Whiteness Visible

By Scott Thill, AlterNet. Posted May 6, 2005.

"Every time you hear an expansive white man drop into his version of black English, you are in the presence of blackface's unconscious return." -- Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class

"This was hip hop's whitest generation yet, the growth factor exponential -- to the point where a white presence onstage of a white audience majority came as no surprise -- and yet they never seemed to wonder what their proper place was, whether they were at lounging at tables marked Reserved. Why should they? They were keeping it real. That was their only responsibility, not figuring out what real was ... or for whom they were keeping it." -- Adam Mansbach, Angry Black White Boy, or the Miscegenation of Macon Detornay

As Spike Lee's brilliant, underrated 2000 film Bamboozled showed, white fascination with black cultural production has not evolved much farther from the turn of the century's fetishized minstrelsy described by Eric Lott. Think of the Bamboozled scene where the lily-white executive Thomas Dunwitty (Michael Rappaport) argues that he's blacker than Pierre Delacroix (Damon Wayans), who can't even recognize Jackie Robinson on the wall. Dunwitty's slang, his black wife, his office full of African-American memorabilia, and his repeated use of the word "nigger"? All are signs pointing out that Dunwitty, regardless of his skin color, believes that he is blacker than Damon Wayans' frustrated Pierre, who fantasizes during the conversation about beating Dunwitty without mercy for his choice of terminology.

The concrete type of blackface minstrelsy that Eric Lott explored in his indispensable 1993 book Love and Theft is more or less completely out of vogue. But with the radical explosion of hip hop and all of its cultural and racial complexities, it has once again come under heavy scrutiny. Lott's thesis about minstrelsy stemmed from what he perceived as the dual energies of love and theft; that is, white performers were compelled by both envy and contempt for the black bodies they so readily lampooned and assumed -- and that contradictory imperative has, especially as the hip-hop lifestyle has evolved to dominate popular culture, done nothing else but explosively proliferate.

But Lee's point in Bamboozled is a deadly serious one: For every Elvis Presley, Beastie Boys or Vanilla Ice that burns up the charts by offering borrowed or sometimes outright stolen goods, there is a Chuck Berry, Parliament-Funkadelic or Madlib undeservedly lurking far below the cultural radar, simply because white America still seems, this late in the game, to enjoy what the Other has to offer, as long as it comes from a white, not black, face. In that, there is nothing new; ripping off the fruits of others' labor is as American as Manifest Destiny and the Trail of Tears. But as the world digs deeper into the crossover-rich soil of hip hop, which hybridizes a variety of international music and style traditions while adding a central nervous system of streetwise suspicion and historical oppression, it must increasingly look into the mirror and decide what color it sees -- or if it sees any at all.

The latest and most compelling installment in this ongoing national interrogation of race, class and culture comes from Adam Mansbach's hard-hitting satire, Angry Black White Boy, or the Miscegenation of Macon Detornay. Mansbach's protagonist, the aforementioned Macon (dumbly named by his parents after the Georgia city, as well as by the author to dredge up the racist ghost of Ty Cobb) comes up in an all-white Boston suburb an unequivocal fan of the golden age of hip hop, the late '80s and early '90s when the form most capably fused the militancy of its Black Panther and Watts Prophets forebears with the wide-open cultural experimentalism of De La Soul and others. It was a time decidedly different from the bling-and-ice dominance of today's hip hop, one that seemed far removed from what Mansbach in his book calls today's "psychotic materialism."

"I placed the book in 1998," Mansbach explains, "rather than 2005 because I wanted Macon to be able to grow up on early-to-late-'80s hip hop; that's what forms his sensibility. But another reason is that I wanted that rampant materialism to still be in its formative stage: The height of the Puffy age, where you can still buy into the culture with money, but not as egregiously as you can now. I wanted to set the book at a time where a 19-year-old could plausibly remember the golden age of hip hop, but also at a time where the characters are conversant enough with hip hop materialism to make money off of their exploits."

Making money, of course, has always been the name of hip hop's game, mostly because it had to survive on the condemned streets of late '70s Brooklyn long enough to settle into the national consciousness. But financial security has not always been hip hop's primary aim; that distinction has been reserved for the ethic most capably summed up in the maxim "each one, teach one." Out of all the aphorisms and slogans that hip hop brilliantly coopted or created, "each one teach one" sums up the golden age's conscientious and stated desire to school those who are ignorant of black history and culture, no matter their color or creed, in the crucial texts, events and figures of the good fight against racism and prejudice. As a white kid deeply touched by that era's hip-hop production -- from KRS-One's By Any Means Necessary to Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back to Ice Cube's Amerikkka's Most Wanted and onward -- Macon Detornay, like Mansbach himself, grows up in Boston as a white outcast ready to explode against the racial injustices of his time. And that process is anything but simple.

Scott Thill runs the online mag Morphizm.com, while finding the time to rant for Salon, XLR8R, All Music Guide, AOL and others. His first novel, The Dangerous Perhaps, should be done by the time the War on Terrorism is over.

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