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Also this issue: It’s (not) a Living Walter Mosley Where the Wilde Things Are Children’s Books Book Quicks |
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March 27-April 2, 2003
cover story
Appreciation or appropriation? Writers explore white people's love for black culture.
"His life story sold me." --Eminem, on signing 50 Cent to Shady/Aftermath
Recently, Michael Jackson, Mike Tyson and 50 Cent have broken records: Jackson for his crazy TV-special ratings, Tyson for his pre-match antics (and oh yes, his 49-second knockout) and 50 for selling two million copies of his major-label debut in two weeks. Simultaneous objects of concern, adoration and most of all, consumption, their popularity exemplifies the phenomenon examined in Everything But the Burden: What White People Are Taking from Black Culture.
"This is admittedly a peculiar book about a peculiar fascination," writes editor Greg Tate, "our peculiarly American notions of racial difference and the forms of pleasure, sometimes sadomasochistic, that have sprung from the national id because of them." A timely, exhilarating collection of essays on how white America "fiends" for blackness, Burden is at once outraged and insightful, personal and intensely political.
Taking its title from Tate's mother's phrase for the incessant theft of "African-American cultural properties," the essays consider history ("the systemic denial of human and constitutional rights" that characterizes African-American experience), popular culture (an astute profile of Richard Pryor by Hilton Als; the obligatory Eminem essay, this one by Carl Hancock Rux), art (Manthia Diawara's elegant reflection on Malick Sidibé, "photographer of the younger generation," in Bamako during the 1960s) and politics (Robin Kelley on exploitations of the "black struggle" by the white left).
Predictably, several essays reference Norman Mailer's "The White Negro," that seminal declaration of white lust for blackness. Tony Green complicates this familiar figure by pondering the relations among Ali, Frazier and Mailer, their weirdly self-loving, self-loathing chronicler. Green blames what he terms "the institutionally racist problems mainstream society has with aggressive black men" for Frazier's "cuddly black man routine." And while he calls Mailer "obviously flawed," Green respects his boxing essays: "No one has sacrificed himself more willingly on the race-cultural cross, dying for the future gaffes of his fellow Caucasian thinkers and scholars."
Coming at culture-sucking from another angle, in "ThugGods: Spiritual Darkness and Hip-hop," Melvin Gibbs analyzes John Walker Lindh's attraction to hip-hop and African-American culture. Following a brief overview of the links among the Five Percenters, Kali, the Nation of Islam and Asiatic culture, he works his way toward Lindh, "attempting to cross the one-drop line," and in the end, "able to take on a virtual black persona" on the Net, where he posted hip-hop rhymes, but "unable to dismantle his whiteness and recuperate it."
If Lindh's attempt to "question whiteness as a category" led him into catastrophe, the collection makes clear that such questioning, difficult as it may be for white folks, is a vital step toward self-understanding or social change. Some essays reflect on appropriation as a cultural determinant. Michaela Angela Davis' "The Beautiful Ones" is a meditation on the whiteness of fashion, and in "The Black Asianphile," Latasha Natasha Diggs, a self-described "black girl with an Asian male fetish," details her Hong Kong action-viewing habits.
Tate includes as well his conversation with Living Colour guitarist Vernon Reid, in which they consider Steely Dan, representing the "perceived outsiders," as a "redemption of the white Negro." Reid asserts that Steely Dan "survived their success artistically in a way that hip-hop is unable to do." Lamenting hip-hop's focus on Cristal, cars and contracts, he adds, "What hip-hop needs right now is a Clint Eastwood character -- a man with no shame who rolls with no crew." Because, as Tate observes, the crew is the "death-knell expression in hip-hop."
The good humor, strength of will and moral resilience that sustain black culture in the face of so much tragedy and abuse are everywhere evident in Everything But the Burden. The essays are less accusatory than contemplative and deftly self-aware. In the fascinating "My Black Death," Arthur Jafa, who worked with Stanley Kubrick on Eyes Wide Shut, recounts his relationship with the director, or more specifically, with 2001: A Space Odyssey's "obsession with/suppression of blackness." He asks, "Have you noticed that 2001's monolith, Darth Vader's uniform/flesh and H.R. Giger's alien are all composed of the same black substance?" After reading Everything But the Burden, you'll notice that and more.
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