Nigs R Us Or How Blackfolk Became Fetish Objects

Everything But the Burden: What White People Are Taking from Black Culture
by Greg Tate (Editor)

White kids from the 'burbs are throwing up gang signs. The 2001 Grammy winner for best rap artist was as white as rice. And blond-haired sorority sisters are sporting FUBU gear. What is going on in American culture that's giving our nation a racial-identity crisis?

Following the trail blazed by Norman Mailer's controversial essay "The White Negro," Everything but the Burden brings together voices from music, popular culture, the literary world, and the media speaking about how from Brooklyn to the Badlands white people are co-opting black styles of music, dance, dress, and slang. In this collection, the essayists examine how whites seem to be taking on, as editor Greg Tate's mother used to tell him, "everything but the burden"-from fetishizing black athletes to spinning the ghetto lifestyle into a glamorous commodity. Is this a way of shaking off the fear of the unknown? A flattering indicator of appreciation? Or is it a more complicated cultural exchange? The pieces in Everything but the Burden explore the line between hero-worship and paternalism.

Among the book's twelve essays are Vernon Reid's "Steely Dan Understood as the Apotheosis of 'The White Negro,'" Carl Hancock Rux's "The Beats: America's First 'Wiggas,'" and Greg Tate's own introductory essay "Nigs 'R Us."

Other contributors include: Hilton Als, Beth Coleman, Tony Green, Robin Kelley, Arthur Jafa, Gary Dauphin, Michaela Angela Davis, dream hampton, and Manthia diAwara.

by Carl Hancock Rux

"Have you forgotten how when we were brought here we lost our religion, our culture, our gods, and many of us by the way act even lost our minds."

- Minister Louis Farrakhan

"The history of the world my sweet is who gets eaten and who gets to eat"

- Sweeney Todd by Stephen Sondheim

"It's not too good to stay in a white man's country too long

- Mutabartuka

The title of this book is a Florence Tate original. Mom once wrote a poem of the same name to decry the longstanding, ongoing, and unarrested theft of African American cultural properties by thieving, flavor-less whitefolk. A poem to point up how Our music, Our fashion, Our hairstyles, Our music, Our dances, Our anatomical traits, Our bodies Our Soul was still considered ever ripe for the plucking and the biting by the same crafty devils who brought you the African slave trade and the Middle Passage.

What has always struck Black observers of this phenomenon isn't just the irony of white America fiending for Blackness when it once debated whether Africans even had souls, but the way They have always tried to erase the Black presence from whatever Black thing They take a shine to: jazz, blues, rock and roll, doowop, cornrows. Readers in Black music history are often struck by the egregious turns of public relations puffery whereby Paul Whiteman got crowned the King of Swing in the 1920s, Benny Goodman anointed the King of Jazz in the 1930s, Elvis Presley popped as up the King of Rock and Roll in the 1950s, and Eric Clapton awarded the title of the world's greatest guitar player (ostensibly of the blues) in the 1960s. Whatever Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Chuck Berry and BB King and other African American pioneers thought about these coronations they seem to have been wisely kept between pursed lips (at least until Little Richard deigned not read the winner and declare himself 'the architect of rock and roll' at an 80s music awards ceremony). The same market forces that provided Caucasian imitators maximum access to American audiences through the most lucrative radio, concert and recording contracts of the day, also held the purse strings to all those Black artists could hope for in the segregated American entertainment business.

For much of the last century the burden of being Black in America was the burden of a systemic denial of human and constitutional rights and equal economic opportunity. It was also a century in which much of what America sold to the world as uniquely American in character in terms of music dance, fashion, humor, spirituality, grassroots politics, slang, literature and sports, was uniquely African-American in origin, conception and inspiration. Only rarely could this imitation be enjoyed by African Americans as the sincerest form of flattery or as more than a pyrrhic victory over racist devaluations of Black humanity. Counter to Thomas Jefferson's widely known notions of black cognitive inferiority, the grandsons and daughters of antebellum America's slave commodities have become the masters of the nation's creative profile.

Legal and economic inequality between the races, though diminished to varying degree by the advances of the civil rights and black power movements, still defines the quality of alienation which afflicts black/white relations. The history of racism is more alive than dead for many African Americans - much of our public policy around crime, public housing, health care and education continues to reflect the notions of second-class status for African Americans born in slavery. The African American presence in this country has produced a fearsome, seductive and circumspect body of myths about Black intellectual capacity, athletic ability, sexual appetites, work-ethic, family values, and propensity for violence and drug addiction. From these myths have evolved much of the paranoias, pathologies, absurdities, awkwardness, alienation and anomie which continue to define the American racial scene.

This book is an interrogation of those myths and the ways they have become intertwined with the popular culture of the country and the world since the time before the first world war. This is admittedly a peculiar book about a peculiar fascination: our peculiarly American notions of racial difference and the forms of pleasure, some times sadomasochistic in nature, that have sprung from the national id because of it. It features a peculiarly African-America twist on Marx and Engel's observations about capitalism's commodity-fetish effect - the transformation of a marketable object into a magical thing of desire. It is our belief that capitalism's original commodity-fetish was the Africans auctioned here as slaves whose reduction from subjects to abstracted objects has made them seem larger than life and less-than human at the same time. It is for this reason that the Black Body, and subsequently Black culture, has become a hungered-after taboo item and a nightmarish booger bear in the badlands of the American racial imagination. It's become something to be possessed and something to be erased - an operation that not only explains the ceaseless parade of troublesome Black stereotypes still proffered and preferred by Hollywood (toms, coons, mammies, mulattoes, and bucks in Donald Bogle's coinage) but as well, the American music industry's never-ending quest for a white artist who can competently perform a Black musical impersonation - Paul Whiteman, Elvis Presley, Rolling Stones, Sting, Britney Spears, N'Sync, Pink, Eminem - all mechanisms contrived to do away with bodily reminders of the Black origins of American pop pleasure.

It is with this history in mind that African American performance artist Roger Guenveur Smith once posed the question Why does everyone love Black music but nobody loves Black people? Readers will find that politics, (the power to address who gets eaten and who gets to eat), matters in this book's discussion of the Black American Burden but so does Eminem, the latest pure product of white and crazy America here to claim his 15 minutes of MTV generated fame as a Black male impersonator whose rap records are routinely played by rock stations who consider black rappers anathema. This book then about Black resentment to no small extent, but be reminded that Black irony and contrariness are never far away. Because while Everything But The Burden is largely devoted to scrutinizing the need by white Americans to acquire Blackness by any means necessary, it is also about the fascination that desire has provoked in a contemporary generation of African American artists and intellectuals who hold complicated ideas about whose Black culture is it anyway?

There is a panopticon effect being generated here. Just imagine a nest of Black scribes secretly and sometimes surgically observing white people parading around as imitation Negroes. Now imagine those same scribes measuring the distance between the simplicity of white mimesis, the complexity of Black expression and wondering where they fit into the equation.

Copyright © 2003 by Edited by Greg Tate.

About the Author

A cultural critic for The Village Voice, GREG TATE is also the author of Flyboy in the Buttermilk and contributes regularly to national publications such as Rolling Stone, VIBE, and the New York Times. In addition, he helped found the Black Rock Coalition, produced two albums on his own label, and composed a libretto that was performed at the Apollo Theater. He lives in New York City.