White boys love rap. Or at least, they say or think or demonstrate they do. White fuels are beginning to wear hoops and acrylics. Appropriation isn’t new, and I’m not quite sure it’s inherently bad. America is built on exploitation of people of color in every way: economically, socially, politically, culturally. While a burden on those for whom the label is not optional, “blackness” is cool for those selectively extracting from it. More simply, white people (particularly white youth) appropriate aspects of black culture as “pop” culture” as a way to signal their own culture and/or coolness. For example, during the jazz era, wealthy white youth “slummed” in Harlem neighborhoods on the weekends to listen to black musicians. Again, I cannot claim whether this is universally good nor bad; I can just claim it has been and it is.
I wonder the origin of this. Some scholars posit white people, on a deep level, feel inherently inferior to black people, and so absorb aspects of their culture without attribution as a means of feeding their own egos. Stereotypes of black people, such as the black man as hyper-masculine or the black woman as hyper-sexual, can be appropriated by white people to emphasize those characteristics (which otherwise seem to be absent) within themselves. Black author and musician Greg Tate comments that, when it comes to black culture, white Americans seem ravenous for “everything but the burden.”
I see truth in this. I also see truth in a coexistent phenomena: ‘white guilt’, which Wikipedia defines as “individual or collective guilt felt by some white people for harm resulting from racist treatment of ethnic minorities such as African Americans and indigenous peoples by other white people, most specifically in the context of the Atlantic slave trade, European colonialism and the legacy of these eras.” This operational definition explains downstream phenomena such as Benevolent Racism, or the act of responding to one’s own racism with extreme politeness or superficial positivity towards the oppressed group while still ‘othering’ them, thereby failing to confront one’s own racism. White Christian missionary work finds its roots here, as did American slave-holder justifications for slavery that involved the inherent ‘darkness’ of black souls and ‘lightness’ of whites, who must enslave blacks in order to redeem them in heaven.
Those unfamiliar with racism and anti-racism conversations may read this and wonder, “What’s wrong with benevolence”? Uncontextualized, nothing. In practice, however, superficial benevolence vacuums empathy from an interaction. Perpetrators or perpetuators of racism need not engage in actually investigating or abolishing their racism if they use this salve. They fail to see the depths of racism and their complicity in racist structures. Benevolence is safe because it is impersonal, and if it is impersonal, it’s missing the point. Racism is personal for everyone, always, at all points.