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1 Wiggers or White Allies? White Hip-Hop Culture and Racial Sincerity An investigation of white attraction to African American culture should logically begin with music, since “White Negroes” have often been drawn to musical forms as if they are the essence of black creativity. The history of popular music and performance is full of white musicians and singers appropriating and profiting from styles originated by African American performers—slave spirituals, jazz, rhythm and blues, reggae, and hip-hop. A long line of ethnomusicologists and cultural critics have scrutinized this form of co-optation, putting under the microscope such artists as George Gershwin, Sophie Tucker, Mezz Mezzrow, Elvis Presley, Janis Joplin, the Police, Mick Jagger, Vanilla Ice, and the Beastie Boys.1 The journalist Armond White, for example, lambasts the Beastie Boys for evacuating hip-hop of its cultural specificity and political edge as protest music. He contends that “white appropriation attempts to erase the culture it plunders,” a conclusion echoed by the vast majority of cultural critics writing about white identification with blackness.2 In a journalistic essay on the “Y2K white negro,” Josh Ozersky argues that the contemporary wigger is a “devil without a cause . . . unconflictedly all about the benjamins,” unlike his more bohemian ancestor, Mailer’s anti-establishment hipster.3 In her acclaimed work The Hip Hop Wars, Tricia Rose concludes that the vast majority of white fans of contemporary hiphop are simply replicating the “ugly history of racial tourism.”4 While this valuable body of cultural criticism has drawn much-needed attention to the imperialist dimensions of whiteness, it also risks treating whiteness as a monolithic signifier of domination. This oft-repeated narrative of appropriation has inadvertently led to the obscuring or repression of other kinds of stories about white attraction to blackness. By relegating all white artists working with African American cultural idioms to the same pejorative category as Mailer’s 28 . chapter 1 White Negroes, we underestimate the potential of some instances of crossover to function as radical acts of “race treason” against white privilege, such as Noel Ignatiev and John Garvey encourage in their journal Race Traitor. While blanket condemnations of White Negroes are problematic, so are facile celebrations of crossover as inherently subversive.5 Rather than falling into essentializing generalizations about the politics of White Negroism, this chapter attends to particularity by comparing three white performers and writers who employ the aesthetics, themes, and/or ethos of the hip-hop arts movement: the internationally famous rap star Eminem (Marshall Mathers); Danny Hoch, an actor/director and founding figure in hip-hop theater ; and Adam Mansbach, a writer of “lit hop” novels and poetry.6 I begin with Eminem, the controversial white hip-hop artist who catapulted to fame with The Slim Shady LP (1999), The Marshall Mathers LP (2000), and The Eminem Show (2002), and the semi-autobiographical film 8 Mile (2002) in which he starred. Eminem’s bombastic disaffection with whiteness offers a useful comparison to the more politically radical artists Hoch and Mansbach, who turn a more selfreflexive eye upon white attraction to black culture. A Jewish actor/writer of offBroadway hip-hop “solo theater” and founder of the Hip Hop Theater Festival, Danny Hoch received acclaim for his shows Some People (1994), Jails, Hospitals, & Hip-Hop (1998), and Taking Over (2008), comprised of a series of monologues in the personae of black, Latino, and white characters, each rendered with bonedeep empathy. Adam Mansbach’s satirical novel Angry Black White Boy (2005), whose protagonist is a white hip-hop aficionado turned anti-racist vigilante, offers an unflinchingly honest portrait of the psychology of white hip-hoppers. Ruminating on alliances between blacks and Jews, Mansbach’s novel The End of the Jews (2008) focuses on three Jewish writers and artists inspired by jazz and hip-hop, as Mansbach was himself. Voicing a strong disidentification with white privilege and a deeply felt affiliation with nonwhite cultures, Eminem, Hoch, and Mansbach require a reconsideration of the stereotype of the White Negro as a romanticizing appropriator. Since Eminem and Hoch hail from racially mixed, working-class, inner-city neighborhoods (Detroit and Queens) where hip-hop is the dominant cultural idiom, they can not rightly be accused of stealing what is, in a sense, their own “native” language.7 Adam Mansbach presents a more complex case, since he grew up white and Jewish in an upper-middle-class suburb of Boston. However, since the age of eleven, Mansbach’s immersion in hip-hop and jazz culture...

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