We Use Words Like Upski

I was worried that the last blog I wrote may have suggested some casual racism with the ben wallace/mike tyson/black-man-beast-rapist connection. Unrelatedly, as I was talking to famous rapper from Tokyo Mike Joyce this morning, he brought up Upski while we were discussing the popularity of petty larceny in graffiti culture. I poked around and I found an old, but berry interesting article Upski wrote on race, whiteness and hip hop authenticity from the Source. While articles like this usually resort to bankrupt conceptions of race and culture that telegraph a different sort of casual racism, and even more frequently, rather stiffly drawn color lines, I appreciated Upski's playfulness, although not his heavy-handed and rather accusatory final paragraph. But, for whatever reason, this snippet struck me:

When Holly Poopster (whatever her name is. Somethin' like that) from the Chicago suburb of Evanston attended her first hip-hop party a year ago, she and her friend told me that they didn't feel accepted at the party because they were white. "We come from a very, very integrated community," she told me (Evanston is seventy-one percent white), as if to say, "It's not our fault they don't like us."

It has been a big year for Polly Shmooster! But don't call her Golly anymore. Her name is "Sista PA," and though she can't quite dance yet, she has befriended a bunch of dredlock b-boys, and feels welcome at parties. She writes passionately about breakdancing and stopping violence for Dry-Paper, a Chicago rap publication.

The Sista even uses words like "phunkyphatphresh" and plays black-than-thou with another white writer, me, saying that I'm not hardcore. (Thought I'd return the favor, Hopsy. Next time you play that shit we're gonna battle.) Topsy has learned what all of us know, that most blacks will accept anyone who makes the slightest effort not to be a typical white asshole - or maybe Popsy's still back in the "I must be special" stage.

Was this about Jessica Hopper?! If it wasn't, to me it sure seems like it, but the connection is sort of absurd. I don't know Jessica, haven't read much of her writing, but I was aware of her role in the recent Slate controversy about whiteness and rap fandom. Perhaps the connection I made hinged too much on the negative reputation internet message board posters foist upon her, but I couldn't imagine her not writing something like "phunkyphatphresh" if she did her current zine in 1993. But anyways, was Upski trying to imply that the embrace "Holly Poopster" made of black culture was exploitative? That she herself was being casually racist?


If you hate me and my writing so much why do you read my blog?

There are obviously boundaries, and, as a white middle-class male, I of course stand to benefit most from the continuation of white male patriarchal society (justifiably, a fact whose resonance might overpower what I have to say; empowered by the blogsphere, i continue), but I've thought about this sort of thing for a while. I still wonder if its the most worthwhile or least worthwhile thing to police the usuage of cultural artifacts with concerns about casual racism. A lot of this confusion on my part stems from an uncertainty over which is more "racist": a concern that usage of "black" cultural tropes by middle-class whites is "degrading" (in the words of Sabrina Williams, quoted in Upski's article) to black culture, because it violates what is essential to "blackness," the idea that their culture is born and enacted from suffering that whites would largely be unaware. This idea of hinges, rather questionably in my opinion, on conceiving of black culture as somewhat monolithic and everlasting. But on the other hand, playing with these (or any) cultural forms casually, as some are apt to do, is problematic because all of these types of play are open to interpretation since they don't make a simple or direct statement that can be addressed, contradicted or supported. In the hands of a bad historian, for instance, or cultural pundits in general, whatever ambiguity that is there can easily be lost, especially from a broad perspective. But is that what matters? The broad trans-historical perspective, or the day-to-day pleasure you can find in the things you consume?



One will transform the other.