Black Like Them

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Corporatized or idealized, hip-hop is the American Dream and the African American Nightmare rolled into one fat-ass blunt. It's not Elvis because black artists remain preeminent; white rappers, aside from the Beastie Boys, and maybe House of Pain or 3rd Bass, haven't won anything. It's not a rerun of jazz or the blues because it represents raw-boned sorrow and opulent success, often bestowed by black executives. Hip-hop rules the world of youth and pop culture for a reason--it's talking about what everybody's thinking. White and black kids know this, even if they can only articulate it by getting stoned to the gills, rejecting proper English, profiling like ghetto supastars, or nodding their heads when Tupac screams on their car stereos that he doesn't "give a fuck."

Many white hip-hoppers, myself included, still wrestle with an age-old disease, which I call only somewhat ironically "double unconsciousness." It's the white flip side to W.E.B. Du Bois' turn-of-the-century diagnosis, "double consciousness," which suggests that blacks in America are "always looking at [themselves] through the eyes of others" and feel a sense of "twoness--an American, a Negro; two souls; two thoughts; two unreconciled strivings." Conversely, double unconsciousness means failing to look at oneself through the eyes of others and living under a delusion of "oneness," the myth that if you, as an individual, don't behave in an actively racist fashion, then you're not shaped by racism. The doubly unconscious refuse to acknowledge how certain institutions (education, housing) constantly watch their backs. They want extra credit for entertaining different points of view. They love black music, talk to a few black friends, and believe they are developing an understanding of black people (when in fact they are only developing an image of themselves). Dead giveaway: If a white guy exclaims "I'm not a racist!" or "But a lot of black people feel the same way I do!" he's doubly unconscious.

Nobody's pondered this ofay shuffle more deeply than a hyper, balding graffiti writer from Chicago named William Wimsatt, a.k.a. Upski. In fact, he's just about the only person who's bothered. What's encouraging about Upski, and why he's still ahead of the curve in terms of understanding whiteness and hip-hop, is that he's so proudly unhip. He's spastic, vulnerable, and poorly dressed. He doesn't try to impress you with arcane knowledge. He doesn't drop names. He actively campaigns against gratuitous use of slang. And for somebody who's spent so much time actually journeying through the b-boy killing fields, he's almost maddeningly guileless. When I finally reached him by phone--he'd just moved from his parents' house in Chicago to his girlfriend's Manhattan apartment --he said sweetly, "Wow, I didn't know anybody still cared."

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