“How you know I never saw a nigger when I lived there before?” Nelson asked. “I probably saw a lot of niggers…I reckon I’ll know a nigger when I see one,” the boy said.
Flannery O’Connor, “The Artificial Nigger”
“One last lonely nigger, one last lonely niggerif I kill you, I’ll be part of the KKK…”
Pop Star Justin Bieber, from an unidentified video, circa 2009
Like the Isley Brothers once said, Here we go again.
Once again, this noose of strange verbal fruit, fertilized in the verminous soil of American shame, swings out of the sulfurous backwoods of history and onto the back-lit touch screens of our 4G consciousness. And the crooner for this post-mil plantation lullaby is none other than pop’s reigning wigga prince, Justin Bieber.
The two mixtapes unearthed this week by those twin paragons of tabloid porn—the UK Sun and TMZ—are a pair of incendiary throwbacks the former Toronto metro station pop-locker and You Tube sensation can do without. The first video reveals a fifteen-year-old Justin sharing a knock-knock joke that both Bull Connor and Donald Sterling could love. As a teen white girl sitting next to Bieber squirmed and quietly asked him not to repeat the disgusting gag, the smirking sopranista pondered: Why are black people afraid of chainsaws?” And then Justin answers his own troubling question, turning the sound of a chainsaw into the echo chamber of a horrific Jim Crow past: “ Run, nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger.” As this first footage went viral, Bieber’s camp and his global legion of pre-teen votaries—known as “Beliebers”—immediately invoked the standard mea culpa, Aw, it was five years ago, aw, Justin was just a kid, and he didn’t know better.
However, it was the second tape, with the Klu Kiux Klan reference and the desire to kill a nigger, that seemed to knock the wind out of even Biebers most devoted stans on Twitter and Instagram, especially his multitude of African American followers, who initially wanted to give him a pass for what may have been a misguided youthful indiscretion.
The fresh faced young white kid who was mentored by and vouched for by Michael Jackson’s musical heir apparent, African American musical megastar, Usher Raymond. The fresh faced young white kid who had a swagger coach to instruct him on the fine art of keeping his language, gait, and sartorial, one-hunit (as in 100% authentically gangsta and black). The fresh faced white kid who got tatted up like all of his favorite black rappers, and who was probably allowed to give them dap and say, “Whas’ hood, my nigga.” A reality seemingly underscored by Mack Maine, the president of Lil’ Wayne and Birdman Williams Young Money Entertainment empire, who issued a statement today saying, “Bieber does not have a slave mentality. He treats his people with respect,” and added that Justin “has legitimately adopted the culture of hip hop, African American culture.” Maine also posited that he himself told a racist joke about a Chinese man, a white man, and a black man as a teenager because he thought it was funny. Indeed, it seems as if Justin Bieber’s elastic melisma has tugged at the hearts of a post racial mindset, ignited by the election of this nation’s first African American President. Justin and his Beliebers are the siren call of this New Obamican Dream.
I don’t know. What if—based on this pattern of Justin’s behavior—the Canadian wunderkind was hiding a dark secret regarding his feelings for a folk darker than himself? What if this son of a Canuck was a Southern Gothic construct of one of Flannery O’Connor ’s nightmarish dixieland characters, synthesized with Budd Schulberg’s smiling sociopath Lonesome Rhodes, from his classic script, A Face In The Crowd (1957)? What if Justin Bieber’s infatuation with black music in general—and hip hop soul in particular—was, in his mind (and his parents and handler’s minds) the quickest was to the good life? What if after Justin hung out and partied with his hip hop coterie, he peeled out his iPhone and face-timed his homeboys in Stockton—that trailer park capital of the Great White North—and mocked all the Young Black Dudes who not only called each other niggas, they made songs about it, and better yet, they let this young white kid call them nigger/nigga, too? Really JB? Really? Wow! They really are what they appear to be, eh?! Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha! Make that money eh? And keep the laughs coming!
It seems as if Justin Bieber has been crying out for attention in the past few months; from him spitting on fans at a concert, stuntin’ recklessly in his Lambo in South Beach, and of course, de rigueur for being ‘bout that rockstar life, the drug bust on a tour bus! It’s possible that Bieber may have displayed some disturbing signs of hidden racist turmoil as recent as November 2013, during a ABC News segment on his love of graffiti. The clip featured some of Justin’s spray-paintings, including a mural that resembled a half-simian/half-Sambo-like image of a rapper adorned with a crown and gold chain.
At first glance, the illustration had me perplexed—and not in a good way, either—but I’m also baffled by the provocatively visual slave narratives of silhouette-ist, Kara Walker.
Still, that puzzling work of art may have been a portent of Justin’s buried racist outbursts that have been recently excavated (and the NY Post’s Page Six says there may even be more on the way); blasts from the past that could implode this young megastars career. Justin says he is a Christian, and maybe this is his Paulian road to Damascus, and hopefully, the same CHRIST I know and trust will Bless Justin with HIS Grace and the insight of Romans 2:11. Despite everything that has come to light, there is still hope for the young entertainer. I wish him the best.
Be that as it may, Justin’s career may have staggered onto a serious impasse. His currrent predicament brings to mind the late Andy Griffin’s mesmeric performance in the final moments of the Elia Kazan-directed masterpiece, Face In The Crowd.
After he’s been exposed as a misanthropic fraud, Lonesome Rhodes is framed yelling at the top of his lungs from the balcony of his penthouse, about a comeback that was never going to happen. Screaming to save the fake life he once lived, Rhodes desperately tries to get the attention of an indifferent public several stories below. Of course, they can’t hear him, because they had turned their backs and tuned him out a long time ago.
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