Tomorrow: Norman Mailer's "White Negro" at AS220

Marc Levitt, AS220, and the Action Speaks! crew do a great job every year in staging a provocative and thought-provoking discussion series. The focus this year is race in America, and tomorrow evening's forum will view this through the prism of Norman Mailer's essay on white hipsters.

I previewed tomorrow's event in last week's Phoenix:

Via e-mail, we spoke in advance with one of the panelists, Greg Tate, a longtime Village Voice journalist and the author of Everything But the Burden: What White People Are Taking from Black Culture (Harlem Moon, 2003).

To take a cue from Action Speaks!, are race and ethnicity a dance that anyone can learn?
I believe anyone can learn to perform a stereotype — to boldly and baldly and even badly impersonate the racial and ethnic Other as it were, for fun and for profit. This we see everyday, and our entertainment marketplace encourages and rewards those performances. Not surprising, since the American entertainment industry history has such deep roots in minstrelsy, especially cinema when one considers The Birth of a Nation and The Jazz Singer, which both furthered film technique and racism in the same “blacking-up” breath.
 
How has the embrace of rap and hip-hop by so many young white people impacted race relations in America?
Since white Americans and black Americans still largely live segregated lives in segregated communities, and largely attend segregated schools and universities, and work in segregated workplaces, I’d say hip-hop’s impact on American race relations — outside of small racially adventurous cultural pockets — has been pretty negligible. That there is marginally greater social exchange between blacks and whites in America now than in the 1950s should largely be attributed to the civil-rights movement than to hip-hop. A few million white kids grooving to a Tupac CD doesn’t remake the racial landscape or upset the racial balance of power.