swiped that one herself).  You just gotta know where to look for the good stuff.