"Wigger"

By Crispin Sartwell

The wigger - the white person who acts like a black person - is a stock figures of contemporary American comedy. A current television 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 ideas of "being white" and 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. In fact, the repertoire of race in contemporary American culture is incredibly rich and detailed, probably as much as it has ever been, from gesture to costume to speech, from a way of walking to a way of being, and everybody is capable of reading its semiotics.

At its most general, the content of blackness and whiteness in the white mind has been largely fixed since the seventeenth century, at the latest. The attribution of "savagery" to the black peoples of Africa - their association in the European mind with the blood festival and the orgy, with nakedness, heathenism, and so on - was a way that Europeans constructed themselves as civilized.

The first great modern European philosopher, Rene Descartes, was a proponent of "mind/body dualism," the idea that the mind or soul was separate from the body and also "higher," naturally suited to command. The black/white dichotomy got interpreted through this lens, so that what was black was associated with the body, hence also with desire, sin, illiteracy, lack of self-control. It goes without saying that this was more about the self-image of white people than the realities of black people, and it connects the 17^th century European monarch contemplating the "dark continent" with the white suburban housewife - from whose loins the wigger springs -contemplating the inner city.

From almost the beginning, however, Europeans also romanticized black culture, and Rousseau's idea of "the noble savage" - unpolluted by civilization: simple, free, honest - is one version of the romantic backlash against modernism. When one associates bodily desire with blackness, blackness becomes the place to discharge white desires, as racists from Jefferson to Thurmond have demonstrated. The Autobiography of Malcolm X, for example, describes the white folks Malcolm met slumming in the Harlem of the 1940s. They came in search of dance, drugs, and sex, even as the congratulated themselves on their open-mindedness.

The wigger romanticizes black culture, and that, to say the least, is not necessarily a liberatory attitude, because it reproduces the dualisms of mind/body and of culture/nature on which racism is based. But as the wigger/author William Upski Wimsatt says: "the most promising thing about spilled milk is that it has ventured from its container," and the wigger does actually contribute (as did Jefferson and Thurmond in a more problematic way) to the mixture of the races and the ways one people learns about another.

The wigger is engaged in a detailed critique of white culture, that, is of his own culture - for its blandness, its pointless etiquette, its equation of concealment and purity - that proceeds from generalities down to the level of the gesture.

And when the wigger becomes self-aware and self-critical, as he has in the case of Wimsatt and also in the case of the uber-wigger Eminem - when he becomes aware of the racism as well as the admiration in his attitude - he signals the possibility of a breakdown of race that might also represent an integration of the self. For, after all, we are all bodies as well as minds, or maybe bodies are minds.

Indeed, unlike Malibu's Most Wanted, the Eminem bio-pic 8 Mile depicts a wigger who is not straining for affect and is not merely the object of ridicule, but who grows up in a mixed situation and has to negotiate a mixed identity, as did and does Strom's daughter.

That, more and more, is the dilemma and hope we all share.

Crispin Sartwell's most recent book is "Extreme Virtue: Leadership and Truth in Five Great American Lives" (SUNY 2003). c.sartwell@verizon.net.