White Negroes: When Cornrows Were in Vogue ... and Other
Thoughts on Cultural Appropriation by Lauren Michele Jackson
"Appropriation is everywhere and is also inevitable. If
appropriation is everywhere and everyone appropriates all the time, why does
any of this matter? The answer, in a word: power."
In her debut essay collection, White Negroes: When Cornrows
Were in Vogue ... and Other Thoughts on Cultural Appropriation, Lauren Michele
Jackson, a professor of English and African American studies at Northwestern
University, examines the problematic social trend of "black aesthetics
without black people." Her essays analyze the desire for black culture by
people who are not black and takes to task America's tendency to poach blackness
for its profit and benefit. From art to fashion, language to activism, black
culture influences worldwide trends. And, according to Jackson, everyone wants
to be "cool" without fearing for their lives, to be "black"
with the wealth and privilege of whiteness.
Jackson asserts that when the powerful appropriate from the
oppressed, society's imbalances are worsened, and its inequalities extended.
White people in America, Jackson writes, hoard power like Hungry Hungry Hippos.
She cites statistics on the ever-growing wealth gap between white and black
people in the United States-according to the Institute for Policy Studies, if
current trends continue, the average black family won't reach the amount of
wealth white families own today for another 228 years. The seriousness of this
reality comes into focus when we see who can thrive off of intellectual
property and who is prevented from doing so by "this nation's hysterical,
driving compulsion to own and regulate all things black."
Jackson divides her book into areas of popular culture to
explore the concept of "blackness in decay without its people."
Topics include:
• Sound and Body: Jackson uses the evolution of Christina
Aguilera's music career as the backdrop to examine the typical trajectory of a
young white female popstar-emancipating themselves from an image of innocence
by using black aesthetics to appear older and mature. "The entire Stripped
era put black culture in motion in a departure from Christina's earlier
aesthetics, even as a child performer raised on jazz and soul records."
Throughout her career, Aguilera goes from one interpretation of black culture
to another until, with her most recent album, she finally achieves a tenor of
homage to the black music that formed her, Jackson concludes.
• Art and Language: Jackson questions the motives of Dana
Schutz, whose painting Open Casket was a recreation of a 1955 photograph of
Emmett Till's body in his casket. The painting was created for the Whitney
Museum of Art's 2017 Biennial, which Jackson explains is remembered primarily
for its blatant dismissal of violence and black pain. "Mamie Till-Mobley,
thrust into activism, took control of her son's image in death, plain evidence
of what America does to black children," Jackson states. "Today, the
chasm between seeing a person in pain and in death and the actions it would
take to reduce the pain and death is so much wider than the Atlantic."
• Technology: "Black people are the best part of going
online," Jackson asserts. "Black culture is the fiber in the memes
that are sometimes the only reasonable excuse for logging on while the world
crumbles." She tells of Vine and the funny storytelling of its former
black users. Before its demise, Vine's most popular meme came from Kayla
Newman, a black woman who admires her brows in the camera and says they're
"on fleek." Jackson shares that Newman's attempt to raise money to
fund a line of hair and beauty products led to derision and claims that she was
entitled for wanting to profit off her creation-despite the term's co-opted use
in Hefty ads and fast fashion crop tops.
• Economy and Politics: Detailing cultural appropriation's
inherent political nature, Jackson describes a period in the 1970s, when the
white working class experienced a financial depression they called the
"blue-collar blues," which was attributed to a black upward mobility
that was perceived to outpace white prosperity. Then, as now, Jackson writes,
they needed use of black aesthetics to describe the circumstance. In the new
millennium, attempts to delegitimize #BlacklivesMatter spur absurd terms like
All Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter. Another example Jackson cites is the
Women's March on Washington, a name borrowed from a black-led political march.
Anger and rage, she writes, are all the rage. Thanks to white feminists'
appropriative actions, the politics of activism and self-care are given a new
and profitable look. "After Ferguson, Baltimore, Chicago, and Oakland,
everyone can make a hashtag and be mad and make it home safely. As long as
well-heeled white people are angry, others can be angry too."
Jackson concludes that although thoughtless appropriation is
impossibly embedded in our culture, it can become appreciation if the world
reorders society to be a place where black people have options and where they
matter to society just as much as their contributions. "Whether black
people will be acknowledged and allowed to thrive more than spiritually from
their innovations remains to be seen," she states. "If there is a
call embedded in this book, it is a call to more alertness, more intensity,
more care, and more fluency in the racial dramas performed as part and parcel
of business as usual."
About the Author Lauren Michele Jackson teaches in
the departments of English and African American studies at Northwestern
University.
White Negroes: When Cornrows Were in Vogue ... and Other
Thoughts on Cultural Appropriation
by Lauren Michele Jackson
$25.95 Hardcover • 978-080701180-5 • Audio book: 978-080708132-7
Contact: Perpetua Charles, Associate Publicist, pcharles@beacon.org /
617-948-6102
A literary scholar examines the many ways in which African
American influences are incorporated, without acknowledgment or thanks, into
the white cultural mainstream. Cultural appropriation, writes Jackson (English
and African American Studies/Northwestern Univ.), "gets a bad rap."
Rap, for instance, borrows from the styles of earlier generations-soul, disco,
funk, even gospel-but includes the likes of Billy Joel and Paul Simon in its
DNA. Appropriation, she writes, 11 is everywhere, and it is inevitable,"
though it is also a matter of power as much as artistic license: The culturally
dominant group gets away with borrowing fashions, musical styles, and language,
developing "black aesthetics without black people." In a lucid
explication of the work of appropriation in music, she examines borrowings not
just by white artists such as Britney Spears, but also members of minority
populations such as Jennifer Lopez, who, by Jackson's account, lifted liberally
from a less-known artist named Ashanti. It's Lopez's good luck that the
borrowing, including the passing insertion of the N-word, took place in a time
when "the internet wasn't then what the internet is now, and time forgives
all slurs." Pop star Pink took a different course, gradually shedding any
blackness in her sound, even as Miley Cyrus dropped her whitepop teen persona
to embrace the hip-hop world and Khloe Kardashian did her hair up in cornrows
and called herself a "Bantu babe." The author ranges across a broad
field of reference, writing of the appropriation of the Southern-ism
"chile" (child, that is) by means of the TV show Real Housewives of
Atlanta and the culinary borrowings of Paula Deen, "white Mammy, plumping
America one fried delicacy at a time," who got in trouble not for her
lifting recipes but instead for using the N-word. Jackson is evenhanded
throughout, though there's a welcome fire to her discussion, as when she
writes, "America is addicted to hurting black people. America is addicted
to watching itself hurt black people.”
A revelatory, well-argued work of cultural criticism.
- Kirkus Reviews, October 1, 2019 issue
Northwestern University professor Jackson's insightful debut
essay collection takes on cultural appropriation-particularly of black
innovation by white celebrities, artists, and entrepreneurs-through the lens of
power dynamics, identifying it as a process by which "society's imbalances
are exacerbated and inequalities prolonged." In the realm of pop culture,
she analyzes the pursuit of "urban" sexual wildness by Britney Spears
and Miley Cyrus, the aesthetic but not economic investment of the Kardashians
in black fashion, and Paula Deen's fetishistic presentation of Southern food
alongside explicit racism. Her exploration of the art world juxtaposes the
public reaction to Rachel Dolezal, made famous by her "impulse to inhabit
blackness," with accusations against institutions such as the Whitney
Biennial, which she asserts ignores black artists but treats depictions of
antiblack violence as edgy and relevant. She identifies toxic white resentment
of black success in the recent viral videos of white people calling the police
on black people (often children) for using public pools, having lemonade
stands, or barbecuing in parks. Jackson is uncompromising in her bold
language, palpable in her outrage; she keeps her razor-sharp analysis in an
accessible but academic register. She both calls out the damage done by
appropriative and oppressive behavior and calls in white readers to take part
in valuing black contributions in a way that helps black lives.
- Publishers Weekly August 19th issue
"Like 'intersectionality' and "diversity'' and
"neoliberalism" and perhaps even "capitalism," the word
"appropriation" has taken on so many interpretations and
interpolations as to court ontological disaster: what does it even mean? Lauren
Michele Jackson wrestles with the idea, the concept, the history, the bodies,
and the selves that are implicated in cultural appropriation. Jackson does not
absolve anyone, but she does point toward some of the most complex corners of
culture. In those corners she asks us to consider not freedom and choice but
power. That emphasis on _who can commodify appropriation is different from
pedestrian debates about who can do appropriation. White Negroes is a mature
meditation for debates that have, at times, wallowed in their own intellectual
infancy. The collection is witty, wry, and welcome. In the vein of lmani Perry
and Zoe Samudzi, this book is an excellent addition to critical thinking about
culture and contemporary racial orders."
- Tressie McMillan Cottom, author of Thick and Lower Ed
"What I love most about Lauren Jackson's incisive and
richly detailed work in White Negroes is how it does not imagine any cultural
phenomenon as something that does not have a history attached to it. And
through the work of charting that history, a new cultural understanding arises.
This is a vital textone that offers new ways of seeing, hearing, and
consuming."
- Hanif Abdurraqib, author of They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us
"We've needed this book for years~ and yet somehow it's
right on time. Miraculously, Lauren Michele Jackson is able to write about
cultural appropriation in a way that doesn't make you want to drink a glass of
sand. She brings incredible nuance and a sharp critical voice to a discussion
that has sorely lacked both-yet somehow emerges with a text that is as
accessible as it is theoretically relevant. Jackson avoids platitudes and easy
answers, has a keen eye for history and popular culture, and, moreover, she is
funny."
- Eve L. Ewing, author of Electric Arches and Ghosts in the Schoolyard
"Blacking up-the American caucasoidal desire to
inhabit, stage, and master an imaginary Black identity-has been a national
obsession and a national enterprise since the antebellum days of traveling tent
show minstrelsy. With language laced with critical clarity, tempered outrage,
radical snark, and researched detail, Lauren Michele Jackson's White Negroes
interrogates and exposes our present-day society of appropriated racial
spectacle-highlighting a plethora of the ways contemporary white minstrelsy
reproduces the erasures and violence of its Jim Crow-era predecessor, then
circulates its badto-rad copies for profit and mockery through viral
technology. Jackson eruditely connects the dots between such disparate
phenomena of the modern racial age as Eminem, Christina Aguilera, Kim
Kardashian, Rachel Dolezal, the fashion and cosmetic industries, the Whitney
Biennial, and the appropriation of 'Bye Felisha.' In so doing, Jackson makes us
wiser and even more disturbed about how much stolen Black imaging and ideations
matter to the cultural, political, and economic maintenance of the nation's
anti-Black status quo."
- Greg Tate, author of Flyboy in the Buttermilk and editor of Everything but
the Burden: What White People Are Taking from Black Culture
