Other People's Property by Jason Tanz

Author:Jason Tanz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2007-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

This was a verdict I eventually came to accept in college, leading me to hang up my Malcolm X hat and retreat into my whiteness. It is a lesson that Carl Van Vechten, that white supporter of the Harlem Renaissance, learned the hard way. In 1926 he published a novel with the title Nigger Heaven, a slang term for the balconies of movie theaters. Although the book was a loving testament to black culture and became a best-seller among curious whites, many members of the African American community that Van Vechten so worshipped were horrified. W. E. B. DuBois called it “a blow in the face” and “an affront to the hospitality of black folk.” At a book review meeting at the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library, angry Harlem residents dismissed the book as “an insult to the race.” Although Van Vechten’s friends, including Langston Hughes and James Weldon Johnson, defended the novel, Van Vechten was never welcome in Harlem again.

At the end of my lunch with Tha Pumpsta, it sounded as if he was starting to come to terms with this lesson as well. He admitted to me that the fried-chicken discount was probably a mistake, that there are some jokes that white people simply cannot and should not make. He understood why some folks took umbrage at his cavalier use of such a loaded (and misspelled) phrase as “Kill Whitie!” a name he said he might discontinue. At the very least, his ram-shackle and largely stream-of-conscious identification with black culture and language left him on the defensive. “It would be the furthest thing for me to try and instigate anything racist,” he said. “I have the most sincere of intentions.”

If Tha Pumpsta needs any tips on how to express his sincerity, he may want to ask for the advice of the white rappers AR-15, who just may be the ultimate Wegroes. AR-15 is a police rifle model, but the group’s two members have reinterpreted the term—“flipped” it, in the parlance—to stand for “Anti Racist 15.” The “15” refers to the fifteen antiracist principles that the MCs have devised to inform their music and their lives (including “study legacies of resistance,” “respect leadership of color,” and “create antiracist culture”). On the group’s Web site, ar15entertainment.com, they refer to themselves as a combination of the Beastie Boys and Public Enemy, and their lyrics make MC Serch’s look like Vanilla Ice’s. “If they take you in the morning,” they rap in the first track of their EP, Whiteness in the Crosshairs, “they will be coming for us at night.” “I’m here to get down, just like John Brown!” they sing in another, a reference to the famed white abolitionist.

Jeb Middlebrook, AR-15’s front man, raps under the nickname Jus Rhyme, but he used to use the handle Privilege. The name was a self-critical reference to the concept of white privilege. Today, Middlebrook, himself the son of an optometrist and an occupational therapist, says that all whites are inescapably

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