Can I hate
wiggers without being a racist?
The short answer is "No." The long answer is "Yes, but it's going to be damned inconvenient having to explain yourself every time you grumble about the kids these days or make a snippy little crack about white suburban teenagers who buy Rap CDs." But I'm getting ahead of myself...
There is a twofold racism lurking in a certain variety of unexamined resentment of white suburban teens who embrace hip-hop. The resentment I'm thinking of is one that stems from the "liberal" notion that white people shouldn't "appropriate" black culture. The first problem with this is that it stereotypes blacks— anyone who lives in an area with a substantial black population can tell you that not all black teens dress in baggy pants, wear sideways baseball caps, listen to and recite rap all day long, "tag" everything in sight, and glorify drug use, firearms, and misogyny.
The stereotyping problem is damning enough on its own, but there's a second racist aspect to wigger-hating, that being the pernicious notion that white people shouldn't act like black people. I don't think there's any need to explain why this is a racist idea. I mention it only because it seems to have wormed its way into so much of what is thought of as "liberal" politics; all too often, the contemporary ideal of Multiculturalism seems to be no more than an artfully coded rephrasing of the doctrine of Separate but Equal.
This became particularly apparent to me when I listened to a Talk of the Nation
segment with
John McWhorter, in which he got a call (about 22 minutes into the segment) from a white woman who told him she thought he'd adopted the culture of the oppressor, and therefore didn't represent the "true" black perspective. In other, uglier words, she called him an Uncle Tom.
This does not mean, however, that the caller thought the uppity negro McWhorter ought to stay in his place and stop putting on airs, though she did seem to think he needed to spend more time in those squalid urban ghettos infested with drug-addled, violent darkies, neighborhoods that exist more vividly in the white liberal imagination than in the streets of any real American city.
No, the white academic liberal does not want the negro to live in squalor. Nor, however, does that same liberal want blacks to assimilate into "white" America. They want to preserve "black" culture, as distinct from "white" culture, except they want to use all sorts of social programs and incentives and education and perhaps some reparations and so on to
transform "black culture," to lift it up to the economic and power-structural level of the white middle class, and to keep it unambiguously black at the same time.
In other words, this well-meaning but not particularly thoughtful variety of liberal wants a Separate but Equal "black culture," instead of the oppressed one they see when they imagine the squalid ghetto. In short, their goal, at the end of the day, is a segregated America, albeit one in which the segregation is "only" social and cultural, instead of official and governmental.
White academic liberals are not the only source of pro-segregation sentiment, of course— in fact, some of it, noticeably, comes from blacks. Phrases like "stay black" and "keep it real," after all, tacitly proscribe any dabbling in behavior that's "too white," too far over the implicitly accepted racial boundary.
But it's time I got back to the wiggers. I still don't like them, you see, despite the clear racist implications, so I've still got a fair amount of explaining to do.
If there's anything that can be said of all wiggers, it's that they prefer hip-hop to other forms of music. Now, since John McWhorter says
hip-hop is to blame for black misbehavior, it follows that hip-hop is what's turning white suburban teens into the sort of people that I'm inclined to dislike, right?
Well, no.
McWhorter's little essay, while amusing, doesn't amount to anything more than the "media causes violence" argument (and its ilk: "media causes greed," "media causes teen pregnancy," "media causes liberalism," "media stole the election," etc, etc.). Needless to say, I don't buy it.
Teenagers who want to act uncivilized don't need any encouragement other than a few peers with similar wishes. Teens were glorifying violence, indulging in misogynist fantasies, acting surly in the face of authority, and spitting in the paths of strangers long before Rap was invented. In fact, it ought to be pointed out that that's exactly how a lot of "the greatest generation" behaved, back in the days of WWII, though you'd never know it from the misty nostalgic pap they've been churning out in recent years.
Of course, Rap isn't quite what McWhorter says it is, either. There's plenty of hip-hop that runs counter to the violent, misogynist portrait McWhorter paints, and contrary to what he suggests, some of it sells well. There's also no shortage today of the sort of good-times "party music" that he waxes nostalgic about (while, conveniently, establishing his Old-School bona fides).
McWhorter's essay inveighs against Rap, but it's worth noting that it wasn't Rap that got him worked up in the first place— it was a particular incident in which he observed a group of rebellious, uncivilized teenagers. Getting pissed about a gaggle of rude teens is perfectly understandable, of course, and now we're finally getting to some firm ground on which I can stand when I proclaim my dislike of wiggers, to wit: a lot of them act like assholes.
Of course, not all of them do, so I can't honestly say I dislike the whole lot of them, either. But there is something particularly nasty about the ones who misbehave, something that lives in an unspoken accusation. The idea is this: that since these surly teens embrace "black culture," then if I have a problem with them, I must have a problem with blacks. In short, if I don't like it when one of them spits on the sidewalk in front of me, then I'm a racist. That's bullshit, of course, and it's bullshit no matter what color the sullen, spitting teen might be. This is also, thankfully, obvious, and I'm hardly the first person to say it. It's what Chris Rock is getting at in his standup, when he tells a black audience, "
I hate niggers."
There's an additional unspoken accusation that one encounters, even when dealing with less objectionable wiggers: that non-wigger whites are square, that they don't understand "the black reality," that they're out of touch, that in not paying much attention to Rap, they're a little bit racist by omission. Wiggers who make that sort of assumption don't necessarily strike me as uncivilized, but they do strike me as smug, which irks me, as I've done a fair bit of reading on the subject of black culture, and black history.
When that sort of baseless, disapproving smugness reaches a certain point, it can turn a wigger into an insufferable asshole. It doesn't usually reach that point, of course, because wiggers, thankfully, don't stay teenagers forever.
And that's what I keep reminding myself every time I run across a teenage wigger I don't like— these are only kids. They're still trying to figure things out, things about themselves, and things about the world around them. They're bound to be a bit smug at times, and maybe even do a bit of spitting. I tell myself that they'll probably outgrow it.
Wiggers well past their teens, however, are a different story. Almost all of them seem to be either insufferably smug liberal types, or insufferably hostile, misogynist, asshole types. My reaction to these particular species of old-enough-to-know-better wiggers is a lot less complicated:
I hate 'em.
