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
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