Beyond the White Negro: Empathy and Anti-Racist Reading

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. The French poet Paul Verlaine first coined the term “White Negro” to refer to Arthur Rimbaud. See James Campbell, This Is the Beat Generation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 1. 2. Michael Sragow, “The Return of the White Negro,” Salon, March 30, 2000, accessed September 30, 2013, www.salon.com/2000/03/30/toback/. 3. See Armond White, “Genius—Not! Eminem Melts in Your Hands,” in White Noise: The Eminem Collection, ed. Hilton Als and Darryl A. Turner (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2003), 179–90; Carl Hancock Rux, “Eminem: The New White Negro,” in Everything but the Burden: What White People Are Taking from Black Culture, ed. Greg Tate (New York: Broadway, 2003), 15–38; and Charles Aaron, “Chocolate on the Inside,” Spin, May 1999, 104. 4. Norman Mailer, “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster,” in Advertisements for Myself (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1959), 341 (originally published in Dissent 4 [Fall 1957]: 276–93). 5. For a history of the term “wigger,” see David Roediger, “Elvis, Wiggers, and Crossing over to Nonwhiteness,” in Colored White (Berkley: University of California Press, 2003), 212–40. 6. See Michael North, The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908–1934 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Jeffrey Melnick, A Right to Sing the Blues: African Americans , Jews, and American Popular Song (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999); and Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). 7. For a discussion of the ideal characteristics of white allies, see Paul Kivel, Uprooting Racism: How White People Can Work for Social Justice (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers , 1996). 212 . notes to introduction 8. Greg Tate, “Nigs R Us, or How Blackfolk Became Fetish Objects,” in Everything but the Burden: What White People Are Taking from Black Culture, ed. Greg Tate (New York: Broadway, 2003), 1–14. 9. Ibid., 14. 10. Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 236; Noel Ignatiev, “Interview with Ignatiev,” in Race Traitor, ed. Noel Ignatiev and John Garvey (New York: Routledge, 1996), 289. 11. Eric Lott, “White Like Me: Racial Cross-Dressing and the Construction of American Whiteness,” in The Cultures of U.S. Imperialism, ed. Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 482; Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 12. See Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988). 13. A few exceptions are Jacqueline Bobo, Black Women as Cultural Readers (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995); and Ramaswami Harindranath, “Ethnicity and Cultural Difference: Some Thematic and Political Issues of Global Audience Research,” Participations 2.2 (December 2005), accessed November 5, 2013, http://www.participations.org/ volume%202/issue%202/2_02_harindranath.htm. 14. For an overgeneralization about white spectatorship, see bell hooks, “Neo-colonial Fantasies of Conquest: Hoop Dreams,” in Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies (New York: Routledge, 1996), 77–82; and bell hooks, “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators,” in Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992), 115–31. 15. Susan Gubar, Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 36. 16. Rogin, Blackface, White Noise, 18. 17. Henry Giroux, “White Noise: Racial Politics and the Pedagogy of Whiteness,” in Channel Surfing: Race Talk and the Deconstruction of Today’s Youth (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 91. 18. Ibid., 134. 19. Elizabeth V. Spelman, Fruits of Sorrow: Framing Our Attention to Suffering (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997), 65. 20. Ibid, 7. 21. Suzanne Keen, Empathy and the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 4. See also Murray Smith, Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 95; and Berys Gaut, “Identification and Emotion in Narrative Film,” in Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotions, ed. Carl Plantinga and Greg M. Smith (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 200–16. 22. C. Daniel Batson prefers empathy (“perspective-taking”) over sympathy, which he fears “has become tinged with a paternalistic, moralistic cast.” See C. Daniel Batson, The Altruism Question: Toward a Social-Psychological Answer (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1991), 87. 23. See Keen, Empathy and...