The White Negro

8 Pages 2101 Words

frican-American characteristics is an act of rebellion against mainstream values. Therefore if African-Americans ever become regarded as an integral part of mainstream society, they would lose the primitive allure that the White Negro attempts to emulate.

Billy Wimsatt, a "hip-hop" journalist and activist, who was profiled recently in the New York Times' series on race, is indicative of the updated White Negro hipster. Wimsatt is a white boy who doggedly claims an affinity towards "Black" people and an allegiance to hip-hop culture. Wimsatt was looking to escape from the arid confines of his predominately white private school and his upper middle class existence and found his release in rap music and hip-hop culture. Having had little or no interaction with poor (or even middle class) Blacks heretofore, he nevertheless romanticized the pathology of ghetto life and submerged himself into the Black world of "hip-hop". Soon thereafter Wimsatt asked his parents to transfer him to a largely Black public school. According to the Times article, Wimsatt "increasingly disconnected from a white culture that he equated with false desires." At the Black public school, Wimsatt noticed that the "cool" kids wore fat sneaker laces gold jewelry and did graffiti. Soon thereafter, like a bad cliché, Wimsatt began break dancing on the streets and tagging trains with "black and Latino" friends using the street moniker "Upski".

For Wimsatt and other White Negroes, Blackness is really more of a projection of their beliefs about "Black" people rather than a true understanding about the humanity of African-Americans. The appeal of rap music and hip-hop culture to the new White Negroes has little to do with African-Americans or their culture. The major interest of these white teenagers is living on the edge. For whites brought up in suburbia or in affluent, homogenous urban neighborhoods, the biggest, nastiest, lustiest most uninhibited edge they can find...