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Beyond the White Negro: Eminem, Danny Hoch, and Race Treason in Contemporary America Kimberly Chabot Davis In the fifty years since Norman Mailer coined the term “white Negro,” whites who ventriloquize African-American culture have been a frequent target for derision among left-leaning academics and cultural critics. Derision was clearly warranted in the case of Mailer’s Beat generation hipsters, who idealized black masculinity as anarchic, sexually potent, antibourgeois, violent, and sociopathic—in short, “cool.” Cultural critics Nelson George and Gayle Wald have deftly analyzed the romanticization and essentialism lurking behind these white fantasies of blackness, and they also unveil the imperialist desires which often turn “white Negro” cross-racial affiliations into acts of co-optation and cultural theft.1 A long line of ethnomusicologists and music critics have criticized whites for appropriating the AfricanAmerican and Caribbean styles of jazz, blues, reggae, and hip-hop; white artists who have faced such scrutiny include George Gershwin, Elvis Presley, Janis Joplin, the Police, Mick Jagger, Vanilla Ice, and the Beastie Boys.2 Journalist Armond White, for example, lambasts the Beastie Boys’ farcical rap music for evacuating hip-hop of its cultural specificity and political edge as protest music. He contends that “white appropriation [often] attempts to erase the culture it plunders” (548), a conclusion echoed by the vast majority of cultural critics writing Kimberly Chabot Davis 222 about white identification with blackness.3 Hip-hop expert Greg Tate recently edited a collection of essays called Everything But the Burden: What White People Are Taking from Black Culture; the title registers an unequivocal disdain for crossover in popular culture. Bell hooks similarly describes cross-racial identification as a symbolic annihilation and incorporation, akin to “eating the other” (21–39). In the book Racechanges, which documents hundreds of instances of racial crossover in twentieth-century art and culture, Susan Gubar despairingly concludes that “even the most high-minded, idealistic motivations will not save white impersonators of blackness from violating, appropriating , or compromising black subjectivity in a way that will inevitably rebound against the ethical integrity of whites” (36; emphasis added). While this valuable body of cultural criticism has drawn muchneeded 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. Relegating all white artists working with AfricanAmerican cultural idioms to the same pejorative category as Mailer’s 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. Vron Ware and Les Back, in their analysis of white contributions to the development of southern soul music, convincingly argue that critics must pay attention to local contexts before passing judgment on individual acts of racial crossover: “Distinctions among musicians, studio owners, producers, and songwriters are elided within the language of appropriation” (230). However, while blanket condemnations of white Negroes are problematic, so are facile celebrations of crossover as inherently subversive. As Noel Ignatiev warns in an interview, “[B]y itself crossover represents a potential for race treason, not the actuality” (“Interview” 290). Rather than falling into essentializing generalizations about the politics of white Negroism, this essay attends to such localized distinctions by analyzing two contemporary white performers working in hip-hop media, Eminem (a.k.a. Marshall Mathers) and Danny Hoch, one an internationally famous rap star and the other little known Beyond the White Negro 223 outside of New York City and the underground hip-hop theater scene. A Jewish actor/writer of off-Broadway hip-hop “solo theater” and founder of the Hip Hop Theater Festival, Danny Hoch received acclaim for his shows Some People (1995) and Jails, Hospitals, & HipHop (1998), comprised of a series of monologues in the personae of black, Latino, and white characters, each imbued with a rich individuality . Voicing a strong disidentification with white privilege and a deeply felt affiliation with the nonwhite cultures of their native urban communities in Detroit and Queens, New York, both Eminem and Hoch prompt a reconsideration of the stereotype of the white Negro as a romanticizing appropriator. Since both artists grew up in racially mixed, inner-city neighborhoods where hip-hop was the dominant cultural idiom, they cannot rightly be accused of co-opting what is in some sense their own “native” language. As historian David...

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