notes on The White Negro

A car rolls by on the street with the windows down, music blaring, loud bass and nail-flattening drums from the speakers breaking up the tentative serenity one found at a street side café, a rapper stammering about hoes and bitches and gangstas and bling and gettin’ paid and body bags, a litany laced together with variants of four letter words that no longer shock or even offend but are ugly all the same, like large piles of crap left on an otherwise fine dining table setting. It’s kids telling us where it’s at and they are in our face, says an associate, and suddenly you feel like you’re in the Culture Wars once again. Progress means moving forward. Four letter words blasting from car speakers on public streets isn’t progress for anyone, it’s a loss, both in civility and in respect others. The same goes for morons yammering about their hemorrhoids or some other aspect of their inane and consumerist existence to fellow dunderheads as they drive their cars or fill our stores, theatres and cafes as their r broadcast -quality mediocrity saturates square foot of public space. It’s another degeneration of the public sphere, unless you think that being able to establish yourself as a lout and a self-obsessed boor rapidly in the presence of strangers constitutes an improvement. I am willing to concede, however, that for some of us becoming a full time creep with pretensions of Thug Life constitutes an improvement, which only underscores how pathetic a large portion of our youth have become, shrill and vain.

Also, any kid, black ,white , Hispanic or Asian ambling down school halls emulating 50 Cent is regression of an odious sort, a realization of Norman Mailer’s romantic ideal of The White Negro. It’s doubtful even Mailer would find this trend enviable, a generation of young people placing a value on the ill formed locutions of millionaire goons and wallowing in a subculture that prizes accumulation of material and money at any costs, including the sacrificing of one’s humanity and the community one lives in.

Being from Detroit in the 8 Mile Road area, I know full well what “Wiggers” are, and I’m old enough to realize that the phenomenon is not a new wrinkle in the scheme of things. Times and styles change, but a constant in my life and in my parents’ life was white kids affecting the style and musical habits of the current edge of black culture. My reference was to Norman Mailer’s contentious and influential essay The White Negro, written in 1957, where he argues that whites who want to free themselves of crushing and killing conformity must emulate the style and language of blacks because blacks, he opined, are closer to violence and thus privy to kinds of rapidly deployed existential knowledge that a bookish and emotionally neutered dominant culture could never know.

Mailer had a continuing theory that living close to violence, the kind of violence that is an intractable of your race’s metaphysical being, was an entry to spectacular influxes of new perception and awareness that dismantles the many veils of false consciousness. It’s all beautifully if bogglingly argued in the essay, and there is a good discussion here of Mailer’s work, ideas and this particular essay here [www.english.upenn.edu]; the short of it is that Mailer thought whites blessed to be attracted to black style and culture and sought to emulate it with” spontaneous bop prosody” (Jack Kerouac’s phrase) were the hope of the white race. Mailer was speculating that the kind of knowledge of violence that blacks had would do well to help the questing Hipster gain new perception and new experience and allow him to create a truthful world where real choices are possible and individual responsibility for them is a matter of what private, divinely derived ethics one has made with the God of their understanding. Among the problems with all this righteous forecasting and waxing poetic is that the Revolution as described never starts, and Heaven does not arrive on the planet, conditions that are easily explained away by revisions to theory where it practice is at fault, not the catechism. Petty and major criminal acts continue to be romanticized as a people’s spiritual rebellion against crushing falseness and capitalist hegemony, and the emulation of those manners in the popular culture becomes an unconnected cluster of trends and marketing clichés. Above all this is Marcuse’s fleeting notion of “repressive tolerance”, often mocked and maligned but prophetic, timeless and tersely wise when one witness their idealistic style turn into advertising slogans and their manifestos become the humorless rationale for being a monster, a thug.

Simply put, the Man, as he was affectionately called in the Sixties, makes your protest and revolutionary style ineffectual by allowing you the means to express yourself and your peculiar take on the erring course the culture has taken. Your protests become part of the news cycle, more factoids to fill the spaces between advertisements. Nearly fifty years later one wonders if Mailer would approve of the bragging self regard that black style has turned into, and if he would admit that “wiggers” , albeit emulators of black style, are merely followers of fashion and consumers after all is said and done with.

It would seem that an especially troublesome tract from Mailer’s writings will be his essay The White Negro., published in Dissent in 1957 . In a rough paraphrase, Mailer argues that whites need to emulate some of the jazz-inflected style of black Americans, whom, he said, had developed an attitude, a lived philosophy in the face of the violence they face daily solely because they are black. Mailer placed a good amount of hope that the Beats might be such an evolution in the Caucasian mind. Authenticity, a self rooted in primal reality and not lodged in a language-locked template, was the goal. Mailer’s assertions, to be sure, came under attack, not the least of the asides being that he was taking something of an exotic and racist view of the lives of black people. The misgivings are understandable.

Some of what Mailer said in the essay was embraced by some in the black community. Eldridge Cleaver, another man obsessed with the ascribed transformative value of personal violence as a response against Institutional violence cited him favorably in his book Soul on Ice. Cleaver, though, was doubtlessly trying to rationalize the rapes he was convicted of as being political acts rather than demonstrations of a pathology or, further, that the pathology itself was a result to being oppressed. It’s a slippery slope, as Mailer realized. Horrible as it was, Mailer never used his stabbing of his wife Adele as an example of How-To-Be-A-White-Negro; his treatment of violence in later books was more measured, weary. All the same, the ethos of hip-hop and rap culture endorses Mailer’s assertion that black Americans have a authenticity and knowledge that white community cannot have because of the fact that they live with an intimate, daily, as-is knowledge of violence as something that saturates their existence, that it might be visited upon them at any instance merely because of the color of their skin; many rappers, in principle, might agree with Mailer as well that the edgy style of hip hop is a result of their being forced to exist at the margins of the culture. Mailer writes that a major reason that black American culture developed the way it did was in response to the racist violence that might befall them at any moment on any day. This was knowledge of violence whites did not and could not know, Mailer argued, and postulated further that the cultivation of the style he wrote about, complete with its violent elements, was a canny response to the brutality that faces them. Mailer thought that whites ought to emulate the style of black culture in order to live more “authentically”; in either case, what Mailer talks about in the essay is that one is confronted with having to make a conscious choice in how one confronts stultifying conformity and Statist oppression. He does not argue for anything “intrinsic” in human beings, and argues through the essay that one must deal with the consequences of their action.

It’s true enough that Mailer added violence into the equation for its potential to transform the individual, but he worried in the same piece about the relentless and purposeless escalation of violence for its own sake. What he saw in the urban black culture of the time was a particularly acute style and manner that could accommodate and hone the violent impulse and use the energy to a more creative purpose. This presents all sorts of problems for intellectuals and gullible whites (and blacks) attracted by the flashy density Mailer’s writing, but it should be noted as well that Mailer modified his pronouncements. Mailer, believe it or not, matured. This is not to say there wouldn’t be sufficient grounds to argue with his later writing. I agree Mailer’s tough guy stances were a species of posing, and it seems to me that he had a rude and crucial awakening after he nearly killed his wife Adele by stabbing her when he was crazed on Benzedrine.

He didn’t disavow any previous declarations, of course, but it’s interesting that two of what I think are his best novels, An American Dream and Why Are We in Viet Nam? are two lyric flights that are fueled by the sort of rage he gloried in a decade earlier, the first book being something of a Blakean purge where his hero, Stephen Rojack, attempts to berserk himself into transcendence through violence against targets that he felt undermined his tenuous grasp on self. Transform he does, but he is an unenviable mess for the carnage, someone stuck on some psychotic edge with virtually nothing to build a new life on. Mailer seemed content to let the violence, the raging burn itself out in the novel, with their being the tacit moral that “encouraging the psychotic within” is a dead end, a nihilist fantasy. The second novel is poised to investigate, through metaphor, the source of this insanity, an obscene cruise through American repression, obsession with masculinity, racism, and an insane obsession with individualism, guns and God. So many polarities battle each other in the book that the question posed in the title is thus: we were in Vietnam because, as a nation crazed on many ill and contaminated streams, we had to be.

William Carlos Williams is said to have remarked that the “pure products of America go insane”, an idea that Mailer accepts in the form of the book’s crazed, multi-voiced narrator DJ who, representative of a complex cultural stew that will not blend but rather form a thickening cluster of unpalatable projections on the face of the planet, is compelled to expand upon, disrupt, dominate, and decimate the people and resources outside its actual borders. Mailer here echoed Susan Sontag (in attitude at least) that the white race was the cancer on the face of humanity. In any event, we’ve been lucky enough that Mailer had the sense to forgo his arm chair philosophizing for long enough intervals so he could do some real work; I am a fan of his novels, but along with most Mailer partisans, I think it will be his nonfiction that will secure his reputation, Executioner’s Song and Armies of the Night, certainly, but also Of a Fire on the Moon and Oswald’s Tale.

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I’ve been re-reading Norman Mailer’s The Faith of Graffiti and it seems astounding Mailer grasped a street aesthetic born of marginalized, nonwhite urban youth. This is an important essay I suspect Eric Michael Dyson or Cornell West would come to admire. Mailer is susceptible to the charges of depicting these artists as noble savages, but he does make the connections between the impulses to transform the environment by adding a bit of one’s personality upon it with the shattered reconstructions of Picasso’s vision. Nice polemic, this. What impresses me is that he refined the existential-criminal-at-the-margins tact he controversially asserted in his essay “The White Negro”, backing away from the idea that violence could direct one to new kinds of perception and knowledge, and emphasized an aesthetic response to a crushing , systematized oppression. Living long enough, I suppose, made Mailer aware of strong trend in urban style that added value to circumstances and individual growth that didn’t involve a fist, a gun or a knife.

(Barry Alfonso, writer, editor , critic and longtime friend, weighs in):

BARRY ALFONSO:Some would argue, of course, that graffiti IS a form of violence against society: specifically, the aggressive territorial pissing of one segment of the population upon the sense of order of another segment. This is less an act of sticking it to The Man than dominating the sensibilities of the meeker, more sedate urban population, a transgressive act akin to screaming into the face of someone who will not (or cannot) raise their voice. It’s hard to see this as heroic, and I suspect that the artistic component — especially when we are talking about that lovely habit called “tagging” — is of less importance here than the sheer thrill of breaking the rules. I think even Mailer would agree that the upholding of SOME kind of rules is the only way to improve American society, particularly in the face of the corporate lawbreaking and governmental malfeasance he so often condemned. It may not be Mailer’s job to iron out the contradiction in this thought. But suppose a team of grafittitistas broke into his home and spray painted their art all over his face? This might prove instructive to his family and friends to see. It might even be a blow against some sort of oppression. But I don’t think Norman would’ve liked it very much.

Mailer would argue that modern architecture and the corporate power it represents is violence against them and their right to exist, and that graffiti is an aesthetic response to an economic reality that wants nothing to with individuals or their dreams or their latent talents. It creates an intimate relationship with the surroundings that otherwise seem designed to urge one to end their lives anonymously. Mailer, though, was talking about a particular quality of prolific taggers, “writers” as they called themselves, and rather rightly discussed them that they were artists no less than the gallery variety. Without patrons, easels, formal training, their walls of the city became their canvas—in those canyons, in those tunnels, on those billboards, all things that hover over them and diminish them in stature, there is an opportunity to declare “I exist.”

BARRY ALFONSO:If this was indeed Mailer’s position, then it is the sort of elitist pseudo-primitivism that win followers for George Wallace, Glenn Beck and other champions of populist fascism. To say it plain, ordinary working folks think that scribbling your name all over the city they have to live and work in is just a form of childish eye pollution committed by bums who have nothing better to do. Apparently, Mailer would have us think that the proper way to protest urban ugliness is to make things MORE ugly, which is akin to making satirizing executions by chopping people’s heads off. (Any allusions made to Picasso is a red herring, with two eyes on the same side of the fish head.) It further appears that for all his later maturity of outlook Mailer never dropped his sweaty-palmed worship of anarchy that he glorified in “The White Negro.” Mailer the Liberal would cringe at the thought, but the tagger is just an Ayn Rand hero with a spray can and without the discipline, a rampant ego who celebrates nothing more his need to be noticed. Such activities give birth to firing squads.

The irony of it all, I guess, is that Mailer can be said to tread on the Noble Savage sentiment, but what he asserts in both White Negro and The Faith of Graffiti” is there is a need, nay, a requirement for self-definition among those who are denied the means to do so for reasons of race, gender, economics, and that the form these taggers have taken is a way of making something that resonates. What he argues, essentially, is that the impulse, inspiration and discipline of committing yourself to unsullied artistic expression is the same, whether it happens to be in European salons, SoHo Art Galleries, Museum Walls, or on the side of a Brooklyn water tower; he rejects art as the domain of the white culture the final aim of which is a fat commission and corporate sponsorship and college courses and brings it again to something that is human in its dimension. As it regards black American culture, the likes of Amir Baraka, Cornell West and Eric Michael Dyson would find quite a bit to agree with about Mailer’s treatise. Urban culture is now the stuff of dissertations has been codified as an aesthetic with its own critical parlance, and is now a legitimate part of the larger cultural landscape of America, and Graffiti, like it or not, is an essential element of this mid 20th century development. Mailer was the first one to write seriously, on his own terms, about this. One can argue with Mailer’s tone, his arch style and his interest in neo-primitivism, but I think his interest in the young men he interviewed and spent weeks with as a writer was honest and his ideas about their work were sincere. In a forward to the book, he reveals that the title was given to him by an artist who was seriously injured from a steep fall that happened when he was tagging a structure from on high. He was talking about having faith in something, an ideal that motivated you beyond your limits. I can only paraphrase, but it came down to him telling Mailer that the name of the book that would come out of this would be “The Faith of Graffiti”.