The White Negro

8 Pages 2101 Words

For many who may still not know, rap music continues to outsell other genres of American music. Since Americans of African descent comprise of about 12% percent of the nation's population, this means that the vast majority of documented rap music buyers are whites teenagers. Although white rapper Eminen has struck platinum with his sophomore album "The Marshall Mathers LP", and artists like Kid Rock and the group Limp Bizkit pepper their rock music with rap, the genre itself is still heavily influenced by the "Black" and Latino youth . For idealists, white kids buying rap music represents a level of racial understanding and acceptance unknown to their parents. However for realists, this phenomenon is nothing more than the re-emergence of the White Negro. True cross-racial engagement necessitates meaningful interaction and buying a CD or dressing "hip-hop" is not a substitute.

Norman Mailer coined the term "White Negro" in his 1957 essay of the same name when he stated,

"So there was a new breed of adventurers...who drifted out at night looking for action with a black man's code to fit their facts. The hipster has absorbed the existentialist synapses of the Negro, and for all practical purposes could be considered a White Negro."

Critics of the day aptly pointed out that hipsters adhered to an idea of "black" which itself was based on racial stereotypes. Ned Polsky wrote,

"Even in the world of the hipster, the Negro remains essentially what Ralph Ellison called him---an invisible man. The White Negro accepts the real Negro not as a human being in his totality but as the bringer of a highly specified and restricted 'cultural dowry, ' to use Mailer's phrase. In doing so he creates an inverted form of the nigger in his place."

In effect the White Negro can only enjoy African-American culture (and exploit it financially) as long as the African-American is deemed by society as different, strange or exotic. The co-opting of A...