PROUDFLESH: A New Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics & Consciousness

Comrade Free

Greg Tate (Ed.), EVERYTHING BUT THE BURDEN: WHAT WHITE PEOPLE ARE TAKING FROM BLACK CULTURE. New York: Broadway Books, 2003. ISBN: 0-7679-0808-2. 272 pp.

“But in Africa, these bleaching creams are popular for their ability to combat a condition that is, apparently, even more undesirable: being black.”
--Meri Nana-Ama Danquah

“…this thing we call hip-hop is not only a billion-dollar subset of the music industry but one whose taste-making influence makes billions more for every other lifestyle-and-entertainment business under the sun: from soft drinks, liquor, leisure wear, haute couture, automobiles, to sports events, electronics, shoes, cigars, jewelry, homes.”
--Greg Tate

“The final incarnations of the black male figure in a century that began with sharecroppers and first-generation free peoples trying to avoid the hanging tree are their gun-toting, dick-slinging capitalist descendants.”
--Carl Hancock Rux

“Black people’s songs, their literature (especially their folklore), the way they moved, even their religion, embodied what Communist theoreticians regarded as culture of resistance.”
--Robin D.G. Kelley

“…black pleasure is more pleasure because black pain has been, systematically, more pain.”
--Beth Coleman

“I could see they knew how to steal the way we looked, but had no clue how or where to find or define how the way we looked made us feel.”
--Michaela Angela Davis

To start we first need to give colossal props to Greg Tate and his army of cultural and literary analysts. This book covers more than the burden, “what white people can’t see when they see Black--the sight of a Black imagination ‘playing in the dark’” (5). This critical, political analysis covers everything from Hip-Hop, identity, self-love, Black politics, and human ownership to self-hate, fake thugs, white liberal politics, white Negroes and black-white relations. With that in mind Tate has also, to a degree, done an injustice in titling this work because it doesn’t fully capture the depth, essence, and variety present in Everything but the Burden. Nevertheless, Tate has assembled “gangsta” writers willing to fearlessly expose both themselves and those who appropriate Black culture for personal and market reasons.

This collection of essays dissects this cultural appropriation with respect to the past and the present, the historical and the contemporary. The collection is so “front-line” and in-depth because it draws on historical events and people who have formed and reformed the current situation of cultural exploitation. These written artists represent part of a literary legacy that is being carved and continues to shape Black culture.

The multitude of intricacies and complexities prevalent here are understood only with a grounding in both historic and contemporary notions of race and identity. What we in 2003 understand as race is a distorted extension of a perverse concept emergent solely for “purposes of colonization” (34). Carl Hancock Rux in “Eminem: The New White Negro” says the “power brokers” of today had to “inherit an inherited concept of race and form vaguely similar ways of seeing the construct of race” (23). The concept of race, and those identifiers associated with race, have never in the history of this country been for the empowerment of Africans. Renee Green, in “Affection Afflictions: My Alien/My Self or More ‘Reading at Work,’” supports this notion when she states, regarding the Left’s view of others, that it seeks to “…identify desired identities which they can attempt to claim for their own uses” (232). What runs rampant throughout Everything but the Burden is certain consistent identifications of the “Black” race: as outcast, outsider culture, opposite to white, “ugly,” and an exploitable brown-skinned “object.” It’s gotten so bad, so dehumanizing, that Latasha Natasha Diggs in “The Black Asianphile” informs us, “In the porn/horror genre of Amine flicks…black men…are being meta-morphed into Japanese monsters” (198).

The dynamics of these characterizations are far more devastating than one may think. What we see is a dichotomy in how Blacks absorb these degrading identifiers ourselves. In “Pimp Notes on Autonomy” and “ThugGods: Spiritual Darkness and Hip-Hop,” the authors paint a picture of those who internalize some negative and degrading characterizations in a self-destructive perpetuation. Beth Coleman summarizes the historic background of her argument: “…the slave economy in America produced the American pimp” (68). She takes the stance that “pimp theory” is based on an ideology that sees humans as objects and thus exploitable. Melvin Gibbs states: “A ‘Thug’ was a heinous robber/murderer, a member of a secret organization…” (82). Apparent to many cultural and Hip-Hop observers is a fixation on wanting to be and live like a “thug.” These two images of “thug” and “pimp” are images internalized, worshipped, and perpetuated by today’s generation in a fashion that makes them complicit in the denigration and degradation of Black cultural expression: music, art, dance, etc. Still, Rux grounds us further toward understanding with his assertion that “…the badass thug and gangsta bitch are not purely the inventions of the inner city imaginations. They are products of Hollywood’s imaginary American heroes...James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, John Wayne, Sean Connery” (23); and I would add today’s most famous “gangsta mogul,” Scarface.

The other side of this dichotomy is the Black female who is in complex struggle against culturally specific identifiers of beauty. What this society has presented as Black is positioned as absolutely opposite to white identifiers. In both “Skinned” by Cassandra Lane and “The Beautiful Ones” by Michaela Angela Davis, the authors in their youth struggle with recognizing beauty in themselves. Their self-esteem and self-image suffered because this society offered white as beautiful and black as devoid of beauty. Cassandra Lane’s “Skinned” states she had her own meanings for white and black in her quest for self-actualization. She says for white, “I chose, instead, pale, generic, bland, ghostly, evil, sickly. For the words ‘brown’ or ‘black,’ I thought of comfort, peace, warmth, safety. A velvet slip dress…Mama’s arms encircling me” (150). Davis, as a part of her transformation and healing, offering in defense of her former self: “She was mine and maybe she could have grown strong and more beautiful but I had no history, no technique for how to care for her” (126). So what we see is an acting out of these denigrating identifiers, a killing of one’s confidence, as well as self-love as a reaction to these identifiers.

Everything but the Burden also conveys, of course, the way in which whites attempt to mimic or reproduce the aesthetics, motivations, and expressions that define Black culture. Davis summarizes, “I could see they knew how to steal the way we looked, but had no clue how or where to find or define the way we looked made us feel” (134). Time and time again, we hear white impersonators’ sorry attempt to duplicate the spirit of our expression from, most recently, Justin Timberlake to Bubba Sparks to Pink... Appearance or style of dress is something, as we are all aware, that whites try to replicate as well. Everyday we see white females with braids or white males with a “fade” cut, pumping Tupac at the stoplight. So in “Afro-Kinky Human Hair,” by Meri Nana-Ama Danquah, one character comments regarding whites parading around Accra, Ghana: “…they want to be black, like us. They know its worth” (211). Saturating the essays of Everything but the Burden, then, are these impersonators who seek to appropriate Black cultural characteristics (for “pleasure”) while simultaneously leaving “Blackness” (the “pain” of it) at the back door.

Though many attempt to steal the persona of Black culture and remain impervious to our burden, C.H. Rux contends in “The New White Nigga,” Eminem, is different from “The New White Negro” (i.e., the “Old White Negro,” Vanilla Ice?). Before reaching the apex of his argument, Rux first asks, “…who is the real outcast, who is the real Slim Shady, what has he inherited from [Black] culture to achieve his bad-boy, outcast minstrel, rebel superstar status, and exactly what identity crisis is being performed?” (19). The crisis that we currently are witnessing is that “Eminem does not attempt to perform the authentic Nigga as much as he performs a New White Nigga…” (27). Both Eminem and Vanilla Ice are performing identity crises, the difference being Vanilla Ice grew up in a middle-class home, thus his entire image was a mockery, a fake. On the other hand Eminem’s mimicry isn’t totally illegitimate because, allegedly, it’s “infused with authenticity because he has lived in Nigga neighborhoods and listened to Nigga music and learned Nigga culture” (27). The point that he listened to the music and adopted the culture doesn’t, however, legitimize Eminem. Fact is, he was raised in a trailer park outside of Detroit and thus traveled to the ’hood and in the process witnessed and simultaneously copied ‘Niggaz.’ Then we have the recent exposes that always seem to find the excused Eminems. All the same, this trend of whites wanting to portray or be “Black” isn’t something new. Alfred Jarry, playwright and actor, attempted to impersonate Black culture in the nineteenth-century when he “perfected staccato speech for himself, a Negro slang of sorts…,” and “demanded outcast inclusion in a formal world” (32). No matter what image they longed to portray, at the end of the day they could return to being just white, thus leaving the burden of being seen as a complete outcast, as the ‘greatest internal threat’ to American society, to Blacks.

Music. Music. Music, our traditional spiritual connection with something higher, something more powerful, in many cases a rhythmic prayer. Today we live in a society that is rapidly eroding away that meaning. Music is an art form, like painting, like dancing, like sculpting. The author of “The 1960’s in Bamako: Malick Sidibe and James Brown,” talking about pictures which I will compare to music, says: “They protect them from the effects of segregation in the host country by providing entertainment and pleasure” (167). I would argue that the affliction our ancestors courageously endured was in part the impetus for the creativity that birthed true Soul music. This is articulated better by M. A. Davis, as she asserts: “They’ve seen us be avoided, chained, hanged, and burned by their hands…as a result of the rape came the birth of a new emotion called the blues…” (131). Music and its essence has been embedded in our souls since our arrival (and for centuries earlier, I might add). Our creativity through music, Hip-Hop specifically, has been expressed in words, sounds, pictures, gesticulations, “…made by turntables…whirling the top of the head on the floor…the visual murals painted sometimes overnight on ten NY subways cars…” (8). Essay after essay puts into perspective the creativity in music of Africans, here and there, music that has been commercially disposable to the historical opportunist.

Without a doubt, Everything but the Burden is a collection of essays that is a must read for all who want to understand the appropriation of Black culture, Black expression, Black beauty, and the influence Black can have on all: white, Black and other.

“Another question which arises in each of these narratives is what does civilization mean when those who are assigned the role of humanness (and by implication civility) act with barbarity.”
--Renee Green

“The slave is a subject, subjected by others; the slaveholder is a subject but he is the author of this own subjection.”
--Beth Coleman

“…one cannot predict the outcome of a revolution, nor the new habitus that will develop out of power relations, nor from where the youth will draw the resources for their creative and epistemological ideas.”
--Manthia Diawara

“…wanting so much to be there, in those pictures, with those women, those regal-looking ebony-skinned, corn-rowed women, whom I thought were far more stylish and sophisticated and breathtaking than any of the models I had ever seen on the covers of Vogue.”
--Meri Nana-Ama Danquah

Copyright © 2004 Africa Resource Center, Inc.

Citation Format

PROUDFLESH: A New Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics & Consciousness: Issue 3, 2004