Backlash
Yesterday, while reading Sam Lipsyte's "The Republic of Empathy" on
the train, I was surprised when the tussling characters on the roof
said "no time for arbitration, son". While I thought briefly how I'd
never heard "arbitration" and "son" in the same sentence, the young
man standing next to me on the train said, "I aint playin, son" to his
friend. Jinx! 'Twas a great "new york/er moment" that I immediately
relayed to my ex-roomie from Barnard I was meeting for a drink. So
today as I finished reading "Empathy" on my way to work at a
non-profit on Wall Street (now I sound like one of Lipsyte's
characters), I was tickled when the asshole Wall Street guy says he
made "mad" and "madder cake". The instances of "son" and "mad",
relatively obscure inner city hip hop vernacular, in one story is
rare, even for New Yorker fiction. They are however two very different
uses of the language by Lipsyte. The instance of the blue collar
Latino character, Fresko using "son", is fine, he is a character that
one comes eventually to empathize with. However, Zach, the Wall
Street guy is later drawn as a villain. My point here is that this
language when used by a white eventually comes to mean asshole. I
noticed this on HBO's Girls with the "wigger character" in the play
which almost prompted it's cancellation. The character was overplayed
but is still viewed as pathetic.
Being a "wigger" and/or using inner city vernacular in general equates
you with asshole. And why is wigger allowed? If Paltrow can't say the
"n-word" in a song title, why is essentially calling someone a white
nigger okay? Wigger becomes an out for using the n-word. It's even
more offensive because it's meant to offend - and what does it
actually mean? That this white person that has adopted inner city
vernacular is acting like a "nigger"? In affect calling all inner city
youth, "niggers". I've got no love for the robber barons on my block
either, but Zach, a kid who was not tucked in by his mom, is painted
the villain by Lipsyte, for really challenging systems of value, and
it is his use of inner city vocab, acting "wiggerish": mad cake, yo
(the yo, added by me) that marks him as such.
This recent branding of "black acting" whites as loser assholes or
inauthentic somehow does not ring true for any of my friends who at
one point or by certain types may have been deemed wiggers. Instead of
the shallowness afforded this bastardly term, they have crossed
bridges and cultures to empathize with the other. Sometimes
successfully and other times, not so much - ain't nothing easy.
In the film, The Five Heartbeats (and in a line later sampled by rap
group, De la Soul) it's asked, "Why we gotta always crossover, why
don't they cross over to us?" Well the infusion of urban culture
throughout the world actually has seen this 2 way transmission but it
seems that in spaces like "Girls" and in-between the lines of short
stories in the New Yorker that we find an emphatic backlash.
posted by z.a.k. @ 11:01 AM
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