Then, of course, there's the classic "white homeboy" routine--acting a fool in daddy's car. Musically inept groups such as the Kottonmouth Kings and Insane Clown Posse, who parade around the suburbs rapping like psychotic pimps, are the most extreme offenders. Sadly, this phenomenon has become the definitive prototype and enduring mass-media cliché. It has also led to the widespread use of the word wigger--a nasty slurring of the epithet "white nigger." Wigger, like "nigger lover" during the civil rights era, was first used by whites who objected to other whites embracing black culture. Now it's also used by whites who embrace black culture to call out other whites who defame black culture. Either way, one timeworn fact remains: With race and class so intertwined, any white kid (wigger or not) who idolizes an African American flaunting a fat bankroll will always get under somebody's skin.

While many publications have sincerely chronicled and bemoaned the so-called death of alternative rock as a relevant, creative genre (circa 1996, say), what actually faded with alt-rock is a belief in rebel style that exists independently of African American culture. This was the secret legacy of punk rock (indie rock and grunge) in America--it offered a handbook of cool for whites that basically ignored the existence of black people. What's happening now is that rock 'n' roll is going back to its miscegenated roots. Like suit-and-tied black professionals donning kente cloth and attending the Million Man March, rock's white fans and performers are undergoing an intense redarkening process.

In recent years, dozens of white scholars have dissected the flimsy foundations of "whiteness" and "blackness" (purely American economic inventions). Two of the more pugnacious palefaces, Harvard's Noel Ignatiev (editor of the journal Race Traitor ) and the University of Minnesota's David Roediger, have even called for an "abolition" of white culture. They argue that such an animal doesn't exist; our bloodlines are too mixed. Even famously cranky hip-hop-phobic essayist Stanley Crouch asserts that America is undergoing an unprecedented "cultural miscegenation," a blending of speech, style, and gestures that will result in our being "far and away more comfortable with human commonalty and variety." The New York Times reported in February 1998 that, while adults' television viewing habits split along color lines, their kids watch black and white shows equally. Michael Jordan and Oprah Winfrey are arguably America's two most admired celebrities. Quentin Tarantino, perhaps the most imitated filmmaker of the '90s, is a self-proclaimed product of black pop culture whose movies hinge on a volatile racial frisson. Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown star Samuel L. Jackson describes Tarantino this way: "He's like my daughters' little white hip-hop friends. They're basically black kids with white skin."