Race with Hua Hsu
I strongly recommend Hua Hsu’s piece, “The End of White America?,” in the current Atlantic. It’s mainly a great survey of cultural points on which the changing status of whiteness is visible. One of its great strengths is the way in which it recognizes the role that that a sort of existential power plays in the politics of racial identification – that is, the way the erotic appeal of a cultural identity lines up with its perceived cultural power. The idea of blackness, in its combination of cultural virtuosity with (implicitly justified) political opposition and subalterity, has long had an illicit pull for adventurous whites. But now that it is both oppositional and, in certain realms, hegemonic…that is a potent mix that leaves whiteness as a cultural identification in a weird state of drift, in which you see a process of further diffusion in some places and greater retrenchment in others. Hsu is really judicious in distinguishing these things.
But there’s one crucial thing Hsu skates over but fails to note explicitly, something that opens a whole new universe of questioning about the role of race in contemporary America. Among contemporary scholars of race, whiteness is typically treated as this alchemic creation, a mix of legal and cultural creations rooted in the political and demographic struggles and scientific fictions of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. These evolve and adjust through the 20th Century, but their fundamental status as epiphenomenal, constructed, rhetorical remains the same. But alongside this fiction of whiteness, blackness gets a different epistemology. When blackness appears as the counterpart of whiteness (as the thing that gives whiteness its defining contours as an ideal, as the negative Other of whiteness), it, too, is treated as a product of these alchemical forces. Blackness, like whiteness, is a construct, a fiction. But when blackness appears on the scene as a cultural force of its own, breaking the fetters of whiteness and staking out its own claims in the open space of popular culture, and transforming that culture, the racial academic takes it on its own terms. The hermeneut-of-suspicion becomes a literal and reverent chronicler of the merry havoc effected by this new ascendant blackness.
I don’t mean to say that the havoc is not in parts merry and interesting. I do mean to point out the sudden lapse in suspicion of the scholars marking it, the sudden failure to treat this new ascendant blackness as itself a construct. And, to the extent that a certain inauthenticity is admitted to operate within black culture – and here I’m talking mainly about hip hop – it is usually those parodic and self-mythologizing moments that are conscious elements of a racial performance. That is, the constructed aspects of blackness are constantly enfolded back into a narrative of authentic redemption and/or opposition, into a coherent identity-package that is not taken to be pathological and unself-knowing in the manner of whiteness. Even in Hsu’s treatment, the reflex of retrenchment among the whitest whites – expressed in things like NASCAR, etc. – is taken as buried under layers of subconscious evasion about its real racial character, while the nonwhite cultural forces that generate this response are taken as things in themselves, the straight-up being of nonwhiteness.But why should they be? I would argue that, over the last twenty years especially, blackness (and also nonwhiteness, of course, both more generally and in its other specific forms) as an identity, an idea, a cultural marker, has been an object of furious constructive labor not just by self-conscious hip hop jesters and personality-artists, but by advertisers and other corporate sales experts, record execs and producers and promoters, lawyers and politicians, policy entrepreneurs and impresarios in the world of therapy and cultural counseling, educators and human resource professionals. The narrative of liberated multicultural blackness is, I would argue, as much a construct as the old definition of blackness as the hobbled other of whiteness. It has been so furiously taken up for purposes of commerce and politics – people have made so much money off of it – you’d think all those suspicious hermeneuts would approach our new celebratory multiculturalism with the same suspicious wince that they bring to the old tables of racial order
Matt: I don’t think any serious cultural critic or sociologist would disagree with this. This is basically what Benedict Anderson was talking about in Imagined Communities no?
— Noah Millman · Jan 14, 09:57 PM · #
“and transforming that culture, the racial academic takes [blackness] on its own terms.”
I’m not sure who you have in mind when you say academic there. Cause academics scholar tend not to. Even those who study hip-hop academically tend to deal with “The Bronx is Burning!” and triangles of cultural exchange around the Caribbean, etc. For the Things White People Like Crowd, you are dead on.
“blackness…has been an object of furious constructive labor”
One could make the argument that this is a selling point. For many teenagers (suburban whites or otherwise) their whole culture is sold to them by corporations, as opposed to inherited through families or local communities, that have engineered their products for maximum efficiency.
I’m curious to your thoughts why all those white students have such anxiety about their whiteness when they talk to that college professor. That anxiety underscores all the rest of the selling.
— rortybomb · Jan 14, 10:56 PM · #
I’m not sure how to parse all of this, but my (limited experience) is that scholars are all too happy to find ever more and more feverish ways to say that blackness, like whiteness, is constructed.
— Justin · Jan 15, 06:46 AM · #
I would direct all “American Scene” readers to Steve Sailer’s superior take on this same article:
http://vdare.com/sailer/090111_hsu.htm
Or for those really adventurous, check out three separate posts on the subject over at “What’s Wrong with the World”:
1) http://www.whatswrongwiththeworld.net/2009/01/it_is_the_dawning_of_the_age_ofofof.html
2) http://www.whatswrongwiththeworld.net/2009/01/the_end_of_white_america_conti.html
3) http://www.whatswrongwiththeworld.net/2009/01/the_end_of_white_america_enoug.html
— Jeff Singer · Jan 15, 02:54 PM · #
It’s hard for young music critics like Hua Hsu (born 1977) to understand just how stagnant popular music has been during their lifetimes compared to what came before. From the 19th Century into the 1980s, English-language popular music was extraordinarily dynamic, due to a process of competition collaboration between whites and blacks.
When I heard the first rap song on Top 40 radio in 1979, I thought to myself — what a cute novelty number! I bet lots of people imitate it over the next year or two, before blacks get bored and invent something else.
And then, as I predicted, the cool white bands like Talking Heads, The Clash, and Blondie brought out rap songs in 1980-81. In 1982, the Sex Pistols’ ex-manager Malcolm McClaren subversively pointed out the unhip roots of rap by hiring a hip-hop group to rap the old square dance call “Buffalo Gals.” So, it looked like hip-hop was going to turn out to be another phase, like disco, and then the world would move on to something new.
Instead, in the 1980s the racial Berlin Wall came down. Hip-hop was sanctified as the official authentic black music and whites were driven out. With a flagship style that consisted of rhythmic talking, black songwriting, which had astonished the world throughout the 20th Century, stagnated as even black songs became more monotonous in melody to partake of rap’s aura.
White rock likewise stagnated, shattering into countless fragmentary styles that, all in all, are pretty much the same as what you could hear on KROQ in 1982.
A couple of years ago at his Superbowl halftime show, Prince deliberately chose his two cover songs — “All Along the Watchtower” and “Proud Mary” — as an attack on the dominant musical ideology of our time that whites shouldn’t be allowed to steal black music. Those songs were written by whites and became huge hits for blacks.
The old system of competition and collaboration between the races was so much more productive than the new system of musical apartheid.
— Steve Sailer · Jan 15, 11:48 PM · #
European and U.S. writers have been romanticizing and commercializing blackness at least since the first play written in English by a woman, “Guinea’s Captive Kings” by (c. 1700) by Aphra Benn. You could go back earlier to the “good” Moor spurned by Portia in “The Merchant of Venice” or the medieval legends of Prester John.
— Harold Brackman · Jan 17, 07:40 PM · #
“The old system of competition and collaboration between the races was so much more productive than the new system of musical apartheid”
The situation Steve Sailer describes is, happily, a bit off-base. I’m not sure exactly where he places the cut-off in the 80’s where whites were “driven out” of hip-hop, but from my perspective there has been a healthy (if sometimes limited) “competition and collaboration” between white and non-white actors in the hip-hop world for almost as long as there has been hip-hop.
Sailer is understandably nostalgic for the early 1980’s, where a lot of interesting rock/hip-hop hybrids occured (many of them in New York City). Perhaps Sailer would resign Steinski to this early era. Steinski was one of the earliest progenitors of hip-hop remixing and what came to be called “mash-ups.” The underground artist Girl Talk (another white guy) is a direct descendant of Steinski.
Admittedly, there was a time in the late 1980’s where (leftist) Black militancy was in vogue, and this is where hip-hop became the “authentic” black music that Sailer speaks of. This era was short-lived (roughly 1988-1991) and was succeeded by the rise of “gangsta rap,” which, while dominated by blacks, was less racially conscious and more explicitly motivated by capital.
At the risk of sounding fogeyish, I feel that everybody in this debate seems to be missing the massive influence of the Beastie Boys on all aspects of hip-hop culture. Their first two records were sampled to death by hip-hop producers and DJs, and no less a personage than Chuck D of Public Enemy reportedly declared Paul’s Boutique to have the best beats of that year.
Exiting the mainstream of the present, hip-hop is becoming increasingly multicultural, with artists such as Girl Talk, Diplo, and M.I.A. Even mainstream producers such as Timbaland are accused of stealing beats from Canadian group Crystal Castles. And what has Kanye West, hip-hop’s current King-of-the-world, been doing the last couple of years but auditioning to be the third member of French techno group Daft Punk? The “competition and collaboration” in music may have been stunted for most of the last 20 years or so, but it never really went away. Signs point to an increase in such collaboration and competition, rather than the opposite.
— cam · Jan 18, 03:25 AM · #
The dominance of hip-hop among blacks over the last 30 years is as sad as if after Johnny Cash’s 1968 hit “A Boy Named Sue,” if country music was dominated by square dance calling for three decades.
Singing is better than talking.
— Steve Sailer · Jan 18, 05:17 AM · #
“Singing is better than talking”
You seem to think that hip-hop has not progressed a lick since Run DMC’s first 12” single.
Obviously no one but children ONLY listens to hip-hop. You are right in that respect. At hip-hop’s core is the drum, and children understand rhythm long before they get hip to chromatic scales and the like.
At some point, we want to hear melodies. This is why your comment hits the wall, because very few hip-hop singles make a dent in the charts these days without a melodic chorus (Lil Wayne’s “A Milli” notwithstanding).
Likewise, no one wants to listen to infinite versions of “A Boy Named Sue,” or any other Cash tune, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t fun to do so once in a while. Yeah, sometimes I want to hear singing, but sometimes I want to pummel my body with an 808 bass drum or a certain type of guitar distortion. Sometimes the physicality of music trumps mere theory.
— cam · Jan 18, 09:53 AM · #