Wigger Please is a documentary feature film chronicling the cultural stereotypes of white Americans embracing hip hop culture. Currently in production, the filmmakers are interviewing rappers, actors, artists and writers who have had their political or personal perspectives influenced by their experiences with hip hop or black culture. For information on the project, contact [email protected]
It's hard to come up with an ethnic slur that has less of a sting than "whitey."
A prevalent yet unsubstantiated Internet rumor passed along by Rush Limbaugh and others has it that Barack Obama's wife, Michelle, used this term at some point in a speech, and the Obama campaign is concerned enough to have posted an online rebuttal.
I've got to ask, though. Are there really white people out there so ignorant of history, so unaware of the nuances of language and so threatened by minority grievances that they take genuine umbrage at the term, "whitey"?
It has no ugly history and hints at no particular stereotypes. Like the term "honky," of which it is an even milder cousin, "whitey" resonates with frustration, not oppression -- a taunt, perhaps, but not a threat.
The only way white people can work up a snit over "whitey" is if they fail to see that context is everything in measuring the wallop of informal ethnic terms. This requires them to set up a false equivalence between prejudice -- making negative assumptions about people based solely on external characteristics, which all races and ethnicities are guilty of -- and racism -- prejudice in action.
It requires them to imagine that "whitey" marginalizes, diminishes and therefore harms them.
And if they're really that dumb, then I guess they deserve to be insulted.
No More Dap for Blacks
by Adam "DNA"
PUBLISHED: JUNE 12, 2008
Once, 125th street ran with the dull thud of black men giving each other fist pounds as they greeted each other in friendship. Now, all that can be heard is that regular city noise you generally hear in New York, and maybe some Reggae music.
“Me and my friends don’t even give each other pounds anymore,” said Darryl Wilkins, a 24 year old bank teller. “We just kind of nod at each other.”
Millions of white people saw presumptive Democratic Presidential nominee Barack Obama give his wife a fist pound before his victory speech last week, and decided to greet each other in a similar manner. As a result, black Americans across the country have eschewed the gesture in protest.
“What, I’m supposed to greet my homie the way Senator Feinstein (D-CA) and Senator Hutchinson (R-TX) greet each other? I don’t think so,” Wilkins added as he shook his head.
Some black leaders are trying to preserve the pound, pointing to its long and fruitful association with the black community. The Rev. Al Sharpton has suggested the Federal Government institute a “dap tax” that white people would have to pay for using the gesture. The “dap tax,” Sharpton says, would be instituted in lieu of reparations for slavery.
“You can give each other dap, you just have to give us the dollars,” Sharpton told reporters at a press conference in front of a Gray’s Papaya yesterday, where he was scheduled to have lunch with Bill O’Reilly.
The Center for Disease Control issued a statement warning that the influx of amateur pound-giving could result in an epidemic of hand borne diseases.
“The knuckles are, in fact, the most germ-friendly part of the body,” said CDC spokesman Jeremy Fowler. “People who have just started giving each other dap should really be careful that they don’t end up getting very sick, and should consider partnering with a veteran.”
Unfortunately, now that black Americans no longer give each other dap, there are few experts around to teach whites how to perform the gesture safely. 45-year old Adina Washington, an assistant curator at the Museaum of Afro-Caribbean Blackness in Brooklyn, says it serves new dappers right if they hurt themselves.
“First Jazz, then rock and roll, and now this?” Washington said, pounding her desk for emphasis. “What’s next, colloquialisms like ‘word,’ or ‘bling bling?’ Next thing you know, white people will be doing the Soulja Boy.”
“DNA” is a guest contributor for Blackline. He posts regularly on his blog at TooSense.net.
I'm a member of the diversity council in my company - one of few white folks - and I'm often called on for my opinion. Now granted I've done over 10 years of diversity work, but why are you assuming the guys on the regional councils are naive?
I'm also a member of a diversity organization that holds an annual 4 day conference, and we always try to find a frame to discuss whiteness. Last year was most successful. Again, white folks are in the minority, so the four or five women launched a workshop we called, "Everything you ever wanted to know about white people, but were afraid to ask."
It was a hit. We were asked pertinent questions, not jabs, and the most interesting question, that actually stumped us, was "what about being White brings you joy?" Everything we named was either a class thing or was about avoiding what People of Color face all the time (being stalked in stores).
I think you are way too isolated as a white guy - WACAN is forming an on-line dialogue for folks who've attended the White Privilege Conference - there were 900 folks, and probably 300 or more white folks, and all of them that I met have done their own work and are savvy. You really have to reach out more to realize you aren't the only cool white person around.
--Nancy Arvold
DiversityInc partner and cofounder Luke Visconti responds:
Comparing average business white men to people who have sought out WACAN is apples and oranges.
Yes, I'm assuming a company that doesn't even apply for the DiversityInc Top 50 has low quality training and "diversity councils" with very little structure and business planning. That's based on my eight years of experience running the Top 50 competition, benchmarking hundreds of companies and presenting to hundreds of "diversity councils."
Most white people in corporate America have no idea what they're talking about when it comes to "diversity" and succumb to making statements that express ignorance to a degree that is detrimental (i.e. "it's all about parenting" or "those people don't value education").
Your mention of being "cool" is interesting. "Cool" has nothing to do with this. If you think you're "cool" and find yourself speaking in "vernacular" or shaking hands in any way but the (white) traditional way, you may want to think again.
Cheney talks trash
The sordid history conjured by the vice president's joke about inbreeding between poor white people.
Gregory Rodriguez
Things are getting complicated. In the same week that a black man clinched the Democratic nomination for president, the current white, Republican vice president was forced to apologize for making a crack that played on the myth that poor white folks like having sex with their cousins.
It probably wouldn't have been a big deal had Dick Cheney not singled out West Virginia, the bluest of the red states. He was talking about having Cheneys on both sides of his family and, he said, "we don't even live in West Virginia." As director John Waters said in 1994, talking trash about "white trash" is "the last racist thing you can say and get away with." After all, there's no political action committee for hillbillies. (And no, the National Rifle Assn. doesn't count.)
It turns out that West Virginia officials did protest the vice president's remarks. Democratic Sen. Robert Byrd lamented Cheney's evident "contempt and astounding ignorance toward his own countrymen." But he and other politicians were clearly more offended by the targeting of their state than with the fact that Cheney was propagating the old canard that poor white Southerners were biologically tainted by inbreeding. That a generally humorless vice president would dare make such a joke in an election year shows how acceptable it really is to disparage lower-class whites from the South and beyond. But why?
Think of it this way: If a black politician made fun of poor blacks, or a Latino official made fun of poor Latinos, he'd likely be roundly denounced as a sellout. Indeed, politicians and all other upper-middle-class Latinos and blacks are generally assumed to bear a responsibility to improve the lot of the most downtrodden among them. So why do privileged white people like Cheney have greater license to distance themselves from poor whites? Aren't they also responsible for helping to lift their brothers and sisters up the socioeconomic ladder?
The term "white trash" seems to have emerged in the 1820s in Baltimore. It was slang, used by both free and enslaved blacks, to put down the poor whites with whom they sometimes found themselves in economic competition. Middle-class and elite whites then borrowed and popularized the term for their own purposes, one of which was to solidify their racial dominance.
That process started with the ideology of black inferiority, which emerged as a justification for slavery, and the concomitant ideology of white supremacy. In pre-Civil War Southern society, the presence of poor, uneducated and uncouth whites presented something of a problem for the advocates of slavery: They were living, breathing proof that whiteness and superiority were not the same.
By the 1850s, poor whites found themselves caught in the debate over slavery. In 1854, abolitionist author Harriet Beecher Stowe argued that "white trash" were the victims and byproducts of slavery, in which the planter class monopolized tillable soil and left poor whites struggling to survive. For their part, pro-slavery advocates retorted that the source of the white underclass was not slavery but the tainted blood that ran through these depraved people's veins.
In other words, in order to maintain the idea of white supremacy, white elites had to de-racialize their poor -- remove them from the group. They were "white" in skin color only. Just as the one-drop rule -- which held that any person with any amount of African blood would be considered black -- kept the white racial category "pure," so did the creation and disowning of "inferior" whites. "The term 'white trash' gave a name to people who were giving 'whiteness' a bad name," said Matt Wray, a Temple University sociologist and the author of "Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness." "It meant that they were behaving in ways that didn't suggest that they were the master race."
By the turn of the century, eugenicists were studying poor rural whites and documenting their social dysfunctions. They eventually made the fatuous connection between Southern white poverty and "consanguinity," or shared blood -- which meant incest. The accusation stuck, and many poor whites were labeled feeble-minded and became the victims of the forced-sterilization programs that began in the 1920s.
Cheney was probably not fully aware of the whole sordid history he conjured. But his casual joke suggests not only that political correctness does not apply to all groups equally but that there are corrosive, nonracial social divisions in this nation that are easily ignored and even tolerated. For too long, we've spoken of social tensions almost exclusively in terms of race. Perhaps the nomination of a black man for president will let that story line fade so that we can finally focus on the ever-present, easy-to-miss issues of class.
The folks over at The LA Times Blog Extended Play have an interview with director Jonathan Levine on mid 90's hip hop and middle class white kids. It's all in anticipation of his upcoming flick "The Wackness" which will be blogged about for an entire week here shortly.
In the meantime, feel free to read the article, and pass along this cool widget, full of tracks from A Tribe Called Quest, Biggie Smalls, and The Fugees as you start your weekend off right.
Curious college choice pays off for Grandview High School grad
By DONALD BRADLEY
The Kansas City Star
Josh Packwood got bounced around as a kid.
He had to move in with friends after his family was evicted. His father couldn’t speak or walk because of a motorcycle-train accident. His mother struggled. The family broke up.
But Packwood still had his choice of colleges when he graduated from Grandview High School in 2004. The Ivy League liked his academic excellence and SAT scores. Columbia University was one of several schools to offer him a scholarship.
Packwood had always wanted to live in New York, but instead of Columbia, he decided on Morehouse College in Atlanta.
A curious choice, considering Packwood is white.
On Sunday, though, Packwood will graduate as the 2008 valedictorian, the first white student to do so in the 141-year history of Morehouse, which has never counted more than a handful of white students among its enrollment of roughly 3,000.
“Absolutely no regrets,” Packwood, 22, said from his new office at Goldman Sachs, a Wall Street banking and securities firm where he started work last week.
“I wanted to get to New York someday, and here I am. I think I’ve always been the kind to take the path less traveled. Sure, at first I was known as the white kid on campus, but later on, I was just Josh. And the way I view the world now … I don’t think I could have ended up any better.”
The one thing that didn’t turn out good was that his father will not be present for Sunday’s graduation. He died in October, three days before Packwood’s final interview for a Rhodes Scholarship.
Packwood had just left the office of Anne Watts, associate vice president for academic affairs at Morehouse, when he got word of his father’s death.
He fell to the floor and cried. Watts, his Rhodes coach, pulled him back into her office and sat him down. She knew of his father’s disability and how much Packwood wanted his dad to see him walk across the graduation stage.
“After a while, he squared his shoulders and dried his tears,” Watts remembered. “Then he told me he had to go to Kansas City and take care of things for his father.
“He told me he had to go do what a man does.”
A history of success
Officials at Grandview High were not surprised to hear of Packwood’s college honors.
He is remembered there as a friendly, gifted student, fine athlete and champion debater who was always involved in school activities. He said his drive was due partly to having seen friends make bad choices and end up in trouble
“Everybody knew Josh, and everybody liked him,” said Joyce Caruthers, an academic counselor. “We are very proud of him. We’re not surprised at his success, but maybe a little surprised at his college choice.”
On one hand, some people were surprised Packwood chose Morehouse because he’s white. On the other hand, one Morehouse recruiter was surprised to learn Packwood wasn’t black.
Packwood had sent information to the all-men’s school and visited after learning about it from a girl he’d met in Kansas City. She attended nearby Spelman College, the women’s school.
Impressed with Packwood’s academic credentials, the recruiter invested heavily in phone calls and correspondence, trying to snag him from elite schools such as Columbia and Stanford.
But the two had never met. Finally, one day while Packwood was getting ready for a Grandview track meet, the recruiter called to make another pitch.
Packwood, speaking on his cell phone, thanked the man for calling but said he had to get on his shoes for an event.
“Well, don’t let a white kid dust you,” the recruiter jested.
Hmmm. Packwood asked the man to take another look at his application, particularly the “ethnicity” box.
“You do know I’m white, right?”
Dead silence.
But the recruiter told Packwood that he was the kind of student Morehouse wanted — whatever his race.
That exchange sealed the deal. Up to then, Packwood worried a bit that Morehouse viewed him as a “token white kid — someone they could steal way from the Ivy League.”
“I knew then they wanted me solely on my merits,” Packwood said.
Natural fit
Aside from the stares at the beginning of his freshman year, Packwood merged smoothly into Morehouse life. He wasn’t the school’s first white student; that person came in the mid-1960s, not long after James Meredith became the first black student at the University of Mississippi.
But black culture wasn’t new to Packwood. His mother had married a black man. He had black step-siblings. Grandview High had been 53 percent black his senior year.
Part of the Morehouse appeal was its rich history. Founded in 1867, just after the Civil War, it has been hailed as the nation’s premier draw for black students, and counts among its alumni such prominent names as Martin Luther King Jr.
Upon arrival there, Packwood jumped into campus life, becoming director of a mentoring program for alternative high school students. He became active in student government. He was voted president of his dormitory and vice president of the Morehouse Business Association.
Students liked him.
“And, of course, I was always asked to give the white perspective to class discussions,” he said.
Watts goes further. Anytime an issue of unfairness or injustice surfaced on campus, Packwood often jumped into the middle of it.
“He was never afraid to speak his mind,” she said. “And sometimes it was not a popular stance from a white student. But Josh had a way of pulling people away from staunch beliefs they had held many a day.
“So tenacious … so gifted. He was always a reminder to me of, ‘To whom much is given, much is required.’ ”
Watts met Packwood that first year. He showed up at her office one day and said he wanted to be a Rhodes Scholar.
Lots of students do, but she knows how long the odds against success can be, and she tells them: “Let’s look at something else.”
But Packwood’s file made her think he had a chance. Like most aspirants, he needed help with his essay. She gave him some pointers and sent him on his way.
He was back the next day.
“I found him sitting outside my office, with that smile of his … that infectious smile that I will never forget,” Watts said.
Despite his hard work to win the Rhodes Scholarship, Packwood decided to skip the final interview after his father died. But friends and family told him his father would have wanted him to go.
He did so, but fell just short.
“If not for him hurting as much as he was, I think he would have made it,” Watts said.
On the Morehouse Web site, school President Robert Franklin Jr. wrote this of Packwood:
“Josh Packwood is Morehouse. He happens to be Euro-American and brings much appreciated diversity to our campus.”
And of Packwood’s Rhodes quest and father’s death, Franklin wrote: “He had every reason to lose focus and abandon hope, but true forever to Morehouse tradition, he doubled his determination and represented us with great distinction.”
Packwood leaves Morehouse on Sunday with a perfect 4.0 grade-point average. His studies took him to China and the London School of Economics.
Now, he sits in a Wall Street office building high above the city he longed for, a world and years away from the pain of boyhood memories.
That curious college choice, though, will be with him for a while.
His brother, John Robert Packwood, a 2008 Grandview High graduate, is headed to Morehouse in the fall.
A changing landscape
Historically black colleges began to see their first white students shortly after the 1954 landmark Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education, which outlawed segregation in public schools.
But the numbers remained low until recent years, when some schools — because of affordability, programs and location — began to see jumps in white enrollment.
Lincoln University in Jefferson City, for example, is on the high end of that. In 2005, more than half of its 3,180 students were white (1,659), according to the United Negro College Fund. Closer to the norm are Grambling State University in Louisiana, with 5 percent white enrollment, and Tuskegee University in Alabama, with about 3 percent.
A few years back the rock-hop (is there a term for garbage bastardization of rock and hip hop?) Limp Bizkit would do a cover of Public Enemy's "Bring the Noise." During a section of the track where Chuck D. gives a shout out to Louis Farrakhan, Bizkit front man/Al Jolson of hip hop Fred Durst would change the lyrics to "Farrakhan's a racist that I think you shouldn't listen to."
There's no real segway from that anecdote to today's party. But whenever one gets the chance to jump on idiot asshat Fred Durst, they should take it. Today's piece is from Tim Wise's latest article located on the most recent Black Agenda Report where he takes aim at White America's hypocrisy towards calling out blacks and black leaders for not being "critical" of Farrakhan. Excerpts below, but show love to the whole piece by clicking on the above link:
Much as Muhammad Ali once famously noted that no member of the Vietcong had ever referred to him by a common racial slur, as a way to explain his lack of enthusiasm for fighting in Southeast Asia, I must point out that no member of the Nation of Islam ever told me when I was growing up that I was going to hell, that my soul was an empty vessel, or that I would burn in a lake of fire for all eternity, just like all of my Jewish ancestors, because we had rejected God. The folks who did that were white Christians: teachers, preachers, other kids, and co-workers - all of them spiritual terrorists and religious bigots of the first order. And not one of them was selling a bean pie on the corner, or copies of The Final Call.
...
But can we get real for a moment? What ability does Farrakhan have to do me any harm, or any Jew for that matter? When was the last time those of us who are Jewish had to worry about whether or not our Farrakhan-following employer was going to discriminate against us? Or whether our Fruit of Islam loan officer was going to turn us down for a mortgage? Or whether our Black Muslim landlord was going to screw us out of a rent deposit because of some anti-Jewish feelings, conjured up by reading the Nation's screed on Jewish involvement in the slave trade? The answer, of course, is never. If anything, members of the Nation, or black folks in general, have a much greater likelihood of being the victims of discrimination at our hands - the hands of a Jewish employer, banker or landlord, and certainly a white one, Jewish or not - than we'll ever have at theirs. White and/or Jewish bias against Nation members, either as blacks or Muslims or both, is more likely to restrict their opportunities than even the most advanced black bigotry is capable of doing to us. That's because bias alone is never sufficient to do much harm. Without some kind of institutional power to back up that bias, even the most unhinged black racism or anti-Jewish bigotry is pretty impotent.
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And speaking of history, for white Americans to condemn Farrakhan, while still admiring some of the people for whom we have affection - who have not only said but done far more evil things than he - is evidence of how compromised is the principle we now seek to impose on others. It is evidence of our duplicity on this subject, our utter venality as arbiters of moral indignation. It isn't that what Farrakhan has said about Jews, or gay and lesbian folks is acceptable - it isn't. But the fact that his words make him a pariah, while white folks actions don't do the same for us, is astounding.
After all, Louis Farrakhan never led a nation into war on false pretense. A white American president, supported in two consecutive elections by the majority of white people did that. And still, millions of whites are riding around with those infernal W stickers on the backs of their vehicles.
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Louis Farrakhan didn't say that his adversaries should be hunted down until they no longer "remained on the face of the Earth." One of America's most revered white presidents, Thomas Jefferson, said that, in regard to American Indians. And he's on the two-dollar bill that I used to buy some coffee this morning.
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Perhaps when white folks begin to show as much concern for the bigoted statements and, more to the point, murderous actions of white political leaders as we show over the statements of Louis Farrakhan, then we'll deserve to be taken seriously in this thing we call the "national dialog on race." Until then, however, folks of color will continue - and rightly, understandably so - to view us as trying to dodge our personal responsibility for our share of the problem. They will view us, and with good reason, as merely using Farrakhan so that we can divert attention from institutional discrimination, institutionalized white privilege and power, and the way in which white denial maintains a lid on social change, by creating the impression that everything is fine, and whatever isn't fine is the fault of "crazy," militant black people, who follow so-called crazy and hateful religious leaders. In this way, white Americans can continue to pretend that the nation's racial problem isn't about us; that we are but passive observers of a drama concocted by others, over which only they have any control. And in this way, we guarantee the perpetuation of the very enmity we claim not to understand, the very tension we cannot comprehend, and the chasm-like divide that was created in our name and for our historic benefit, no matter how much we try and shift the blame now, heads rooted firmly in the proverbial sand.
This letter was put on the website of Saint Sabina yesterday by the Rev. Michael L. Pfleger. Even with a public slip-up the guy is on the righteous path. The youtube video that started the storm is attached below, for all of you that have been living in a cave for the last week:
Last Sunday, I was invited by Trinity United Church of Christ to come and preach on the topic of race.
I agreed to do so because of my love for Trinity, Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Rev. Otis Moss, III and because all my life I have sought to deal with the reality of racism. As I said, Last Sunday, I have committed myself to tear down the walls that divide us wherever they stand.
In 1966, as a junior in high school, amidst all the hate and meanness that surrounded me in Marquette Park, I heard more than the voice of Dr. king calling for community over chaos. I heard that small voice from within, that said, I am showing you this now, because you must spend your life trying to eradicate this.
The last few days have been the most painful days of my life, even more so than the murder of Jarvis, my foster son.
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It is also grieving to me when a 1.5 minute “Youtube” video becomes the headlines across the world of papers and news stations, while the tragedy and death of earthquakes, cyclones, and tornadoes that have taken lives of people around this world, while the killing of our children across the country and here in Chicago, and the easy access to guns have become stories on page 18 and 19, and while people are at my front door, looking for food to eat or gas to get to work, indeed that grieves me.
Brothers and sisters, racism is an explosive and sensitive sin in our world and it is against the command to love, and against the God of love.
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I am neither a racist nor a sexist. I am constrained by this great Gospel that I have been called to preach, to be an agent of reconciliation, as well as a truth teller.
However - we must, if we are to move forward and become who God has called us to be as a human family, we must be willing to have an honest and open discussion on race and justice, and it must be on the equal ground at the foot of Calvary.
We have as a Country done many great things, but we will never become a great Country until justice flows like a river and righteousness like a mighty stream, for each and every human life.
As for what is next, I ask that you wrap me in prayer - I don’t know.
I ask that you pray, that I still might be a voice of truth, in season and out of season, and that I might have the courage to bear whatever wounds that may cost.
As for my defining - Dr. King, my mentor said, that he only wanted to be remembered as a Drum Major for Justice and indeed that is my only hope, and that is what I have tried to do since that afternoon in Marquette Park.
Hate me if you will. Hate my imperfect presentation. Hate my imperfect dramatization. Hate my imperfect articulation. I have never presumed to be anything, but imperfect, but I pray I can still beat the drum of justice, even if sometimes I am off beat.
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