Another shade of black

The sadder truth is that for many white people, black people are a minority with a sad history, and they'd rather be rid of us completely. The very sad truth is that white people are much more important to black mythology than the other way around. That's not fair, but like many things that aren't fair, it's also true.

Might that be changing considering how much black culture has influenced white culture? What I find hard to believe is that whites aren't conscious in some ways of how they emulate black people.

Interesting question. Many black people are afraid that we're being co-opted. What they don't understand is how black white people are getting. And it's something that's easy to miss; fish don't know that they're wet. But it's at the point where hybridism is becoming very much the norm. Most people don't think about the fact that the way Britney Spears sings and moves is black.

It's not only in entertainment. You see it in the way people talk. A lot of "ebonics" is now ordinary speech. I don't know how many white girls I've seen calling each other "dude." "Dude" starts with black people and it percolates into white vernacular among men. Now white women are saying, "Dude, let's go get our nails done." It's a black thing. If you look at a silent film, at white people moving in 1903, they don't walk like white people now, they don't nod like white people. All of us are blacker. So what we're really moving towards is a Mariah Carey, Tiger Woods sort of thing. Nowadays, black people do matter more to white people, but in a good way, because black people are in white people and they don't even know it, which is the way it should be.

Which is the way it should be?

Yeah, because we're moving towards getting past race. Al Sharpton wouldn't like that, but we're going to get past it. Getting past it does not mean these communities of wary blacks and wary whites eyeing each other and writing Op-Eds about each other.

Do they feel that way about hip-hop? It's mostly black controlled.

Hip-hop is interesting. It's almost as if people are waiting for it to be co-opted. But the thing is that there is no hip-hop Elvis and there's not going to be one. There is Eminem, but nobody would claim that he is taking the lion's share. There is nobody who thinks of Eminem as the quintessence of hip-hop.

But people have compared him to Elvis. Well, he compares himself to Elvis, anyway.

In that way that he is a white hip-hopper. But he is not taking over the field. He is not making more money than any other number of hip-hoppers. He is just one of the many. And he's doing fine. But he's not taking over in the way that Elvis did. Elvis made it and all of a sudden he's making more money than Chubby Checker and Sam Cooke and all the others combined. Eminem's not doing that, he's not going to, nor will any white hip-hopper do it. Things have changed. The white kids in the suburbs are not listening only to Eminem. There's no sense that they like Eminem better than the black ones.

I wanted to talk about leaders a little bit more. You direct a lot of your criticism at black leaders -- Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. I'm wondering what you think of the young leaders, and while we're talking about hip-hop, what's being called the hip-hop political movement.

It makes me feel old. I'm 37. This whole hip-hop culture idea is an outgrowth of a general "bobos in paradise" idea -- to be countercultural and to hate the establishment. I don't love the establishment either, but this hip-hop thing is professional alienation, a recreational indignation. The idea that black identity can be centered on that, especially among the young, strikes me as a pose rather than an action. It feels good to be an underdog and that's what that's about. You put your cap on backwards, you think somebody set up Sept. 11 on purpose 

But I see Russell Simmons, who seems to be leading this movement, as very much a part of the establishment.

That's the thing. Simmons will fund all of this music that's preaching black alienation and he's one of the richest people in the world. More to the point, the idea that the main face of black people for the country should be alienation and poverty is inaccurate. It's the way that a segment of the population lives and we need to do something about that. But the idea that that's the blackest thing that people need to pay the most attention to  again, it's a pose. It feels good to play the underdog.

But when I first heard about this movement and that Simmons was spearheading it, my thought was that it was pragmatic. You want to get a lot of young people of all colors involved and to tap into such a large audience. He has so much money and power, and it's a way to get people interested in politics.

And the question is: What politics? To get people to vote? For what? Is the idea to get people to vote for reparations? To get people to vote for expanding welfare benefits again? It's so unclear to so many people today what black people need. It seems like a hip, get-out-the-vote movement. My god, vote for what? Do you feel that affirmative action needs to be restored? I disagree. It seems to me that that's the sort of thing that Russell Simmons and his voters would push for.

Well, they are talking about things like racial profiling and incarceration.

That's true.

It's possible that they -- and hip-hop -- could bring college-age people together in a way that nothing else can. I'm not wild about Russell Simmons being the head of this, either. But I have been heartened by some aspects of it, if only because there is no young political movement out there.

Not today, no. And racial profiling is important. Some of this for me is just visceral. You have a guy, and I don't care what color he is, his pants are baggy, he's standing in front of a camera, and he's throwing his hands and palms out in that hip-hop gesture. The rhythm is going and he's bouncing his arms around and hurling his palms at the camera. Anyone who's doing that -- their main message is "Fuck the establishment, I am oppressed, and isn't that wonderful?" Any vote movement based on that sentiment strikes me as one that's going to keep running into walls. It's not instructive, it's melodramatic. The point is that whole iconography is not based on engagement with our society.

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