Beyond the White Negro: Empathy and Anti-Racist Reading Kimberly Chabot Davis Bridgewater State University, [email protected]
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Bridgewater Review Volume 33 | Issue 2 Article 12 Nov-2014 Faculty In Print - Beyond the White Negro: Empathy and Anti-Racist Reading Kimberly Chabot Davis Bridgewater State University, [email protected] Recommended Citation Davis, Kimberly Chabot (2014). Faculty In Print - Beyond the White Negro: Empathy and Anti-Racist Reading. Bridgewater Review, 33(2), 37-38. Available at: http://vc.bridgew.edu/br_rev/vol33/iss2/12 This item is available as part of Virtual Commons, the open-access institutional repository of Bridgewater State University, Bridgewater, Massachusetts. power and violence. Of course, whites’ FACULTY IN PRINT impersonation and appropriation of blackness has a much longer, multi- An excerpt from Kimberly Chabot Davis, Beyond media history, encompassing blackface the White Negro: Empathy and Anti-Racist Reading minstrel shows, modernist poetics, and (University of Illinois Press, 2014). Hollywood film. With good reason and ample evidence, many scholars read this Winner of the 2014 Lois P. Rudnick Book Prize, cultural history from blackface to wig- New England American Studies Association. gers as a long and repetitive story of the imperialist and racist nature of whites’ t the start of the twenty-first century, critics desire to possess the black “Other.” concerned about white appropriation of Beyond the White Negro: Empathy and black culture reached back into their cultural Anti-Racist Reading complicates this A history of white appropriation by lexicons to resurrect a term that Norman Mailer had analyzing white audiences consum- popularized in 1957: “The White Negro” … Between ing African-American literature, film, theater, and music in the late twenti- 1999 and 2003, nearly every media journalist and eth and early twenty-first centuries. scholar writing about the rise to fame of white rapper Extending the cultural sphere of the Eminem felt obliged to use Mailer’s phrase to describe debate beyond hip-hop music, I argue that the White Negro paradigm is the hip-hop star who claims to be “chocolate on the inside.” Revealing the stereotyping logic often lurking beneath white attraction to African Americans, Mailer’s famous essay “The White Negro” typified the white bohemian fascination with the supposed sexual potency, anarchic wildness, and hip poses of black men. Desiring escape from a 1950s white culture of conformity and anxiety, the hipsters that Mailer describes sought an antidote and the infinite variations of joy, lust, in the swagger and “primitive” emo- … [and the] scream and despair of his tions of “the Negro”: “He lived in the orgasm. For jazz is orgasm” (341). The enormous present, he subsisted for his jazz-consuming “White Negro” has Saturday night kicks, relinquishing now been resurrected as the “wigger,” a the pleasures of the mind for the more term for suburban white kids who dress obligatory pleasures of the body, and in ghetto style and consume gangsta rap in his music he gave voice to… his rage music to stoke their fantasies of macho inadequate to describe the varied I examine encounters with politics of cross-racial identification black literature and culture in the past decade, given the evolu- tion of whiteness in our contemporary that foster the development of moment. To question the often pes- simistic and cynical scholarly view of “white allies” who are divesting, cross-racial empathy and affiliation, I examine encounters with black rather than investing, in white literature and culture that foster the development of “white allies” who power and privilege. are divesting, rather than investing, in November 2014 37 white power and privilege. I investi- cultures” (14). In contrast to Tate, and interpreting the world, includ- gate how whites respond to politically Beyond the White Negro contends that ing racist structures of power. While progressive forms of African-American African-American literature and cul- my research confirms that cross-racial culture that aim to expose and under- ture can be productive catalysts for the sympathy can often resemble a coloniz- mine white supremacy, and thus are less development of cross-racial empathy ing appropriation of blackness for white easily re-purposed for white needs and and anti-racist identities among white needs, the evidence also suggests that desires. How might the scholarly narra- audiences. In response to critics who cross-cultural encounters can stimulate tive of appropriation change if we were believe that the forces of commodifi- radical acts of treason against white to examine white audience responses cation render cultural consumption a privilege. In her book White Women, to a Toni Morrison novel, a Spike Lee tainted vehicle for cross-racial under- Race Matters, Ruth Frankenberg con- film, or politically oriented hip hop? standing, I argue against a too hasty cludes that “whiteness changes over To address that question, chapters of dismissal of white consumption of black time and space and is in no way a trans- this book are focused on white hip-hop cultural texts as a potential conduit historical essence,” yet critical race artists, white women discussing black for social change. Although “cultural scholars such as Noel Ignatiev continue to essentialize whiteness as “nothing but an expression of race privilege” Rather than treating whiteness (Race Traitor 289). Rather than treating whiteness as a transhistorical essence as a transhistorical essence synonymous with domination, I explore how encounters with African- synonymous with domination, American literature and popular culture help whites to develop and I explore how encounters with strengthen anti-racist sensibilities. The nouns “White Negro” and “wigger” African-American literature and are inadequate to describe this recep- tion phenomenon because they imply popular culture help whites to that blackness is a state of being that can develop and strengthen anti-racist be embodied by white people—a false premise given the tenacity of white sensibilities. privilege in this country. In contrast, Beyond the White Negro emphasizes that cross-racial empathy is a state of mind women’s fiction on The Oprah Winfrey consumption” is a term commonly and an aspirational process, a struggle Show, Boston-area book clubs reading used to describe reading, viewing, that is ongoing and never complete. African-American literature, and col- and listening to texts, the word “con- lege student viewers of the racial-con- sumption” is ill-fitting for my pur- flict films Do the Right Thing and Crash. poses because it signifies purchasing and eating, implying that the culture In his book Everything But the Burden: in question is commodified, easily What White People Are Taking From digested, and disposable. Instead, I Black Culture (2003), editor Greg Tate highlight experiences of cross-cultural brings together essays examining encounter that can profoundly alter white fascination with blackness as a the self-conceptions of white readers, “fetish object” in the realms of music, viewers, and listeners of black-authored sports, fashion, comedy, art, cinema, texts. Although white co-optation is an and politics. As his title implies, Tate undeniably potent force in the present, reductively assumes that white people Kimberly Chabot Davis is Associate the possibility remains for white audi- take everything from black culture Professor in the Department of English. ences to do more than simply consume except the burden of living in a racist and copy black style, but to experience society, and that black culture “remains a perspective shift by being exposed the most co-optable and erasable of to African-American ways of seeing 38 Bridgewater Review.