Black Mirror: The Cultural Contradictions of American Racism by Eric Lott

Author:Eric Lott [Lott, Eric]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: history, United States, 20th Century, Social Science, Ethnic Studies, American, African American & Black Studies, popular culture, Discrimination, Media Studies
ISBN: 9780674967717
Google: uigzDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2017-09-25T00:17:13.554522+00:00

NORMAN MAILER’S “THE WHITE NEGRO” (1957), an extended riff whose mythologies are as telling as its analysis, is the garish post–World War II advertisement for this pose—freedom dreams, hipster division. As none other than Norman Podhoretz observed in 1958 of the white-Negro discourse of which Mailer’s essay was the centerpiece: “I doubt if a more idyllic picture of Negro life has been painted since certain southern ideologues tried to convince the world that things were just fine as fine could be for the slaves on the old plantation.”21 Not a postdating or mere continuation of antebellum racial cross-dressing but its genealogical legacy, this postwar discourse—Mezzrow, the Beat writers, Elvis Presley’s early career, Mailer’s hipster, Griffin’s Black Like Me, and others—did (in all its racial “modernity”) reproduce the obsessions of certain nineteenth-century northern ideologues but in racially sympathetic form. To the extent that these obsessions weren’t wholly continuous with the dominant culture in the ensuing years of protest, they returned as farce in the late 1960s: Elvis’s 1968 comeback TV special, Grace Halsell’s Soul Sister (1969) (Griffin’s second-generation simulacrum), and, in a crowning blow (to which I will return), Melvin Van Peebles’s Watermelon Man (1970)—in which Godfrey Cambridge in whiteface plays a suburban racist who wakes up one morning to find himself turned black. The steady backbeat of this trope and of white Negroism generally since then—the movie Soul Man (1986); black-folk-filled music videos and performances from Madonna to Miley Cyrus; Lee Atwater’s blues Republicanism and Bill Clinton’s Elvis ticket; Quentin Tarantino movies and white-Negro parodies (e.g., Malibu’s Most Wanted [2003]); Vanilla Ice, Robin Thicke, and Iggy Azalea—is as bewildering in its ubiquity as in its ideological variousness, but these instances and countless others only confirm the original template.22

Mailer’s piece codifies the renegade ethic of male sexuality conceived out of and projected onto black men—and always driven by a rather transparent eroticizing of them—that informs the more than metaphorical racial romance underlying one construction of American whiteness: “Knowing in the cells of his existence that life was war, nothing but war, the Negro (all exceptions admitted) could rarely afford the sophisticated inhibitions of civilization, and so he kept for his survival the art of the primitive, he lived in the enormous present, he subsisted for his Saturday night kicks, relinquishing the pleasures of the mind for the more obligatory pleasures of the body, and in his music he gave voice to the character and quality of his existence, to his rage and the infinite variations of joy, lust, languor, growl, cramp, pinch, scream and despair of his orgasm.”23 Mailer and other male white Negroes inherited an affective paradigm whose self-valorizing marginality and distinction require a virtual impersonation of black manhood. It is revealing that while the liberatory preoccupations of Mailer’s existential errand are inexactly calibrated with either Griffin’s Black Like Me or Elvis Presley, the shape of this white mythology looks pretty much the same in all cases. Its resonance is, for instance, succinctly articulated in white guitarist Scotty Moore’s gleeful

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