Black Like Them

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The next week, we're walking through the West Village, and he's manically going off about his new book, tentatively titled Urban Life, Home Schooling, Hip-Hop Leadership, and Why Philanthropy Is the Greatest Art Form of the 20th Century. I ask if he feels bad for making all those white hip-hop kids look like such bozos. He grins and laughs. "I have clowned wiggers over the years, I admit it; but in general, I think it's a great thing for white kids to get into hip-hop. It's had an enormous impact on my life. It caused me to look at the world in a whole new light," he says.

"America is such a racially charged place that white people are afraid to mess up," he adds. "Our biggest fear is being embarrassed. We're scared of making a racial faux pas. I want to make it OK to mess up; I sure made my share of messes. I mean, why are we trying to convey to the world that we know what we're doing? We need to start from scratch and mess up a lot!" Back in the day, white kids generally had to make a point of crossing over racial lines, especially if we didn't live in an urban melting pot. Today, the racial lines are crossing over us. White kids today are being restyled and reoriented by black popular culture, whether they like it or not. The choice they have is whether to resist the process, and what bothers parents and the cultural establishment is how little these kids are resisting.

What worries me is how white hip-hop kids' familiarity with black pop culture tends to give them a false sense of familiarity with, and knowledge about, black people. Neither black nor white rock fans assume that most white people are like, say, Dave Matthews or Sarah McLachlan. But most white hip-hop fans tend to think DMX or Method Man represents some essential quality about black people. This isn't necessarily their fault--society's arrested racial development is due most of the blame--but it is an assumption that needs to be questioned, regularly. So when I see the autonomous white hip-hop enterprise the Beastie Boys have constructed--which seems to feel more strongly about cool sneakers and Tibetan monks than exploring their relationships with African Americans--it strikes me as an enormous denial. Then again, the Beasties, like so many of us, aren't that hyped about being racial martyrs. They just want to live.

With racism evolving as quickly as racial demographics, anything's likely to happen in the years ahead. Discrimination could become less acceptable, the suburbs could become less isolated from cities, concert audiences could become more integrated, radio formats could become more diverse. Or not. But the so-called hip-hop generation--white, black, or otherwise--is doing everything in its power to mock our culture's stuttering fear of racial progress. When a kid's identity crisis is ridiculed or blamed for the minstrelsy of the past, racism's foundation is only reinforced. OK, so much of young white America looks like a bunch of foolish twits playing dress-up. But are they really any less confused than you are?

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