Wiggers

By Crispin Sartwell

The wigger - the white person who acts like a black person - is a stock figures of contemporary American comedy. A recent commercial, for example, depicts three white guys, speaking in black argot and dressed in parody hip hop wear - sweatsuits, head scarves, and sideways baseball caps - meeting three black guys dressed in conservative "prep" fashion a la Abercrombie and Fitch. The cross-dressing seems symmetrical, but the black guys laugh at the white guys and not vice versa. The wigger is well nigh ubiquitous: the Seth Green character in the film Can't Hardly Wait, for example, the pale rapper of Malibu's Most Wanted, and so on (if one lacks acquaintance with the term "wigger" or the accompanying concept, I'd suggest one of these films). The comic effect is achieved partly by the slight flavor of transgression that still attends the figure; the wigger plays with and in a variety of stereotypes. He (and it's indeed almost always he) indicates, first of all, that there is some sense in the idea of "acting black," that is, that there's still some current cultural distinction between the races. This, one would think, is hardly a controversial assertion, and yet it is anathema to a certain sort of liberal take on race, which holds that essentially any such distinction is a mere prejudice or stereotype without continuing purchase in reality. And indeed, the way that wiggers act black often has to do with a mere feeding off the media: an imitation of hip hop videos, for example. But of course the videos themselves make use of a variety of cultural norms and real vernaculars. The repertoire of race in contemporary American culture is incredibly rich and detailed, probably as much so as it has ever been, from gesture to costume to speech, from a way of walking to a way of being, and more or less everybody is capable of reading its semiotics.

Wiggerism is hence a cultural performance that draws whatever small frisson it may retain from the idea that race still has currency. As a standard comic persona, it resembles the Irishmen Pat and Mike of old, though oddly the wigger himself intends to privilege rather than ridicule the members of the group he imitates. But it is also a recognizable figure on the street, at a party, in a club, in a classroom: there really are wiggers, though we may think of the ones in the street as also being performers of a certain kind. The wigger outside the media often intends to convey the idea that he is more than a performer, and in some cases he may well be. That is, many wiggers will insist, with varying degrees of sincerity and varying degrees of truth, that his soul is not white. (One must bear in mind the possibility that a white person may actually grow up among black people, as the rapper Vanilla Ice falsely claimed about himself.) Incorporating the performative and comic aspects with the possibility of sincerity and seriousness, we might think of wiggerism, (and hence of one form of blackness as perceived by the wigger), as an aesthetic: it centers around music, but it includes an entire, basically conscious art of self-presentation in body language, visual expression (such as graffiti), clothing, and so on. Wiggerism (and hence blackness as conceived by the wigger) is an aesthetic repertoire that pits itself against the aesthetic canons associated with whiteness. One of its important effects is that it makes both these aesthetic repertoires explicit. This is particularly interesting not for what it shows and what it distorts in black aesthetics, but what it makes visible about white aesthetics, usually taken as unmarked and normative.

Just to lay down a few cards quickly: I emerge from the wigger tradition. I grew up in a mostly-black city and attended mostly-black schools. I associated coolness with blackness and clumsy stiltedness of manner with whiteness. I listened to black music, talked in black slang. Eventually I immersed myself in the history of black music and learned to play the blues harmonica. Later I was a white rock critic to writing about early hip hop music, which I must say I didn't understand very well. (But what publication had a black writer they could put on it?) Reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X in a junior high school black history class had been a formative experience. Eventually I also immersed myself in African-American literature, particularly autobiography. And you'll still hear black slang circa 1971 coming out my mouth, as well as hip hop coming out my speakers. Much of what I appreciated in black culture was, first, what I felt was missing in white culture, and, second, a construction of blackness by white culture for its spontaneity, expressiveness - even, dare I say, its rhythm.

The wigger is a problematic and complex figure. Does he signal a merging of the races, a transgression of whiteness that demonstrates that race is a social construction that can be destroyed by cultural crossings? Or does he demonstrate on the contrary - by his failure to offload his whiteness - that race is persistent and essential? Is he a liberatory figure or a mere reiteration of racist stereotypes? Does he contribute to a celebration of black arts, or does he take up a place in the vicious history of appropriation and exploitation of these arts and their practitioners by white people? Does he undercut and threaten white culture by the migration of its own children to blackness, or does he dilute black culture by his presence within it or at its periphery? Is he performing in blackface, or critiquing whiteness? And in our amusement at the figure in popular culture are we ridiculing white people for pretense, or are we ridiculing black people for their ridiculous mannerisms? The answers, as I guess you might imagine, are in every case "yes."

1. Prehistory of the Wigger

Let me begin with a brief set of excuses. In order to discuss this topic at all, it is necessary to resort to generalities. I have been and will be talking about "black culture" and "white culture," "black arts" and "white arts," or indeed "black people" and "white people." I will be purveying stereotypes even as I examine them. Many people - especially many academics - would stop me right there and accuse me of a false essentialism with regard to race. I should hasten to say that my own view of race is that it is entirely a social construction, and furthermore, with regard to any given general characterization of black people or white people, that there are obviously numerous exceptions. But we need to be able to examine the content of these social constructions themselves, and we need to be able to acknowledge their continuing centrality to our experience: their status for us as realities. The fact is, when you see a wigger, you know what you're seeing, and you wouldn't if these categories were not current in our imagination. Indeed, you autonomically know what you're seeing; you deploy a set of categories you sucked in with your mother's milk. The fact that the categories are socially constructed does not entail that they are unreal for us now; quite the reverse. They are still our social constructions, and even as we criticize them we recognize and employ them. A benevolent egalitarianism which is determined not to use the language of race is little more than a semi-sweet self-delusion, and it is one that often itself carries racist overtones. On no subject is public discourse more dishonest than about race; on no subject are our thoughts so utterly distinct from our public pronouncements. So if you're worried about me throwing around terms like "we white folks," or whatever, stop reading now or prepare to be irritated.

The history of white romanticization of black culture is as exactly as long as the modern history of the contacts between the peoples, and exactly as long as the white destruction and exploitation of black peoples. It precisely tracks, we might say, philosophical and aesthetic modernism. It is rooted in the dualism of mind and body and its writ-large version, the distinction between culture and nature. And the romanticization is rooted also precisely in the oppression that is interpreted by these dualisms and which they drive. If high Western culture and its current American suburban manifestation identifies whiteness with mind, then we seek to exclude the body and its desires - in particular, sexuality, intoxication, and violence - from ourselves. And if we identify ourselves with culture, we seek to exclude from ourselves the primitive and savage festival: we imagine what we exclude as the blood rite or orgy, the pre-civilized evil of unleashed desire. This is not only the interpretation of, for example, Africa by eighteenth-century Europeans; it is the interpretation of the inner city black community by the contemporary suburban housewife. This structure underlies almost every racial stereotype and justifies almost every form of racial oppression. But it is fundamentally not about black people. It's about us and what we fantasize ourselves to be. We are souls or minds flitting hither and thither, barely spatially located. We are enlightened, educated; our civilization and knowledge are universal and represent progress or evolution from the savage state in which we find others. The basic function of the stereotype - besides the decided economic advantages that accrue to assigning other people the physical labor - is self-congratulation, the propping up of an always-tenuous self-image.

It goes without saying that the image is tenuous because, among other things, mind/body dualism is ridiculous. Even as we slap one another on the back for our purity and intellect and etiquette, we remain bodies grubbing around on the surface of a planet, mammals with the full range of mammalian desires. Indeed, in the familiar Freudian manner, the desires are intensified and twisted by their repression and by the privacy with which they are held and discharged. The primitive and black functions in the European and European-American imaginative economy as the sign of desire per se; the essence of everything evil, desirable, and interesting. And so when it is time to discharge these desires, we seek what is black: we go slumming in Harlem, or we listen to the devil's music, or we turn the cap sideways. And since some white culture seems to have excluded almost everything interesting - indeed, almost everything real - from itself, we actually seek to migrate, to become black, for an evening (or, in the case of the serious wigger) for a lifetime. It is also worth mentioning that the mirror image of this deflected desire is a black desire for assimilation. For one thing, the material and social rewards of whiteness seem all too obvious. And so while white people are slumming, black people are passing, and either of these activities can be engaged in to a variety of degrees.

From the beginning, then, there has been both an underground and an explicit privileging of "savagery" in the white mind: an association of blackness not only with primitive, but with its neighbors honesty and simplicity and truth. This idea was present above all in romanticism: one of course sees it full-blown in Rousseau, but also in such figures as Thoreau and even Kierkegaard. Any conceptual system in which emotion is praised and the efficacy of reason doubted gets read as a praise of the primitive and an affirmation of the body. Such views are expressions of cross-racial desire: a desire for desire itself, ejected by the tradition to which romanticism responds onto the bodies of black people.

This history of cross-racial desire has been, on the whole, anything but liberating. It partly accounts, for example, for rape of black women by white slavemasters and for a variety of other sexual practices that reproduce both racism and sexism, but which also largely account for America's signal racial impurity: the fact that most of us are mixed in one way or another. This in turn drives a certain kind of integration. But the fact that southern racists from Thomas Jefferson to Strom Thurmond seem to have had children with black women should surprise no one. And likewise, the basic structure of racism and cross-racial desire drives the brutality displayed toward black men, who are invested in white imagination with a super- and sub-human masculinity and potential for violence that leads to their fetishization and to their brutalization. Indeed, the imagination of sexuality and violence attributed to black people by white people is what drives the actual sexuality and violence of white people directed at black people, a perfect hypocrisy in which we become what we imagine you to be: sexual predators, thugs, avatars of violence and twisted desire.

Such expressions took on a somewhat more nuanced form as the twentieth century proceeded from lynching to Jim Crow to the civil rights movement, though it always rests on a foundation of stereotype for its possibility. The tradition of rape proceeds into prostitution and various forms of concubinage. Lynch-law proceeds into the racially-charged application of the death penalty. Malcolm X describes in detail the activities of white people in Harlem during the 1940s, when he was "steering" white men to black prostitutes, or simply enabling drunken or drug-addled nights on the town where white people could view some of the greatest musicians of the twentieth century, such as Billie Holiday or Duke Ellington. Such activities are, perhaps, more or less what one would expect out of human beings in general, and certainly the argument for going out to see Billie Holiday is one that ought to be universally valid. But what struck Malcolm about the white folks he was dealing with was that they regarded themselves as engaged in liberation, and not mere self-indulgence. They used their trips to Harlem as a way to congratulate themselves on their lack of prejudice. The most interesting thing about this claim, though Malcolm merely ridicules it, is that it is not wholly false. Many white people of the period would not associate with black people at all except as menials, much less go out clubbing with them. No doubt real conversations and real friendships eventuated; no doubt both cultures found out quite a bit about the other and occasionally entered into more understanding and sympathy than they showed previously. The recognition of the sophistication and power of black arts and politics as expressed in Harlem at that time no doubt had a real impact on the civil rights movement, as the presence of Adam Clayton Powell or of Malcolm himself would attest.1

But of course the structure of desire enacted in slumming fundamentally reproduces the American racial imagination. What makes Harlem attractive is the vacation it offers from whiteness: from tidy houses and tidy offices to the desires symbolized by the jitterbug or by the dark underside of the sex industry; from "good taste" - staid clothing and classical music - to the zoot suit and the rhythms of jazz: loudness. And what is perhaps most dangerous to say is that this experience is not completely false, and not, or not only, manufactured for commercial purposes by black people. Blackness really was a relief from whiteness, and whiteness really did have its privileges: the social constructions were in part made actual. That black taste of the period was by and large louder than white taste is not an assertion that you should really quibble with, nor the assertion that black dance was bolder and more athletic and more suggestive, nor the assertion that black music was . . . better.

2. Music

Music is absolutely central to the wigger persona, and it has been a central site of cross-racial desire and cross-cultural fertility since, at latest, the beginning of the twentieth century. Indeed the history of world popular musics since that time is to an astonishing degree the history of white appropriation of black musical and performance styles. The swing music of Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller is a good example: it is a popularization of black jazz styles, cleaned up and made more palatable for white audiences. Its origin is the synthesis of European and African musical forms originating in Louisiana and elsewhere in the American south. The country blues of such distinctively American geniuses as Jimmie Rogers and Hank Williams emerges directly from the interchange of styles among largely dispossessed white and black people, and the mythology that attends such figures invariably includes scenes of the future performer crossing the tracks and listening at the window of a black juke joint, or learning their first few chords from a black bluesman. The origin of rock 'n roll music is similar, and certainly such figures as Elvis Presley or Jerry Lee Lewis owed not only to some extent their music but to some extent their personae to black musical traditions. Of course the music was widely received as transgressive by white society, and of course this had to do as much as anything with its association with blackness and the sexuality and criminality that were held to attend it. The British invasion launched by bands such as the Rolling Stones and the Beatles lionized American blues, and the idea of Mick Jagger was a knowing wink at blackness, down to the lips and the faux-American-black accent. Performers such as Eric Clapton and the Allman Brothers were archivists of the blues tradition as well as innovators within it. Disco emerged from black dance to the white mainstream, and Madonna, No Doubt, and countless others have made a living from black dance music. And finally, hip hop, which emerged from a synthesis of black American and Jamaican party styles in New York, is the dominant popular music of the day, as available and natural to white performers such as uber-wigger Eminem as to black ones such as Jay-Z or DMX.

This history is immensely complicated and immensely problematic. But it would certainly be wrong to think of it merely as exploitative or as having had a negative effect on black artists. Indeed, the history of black music has to a large extent been preserved by white performers and scholars, and many artists have gotten recognition and recording contracts and tours because they were the heroes and sources of famous white rockers. White appropriations of black music have not only at times compromised its artistic power, they have at times taken a cultural possession and disseminated it well-nigh universally, which is both an expansion and a dilution of its source. This has itself in part driven the history of black styles, which often seem to push quickly on once white folks get hold of them. The innovations are then eventually appropriated, and so on.

Hip hop music enacts this entire history with peculiar intensity and peculiar self-consciousness. First of all, the various personae taken up by hip hop performers bear a remarkable set of relations to white stereotypes of black people. The gangsta or thug, embodied by 50 Cent or Tupac Shakur (who actually had "Thug Life" tattooed on his stomach, and who died in a hail of bullets) feeds a white fantasy of black violence and hyper-masculinity. Then there is the "ho" persona purveyed by L'il Kim or Eve, again a mirror of white conceptions of black female sexuality. This is not to say that the image these performers convey is insincere, or that it does not capture something real in their own experience, or that it is univocal. For example, for a black "thug" to appear in public space in full dress is not something permitted by white folks historically; there is no deference or self-effacement in these people. Quite the reverse: their art is a continual enactment of self-expression as defiance. And one might point out that the humor with which black rappers such as Ice T approach their material - which displays an immense capacity to play with stereotype and draw out its ironies - is often lost on white audiences. In addition, the personae themselves can be remarkably complex. Tupac is a good example: though there are certainly celebrations of violence in his music, there is also a great deal of mourning for it and for the self-destruction it signifies. And there is also a gentle, "sensitive" side to Tupac, found in his lyrics about love or about his mother, and perhaps in the vulnerability that came through in his face along with the aggression. It is worth saying, too, that hip hop is a rich and varied genre, and once you get underneath a few dominant pop performers, you find everything from the perfect poetry of Atmosphere to the religious expressions of Dead Prez. Much of it is philosophical or informative myth-making or instruction.

One way to read the gangsta rapper is the stereotype manufacturing its own reality, which now returns to menace the people who invented it. And indeed, white culture has been duly menaced, in the form of Tipper Gore and a hundred other anti-hip-hop activists. It is as if our own exclusions constitute our destruction, which of course they do and must. The statement one gets about black experience in popular gangsta rap is limited, but important: it emerges from a real atmosphere of drugs, sex, and violence, and translates it into art, as the blues did with the hard labor and booze and chronic poverty of the early twentieth century. This is potentially a factor in its amelioration as well as its intensification. For one thing, hip-hop is a form of music and art culture; it is designed for the party as a release from one's daily cares. But also, it puts into wide circulation a set of racial signifiers that now have to be grappled with by both black folks and white folks in public space: it makes the racial imaginary explicit, forces us all to confront it. This was true also of the blues, but hip hop is more explicit and more confrontational, and at this point more popular all over the world.

It is a familiar point that most people who buy hip hop records are white, though this should not be taken to mean (as it occasionally is) that it does not have a large black audience. And obviously as well, this affects its content to some extent, and any pop artist who is self-reflective will admit that what she does is not some sort of pure or unsullied self-expression but is also made in collaboration with an audience. By definition, pop artists want or at least are willing to, sell a lot of records to a lot of people. Given the history that we've just traversed, it should surprise no one that white people not only buy hip hop records, but romanticize hip hop culture and seek to emigrate into it. So coding black is a way to rebel against one's own culture and one's own family, not just in some general sense in which each generation rebels against the previous one, but specifically against the content of whiteness as polite good taste, deference, and self-effacement. The culture we have made is an immensely dull and safe one, and we've made it specifically by excluding from ourselves anything interesting and dangerous. To say one might expect the occasional blackist backlash is an understatement: it's odd, in fact, that there are any really white kids left.

The wigger must be understood specifically in relation to hip hop music and culture. All the signifiers by which he codes black are essentially made within hip hop: the clothing, the slang, the music, the graffiti and other art. Hip hop is the wigger's instruction manual, and since hip hop is available everywhere, wiggerism is available even in North Dakota or for that matter Paris, where, no doubt, it is even more interesting. Hip hop is a visual as well as aural art: indeed, in the age of music video and pop soundtracks, music itself is a visual art. And hip hop is an art culture with well-nigh universal dissemination. There really is no reason any longer for anyone to act white, if they don't want to.

But passing also has its limits. We still believe that, for the most part, we can tell a white person from a black person by looking. We believe also that we can recognize the typical or identifying behavioral repertoire of black people and white people. And so we can see white people acting black, and for that matter black people acting white. And we still assert of this activity that it is a falsehood, or a betrayal of who one "really is" - that it is mere histrionics - and we ridicule people for it, however much they may protest their own authenticity. That is the essence of the wigger as comedy: he's pretending. Now this of course shows that we have all the racial understandings well-implanted in our heads: that we understand what it is to act black or to act white, and to be black or to be white. The ridicule to which the wigger is subjected is a policing of racial boundaries, but it's also an acknowledgment of realities: more or less, most of the time, the wigger is consciously acting out a role, though he may become very accustomed to it indeed. The ridicule is both an acknowledgment of the continuing reality of race and an enforcement of it.

At the center of the wigger's role is a critique of white culture. Not a generalized critique (such as the one I've just issued) but a critique that gets down to the level of gestures: it is a completely specific attack on everything it means at a given moment to be white. In part this has to be seen as a self-critique: part of what most wiggers are attacking is themselves; part of what they are violating is the inscription of white culture on their own bodies and expressions. More explicitly in their own minds, perhaps, they are criticizing in ruthless detail their own parents and communities. They are expressing hatred for their lily-white suburbs, their excellent lawns, their good manners, their careers, their lockstep obedience to social conventions. They are trying to remake themselves into aliens in that atmosphere, and hence showing its power to alienate.

3. Two Cases: William Upski Wimsatt and Eminem

The comic effect of the wigger depends fundamentally on his lack of self-consciousness. The wigger of comedy is completely serious. So the wigger gets a kind of Quixote flavor, trying with the utmost seriousness to do something that is a priori impossible and inappropriate, like Quixote's mutation into a questing, chivalric knight. And yet from the start various wiggers have displayed the possibility of self-consciousness; this is true even of semi-ironic early wigger anthems such as "Play that Funky Music White Boy" or "Dirty White Boy." In this sphere, the first successful white hip hop artsists - the Beastie Boys - provide a particularly clear example: in the midst of a set of hip hop recordings they were insistently, pointedly white: they actually made their whiteness, rather than their imitation of blackness, the key to their comedy, even as they made some excellent records. They were white kids pretending to be white.

Eminem is easily the most famous wigger who has ever lived. He certainly takes up a place in the history of white appropriations of black music styles which we examined briefly earlier. And like Elvis, for example, he is more successful than any black artist working in the same style, though the style emerges from black communities. But what distinguishes Eminem in this history is his self-consciousness, which could hardly be more intense. Indeed, Eminem's overall approach is continuously confessional: he parades his neuroses and insecurities as explicitly as humanly possible: his raps are turned obsessively inward. In that context, his work on race is perhaps less surprising than it might be, but still:

See the problem is I speak to suburban kids who otherwise would of never knew these words exist

whose moms probably woulda never gave two squirts of piss,

till I created so much motherfucking turbulence

straight out the tube, right into your livingroom I came, and kids flipped...

That's all it took, and they were instantly right in, and they connected with me too because I looked like them.

This from the anthemic "White America," whose title more or less says it all: I doubt that white America has ever been so explicitly addressed in the white media by a white person, or criticized in such detail in that context. He calls unspoiled white children "Eric" and Erica" - a characterization of their blandness - and attributes his own ability to pollute them to his own whiteness, as seen from his position as a race traitor or cross-dresser. It is precisely Eminem's marginal status that allows him to deliver this message, that gives him leverage over his own people, that allows him to understand whiteness from a distance that one would usually associate with a black critique of white power. First of all, as he never tires of telling us, he grew up in a trailer park, as Detroit white trash. And second, he has worked with black people in a black style all his professional life. These factors allow him to understand white culture simultaneously from inside and outside, and he uses that understanding continuously. Eminem is not usually thought of as a political artist, but in fact politics marks all of his work, up to and including anti-war messages delivered in his own twisted way.

Eminem also manages to pay homage to hip hop history and to mentor black rappers such as 50 Cent. And his artistry is essentially collaborative, especially with regard to the great LA hip hop producer Dr. Dre. Indeed, in one song, Em credits Dre with bringing him to a black audience, even as he credits himself with bringing Dre to a white one. Such activities are not necessarily different in kind than those of white blues stars such as the Stones and Clapton, who also collaborated with black artists and provided career help. Nor is the irony essentially different; there are many extremely popular black hip hop acts (and no white ones other than Eminem in the top echelon) but nevertheless the single best-selling and artistically dominant hip hop performer is white. What is different is, again, the explicitness in the music itself of Eminem's racial positioning:

No I'm not the first king of controversy
I am the worst thing since Elvis Presley
to do black music so selfishly
and used it to get myself wealthy
Hey! There's a concept that works
Twenty million other white rappers emerge
But no matter how many fish in the sea
It'd be so empty, without me.

Em's excellent autobiographical movie 8 Mile is largely an exploration of the trials and tribulations of being white in black neighborhoods, black styles, a black world. Here the wigger is portrayed seriously; one of the few such portrayals in the history of the persona. Eminem's character, "Rabbit," is played without irony and though he deploys a set of black mannerisms, etc, he does so with complete ownership of them, without any strain or exaggeration, simulation or comedy. It's about complexities and dangers, but also pleasures and the possibility of a small transcendence into the universal.

And maybe, despite the kinks in the wigger's consciousness and experience, that's what he's aiming for: a transcendence of the dualisms that constrain all of us to some degree. Eminem finds himself in the position to see and attack the dualisms from both sides at once, and that, we might say, is the hope embodied in the wigger, even though his very existence depends upon the dualisms in the first place. The wigger as presented by Eminem is a transitional phase in the breakdown of race; he's no less aware of race itself than a southern segregationist, or one might add, than the rest of us, black or white. But he has a different point of view on the whole matter, one that reveals aspects of it (as, among other things, performative, optional) that most Americans can't quite see. And what's unique about Eminem is that he then expresses these insights on the largest possible stage, to an audience of millions, which takes guts and creativity as well as understanding. Perhaps if this is pursued with enough self-reflection, a transcendence is possible, though it be small, halting, and itself of questionable value.

No self-proclaimed wigger other than Eminem has been more reflective and self-critical than William Upski Wimsatt, whose books Bomb the Suburbs and No More Prisons are minor classics not only as wigger manifestos but as anarchist-tinged political statements. Wimsatt, the son of a professor in Chicago, eventually became a serious graffiti artist and writer on hip hop for a variety of publications. He describes the dawning of his wiggerism like this:

Midway through grammar school, I made a discovery. Michael Jackson, Prince, and most of the other rock stars I stood admiring one day in the record store display window, were black. From this massive insight followed others. Practically all of the wittiest, the coolest, the strongest, the most agile, and the most precocious kids I knew were black (in part this was because most of the whites I knew were unusually dull and spoiled). In the locker room, the black boys really did seem to have bigger dicks. Although it has been proven untrue scientifically, you couldn't have told me that at the time. Next to them, my voice was flat, my personality dull, my lifestyle bland, my complexion pallid.2

(I must note that this is strikingly similar to my own conversion, though that took place in the seventies rather than the eighties, in DC rather than Chicago, and involved James Brown and Isaac Hayes rather than Prince and Jackson.) Note that the romanticization of the black is coupled with an explicit attack on the white. And note also its sexual element: the big dicks of black men are, we might say, a syndecdoche of all white attitudes toward black men, as the sexual precociousnes of black women are on the other side of the gender split (Mick Jagger: "Black girls just want to get fucked all night; I don't have that much jam.") So far, I think, so good: almost any wigger might tell a similar tale.

But Wimsatt goes on to examine both the racism and the liberatory potential in his own attitudes with a withering and absorbing self-reflection

[My whiteness] is the reason I am getting paid to write about hip hop while the people who taught me about hip hop are in jail, dead, or strugglin, scramblin 'n' gamblin. This is neither something to fight, nor to gloat about, nor to sit back and be thankful over. It is merely a moral debt. . . . "I'm confused about what your point of view is," an editor of mine once said. "I can't tell from reading this whether you are a hip-hopper or a racist, an insider in black society, or some kind of outside sociologist. Do you like black people or do you hate them?" My answer is that I'm human, meaning that I'm complex enough to be all these things at once." (40- 41)

Wimsatt knows perfectly well that he didn't manage to offload his whiteness and his privilege even as he was trying with all his might to be "down." And he knew that his position was half participatory and half anthropological, studying an alien culture, a position which as much as anything crystallizes the relation of white to black culture in the minds of white people. An interesting analogy might be the work of W. E. B. DuBois, who likewise continually faced the negotiation of a set of dualities: light-skinned black person from Massachusetts in the South; trained sociologist excluded in many ways from wide recognition because of his race, as well as race leader. He famously formulated the dilemma as "double consciousness." Wimsatt agrees, actually, but consciousness turned against itself is only one element; the doubleness is one of social positioning and its accompanying actions (for Wimsatt, graffiti and authorship), affiliations, educations, physical locations. DuBois faced a double response from the black community too, to his "culture," his accent, his light skin, his "airs," all of which were on display during his conflicts with Booker T. Washington and Marcus Garvey, both of whom he despised. Wimsatt could expect the same were he to reach DuBois's pitch of eminence.

The social scientist has a neutral view and no doubt good intentions; the target culture is basically described through its deviations from the culture of the social scientist. Wimsatt takes seriously his continual point of view as both-at-once, and both the racist and liberatory potential of each possible juxtaposition of affiliations. That the wigger himself is a location of racism is something he can almost never admit to himself. Like the slumming white folks of Malcolm's Harlem he believes that his romanticization of black culture and his emulation of it and seeking after membership in it is a demonstration of his transcendence of racism. But obviously the romance itself depends on a set of categories that in turn depends on the basic racist structure of mind/body dualism and so forth. If this remains uninterrogated, the wigger is really not a liberatory figure, but if it becomes fully self-critical, it yields the kind of overall leverage on race that Eminem and Wimsatt display so conspicuously.

In the context of such self-criticism, wiggerism indeed becomes an agent of change, and race migration, with all its limitations, holds out the possibility of knowledge of black folks and knowledge of self. "The most promising thing about spilled milk," writes Wimsatt, "is that it has ventured from its container" (32). So, we might conclude, don't cry over the wigger.

Endnotes

1 Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York: African-American Images, 1987 (1965)), chapters 5-7.

2 William Upski Wimsatt, Bomb the Suburbs (New York: Soft Skull/Subway and Elevated, 2000 (1994), p. 32.