Racial (Co)Option: Visualizing Whiteness in Suburban Space

Matthew Durington

This paper was presented at a panel at the American Anthropological Association meetings, December 2, 1998 in Philadelphia entitled Seeing Culture: The Anthropology of Visual Communication at Temple University. Do not cite without author's permission.

In order to proceed a few different points must be described in order to bring us up to speed. First, the history of blackface minstrelsy in the United States must be contextualized in order to understand the stereotype of the wigger, which is its contemporary manifestation. Second, the means by which this stereotype is a projection of whiteness in youth subcultural identity formation must be understood in order to demonstrate how this subject is the latest in a long trend of cultual cooptation conducted by teenagers in naturalized acts of adolescent resistance. Third, the material and symbolic history of the American suburb must be realized in order to discuss the site-specific operation of whiteness in the activities of teenagers engaged in this activity. The material and symbolic history of the suburb creates a space that provides the option to coopt black cultural material and is emblematic of white privilege. Finally, I will demonstrate how the presence of this stereotype illustrates the operation of a moral panic and how this process is a means of visualizing whiteness within suburban space.

The history of blackface minstrelsy within the United States is one of the clearest windows into the tortured racial history of this society. Essentially, blackface minstrelsy is the act of white entertainers donning blackface make-up to act out various pre and post bellum black stereotypes on stage. Blackface minstrelsy emerged from the Vaudeville stage of the nineteenth century as a form of entertainment. Whereas the material conditions of slavery and later segregation acted out white racism in the "real" world, blackface minstrelsy guaranteed this domination in the realm of popular culture well into the twentieth century. This is only solidified by the historical fact that the two most important landmark events in cinematic history, the first multi-reel film, Birth of a Nation and the first sound film, The Jazz Singer, were both governed by narratives of whites acting out in blackface.

The act of blackface minstrelsy is also one of the easiest cultural spaces to mark the projection and solidification of whiteness. Recent work on the history of blackface minstrelsy in the United States has illustrated the complex interaction of identity formation and race (Lott 1992, Roediger 1994). Rather than merely conceiving of the blackface minstrel tradition as a way of marginalizing and mocking African Americans, this practice has also been theorized as a device for historically defining what is white (Lott 1992, Roediger 1994, Dyer 1988). Dyer has illustrated how Eastern European and Irish immigrants would don blackface makeup on the minstrel stage to lose their "ethnic" identity and become "white" by acting "black." In other words, by performing stereotypes of African Americans, which were exaggerated caricatures opposite of supposed white behavior, ethnic identity would be lost in the performance of this "alternative" to whiteness. In essence, whiteness becomes defined by possessing opposite traits of blackness. Yet, ironically, the process of determining whiteness is dependent on the explicit usage of alternative, exaggerated racial popular culture.

Whereas this history is easily condemned, historians such as Eric Lott have called for a deeper understanding of the meaning behind this process. As he states, "In light of recent discussions of race and subjectivity, we probably ought to take these facts and processes as merely a starting orientation for inquiry into the complexities of racism and raced subjects in the United States. In doing so, we shall find that blackface performance, the first formal public acknowledgment by whites of black culture, was based on small but significant crimes against settled ideas of racial demarcation which appear to be inevitable when white Americans enter the haunted realm of racial fantasy."

This history of "love and theft" is continued throughout the history of American popular culture, principally in music. Each generation has had a presupposed true form of black popular culture that corresponds with a presupposed false white identity where individuals engage in modeling themselves in the image of authentic black practicioners or try to seize black cultural practices for their own purposes. While this dichotomous analysis ingores the hybrid nature of cultural exchange that occurred in each of these eras, they are easily described scenarios. Whether known as the Elvis Syndrome of new white rock n' roller suburbanites in the fifties, the hipsters who were emblematic of Norman Mailer's White Negro Problem of the sixties or the superfly, white cocaine loving pimp of the seventies; whites have consistently been engaged in acts of cultural cooptation of black cultural forms. The contemporary ailment is known as the Vannilla Ice Virus and the subject that has become the standard carrier of this disease is the white suburban teenageror wigger.

Wiggers are predominantly male white suburban adolescents who borrow various forms of hip-hop culture through dress, language and behavior. The term itself carries racist connotations semantically and has been employed for different reasons. "The term wigger, like the word nigger-lover during the civil rights era, was first used by whites who objected to other whites embracing black culture. Now, it's also used by whites who embrace black culture to call out other whites who defame black culture (Aaron 98). While in existence for almost two decades now, the wigger "sometime after the death of Nirvana's Kurt Cobainwith over-size Hilfiger sportswear, hip-hop slang, and skateboard double-parked outsideemerged as the 90's embodiment of white suburban youth alienation." This process has been supported by the evolution of hip-hop style into commodified general American pop style. (ibid.) As Charles Aaron states, "fashion designers such as Ralph Lauren and Tommy Hilfiger court hip-hop's imprimatur and from Nike to Sprite, sampling and selling black cool to white consumers is the get rich quick scheme of the decade." Black hip-hop culture is displayed on MTV, sampled on radio and available in various commodified forms at the local suburban mall available for consumption and cooptation by white suburban youth. The suburban mall becomes the arena for the commodification of hip-hop culture and the stage where various wiggers can purchase symbols of this hip-hop culture and gather to represent among peers. The suburban mall becomes the space where traditional white suburban youth lifestyle is reconstitued racially. As Silverstone states, "The hybridity displayed in the shopping mall is a re-presentation, a reflection and a revelation, of the hybridity of suburbia" (Silverstone 1997) The mall also becomes the space where you can purchase items already pre-approved in mass media.

In my research, I am suggesting that the wigger, weilder of various manifestations of material and symbolic hip-hop culture, is the contemporary manifestation of the blackface minstrel tradition. Just as ethnic immigrants of European descent seized the blackface minstrel stage to affirm their white identity, contemporary "wiggers" seize black popular culture to affirm their privileged racial and class position. When suburban youth attempt to utilize symbolic traits associated with hip-hop culture, they reflect the same cultural cooptation exemplified in the blackface tradition. Lipsitz has demonstrated how cultural cooptation represents a "dangerous crossroads" where the promise of expanding beneficial multicultural experience is often subsumed by exacerbating social divisions through misunderstanding (Lipsitz 1994). Suburban youth may be simply attempting to expand their horizons by recognizing and utilizing forms of alternative symbolic culture that surround them in mass media. The question remains whether these activities of the wigger are traditional acts of resistant youth subcultures that attach themselves to any form of alterity, or whether they are actual steps toward critical race consciousness for suburban youth.

A number of questions evolve from this dilemma that demand a material, symbolic and ethnographic treatment of this phenomenon where it manifests itself principally, the American suburb. The history of the American suburb has been completely racialized since its inception. The historical population shift from the city to the suburb is referred to as "white flight." This first phase of suburbanization was "underwritten" by discriminatory government policy, banking practices and the real estate industry (Harvey 1990). Race becomes the predominant means of explaining this population shift because of racial practices which established segregated neighborhoods and kept African-Americans and various others out of the suburb (Sacks 1994). The history of white flight and suburban development provides a material context for the establishment of the suburb as a white space. This process also had the effect of symbolically demarcating the suburb as a white space.

This history is reflected in popular culture such as television and film that represented the suburb as a white space. While the number of films and television shows that have served this purpose is too many to describe in this paper, both praise-songs of the suburb and critiques of it continually affirmate its existence as white space. We are not allowed to witness the contemporary multicultural suburb for what it is. As Silverstone points out, "the institutionalization of television rested on the "ordinariness" of suburban life in shows like "Leave it to Beaver" and had the effect of equating the suburb with whiteness (Silverstone 1997). This historical representation of the suburb in popular culture established the suburb as homogenous, white and hence, with an absence of identity. The labeling of whiteness as an absent identity or a colorless void is highly problematic, because this way of thinking only naturalizes racism and power (Fusco 1994, hooks 1995). A body of work has emerged in recent years investigating the notion of "whiteness" in a more critical fashion, but outside of anthropology this analysis continues to trivialize whiteness through various cultural reads of films or haphazard linkages to larger social issues and trends. Although the setting for these accounts of whiteness is often the suburb, a comprehensive ethnographic analysis of how the suburb is created materially and how white identity is formed and projected symbolically among its inhabitants is still lacking. This requires a research methodology that contextualizes the material development of the suburb, the way that the suburb has been represented in popular culture historically, and the means by which both of these influence identity formation in this environment.

How is this type of analysis to be conducted? Whiteness studies needs anthropology in order to garner the meaning behind the presence and projection of whiteness in social spaces. Ethnography will illustrate the material and symbolic relations that constitute white privilege which is "the organizing principle in social and cultural relations" for white suburbanites. But the need of whiteness studies for anthropology is superceded by the need of both for the anthropology of visual communication. If we are to agree that whiteness is conveyed not only through the material conditions of society, but compounded and exacerbated by the domination of whiteness in the symbolic realm; then the need for a methodology which attaches ethnography to visual communication is apparent. Methodological tools like the ethnographic semiotic that not only comment on the appearance of the wigger as racial connotative sign, but attach analyses of intention and reaction that surround this observance. And, the anthropology of visual communication needs social theory to understand what occurs when ethnography presents phenomenon of power. So, where does this leave the stereotype of the wigger?

Yes, the wigger stereotype is the contemporary manifestation of the blackface minstrel tradition, but so what? Unless this phenomenon is attached to an illustration of how white privilege is constructed and enacted both symbolically and materially in the site-specific space of the suburb, it is nothing but an anecdotal observance and yet another cataloging of tortured youth identity formation. If not provided with ethnographic and theoretical investigation the analysis of the wigger stereotype does nothing but reinforce white privilege that rests on racial dichotomy. As Hartigan states, "Lest whiteness and blackness become static versions of the marxist superstructure/base paradigm ­ discrete, separate entities rather than constantly entangled registers ­ ethnographers must devise means to analyze how whites, as racial subjects, are embroiled predicaments where the meanings of race are unclear and shifting, subjects of discourses or local idioms that are fashioned in fast-changing sites" (Hartigan 1998).

One theoretical mechanism that can be employed to disrupt this anecdotal treatment of the wigger stereotype is realizing the means by which racial cooptation illustrates white privilege. The practice of racial cooptation is a normalized white cultural practice, principally evident in the history of popular culture. The normalized behavior of racial cooptation is inculcated in white culture in the suburban arena where ethnic flavor is served up nightly on television, commodified in the suburban mall or placed on display in wigger identity formation. This behavior is emblematic of an overall power structure in the society that rests on white privilege. If an aesthetic appreciation, or distinctiontaste, for rap music is not inculcated early in life, especially by suburban parents who fear its presence in the lives of their children, then how does it develop? Your traditional, stereotypic suburban soccer mom does not have Eric B. and Rakim or Tribe Called Quest pumping in the minivan. Could it be that the very act of racial cooptation through popular culture, the option to coopt, is a behavior that is inculcated as part of suburban identity? If so, than the willingness of youth culture to cut across class/color coded musical tastes disrupting a fixed socio-economic standard is something that must be interrogated for its disruptive power of suburban normality.

Another mechanism of identifying the projection of whiteness in suburban space around the subject of the wigger is to illustrate the operation of a moral panic that surrounds this phenomenon. A type of moral panic erupts from adults who can not understand why their privileged youth; white, black, hispanic or asian, would identify with an image that stereotypically personifies everything that the suburb is supposedly not; dangerous, violent and black. A moral panic is initiated when a "group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests and its nature is presented in a stylized and stereotypical fashion by the mass media"(Thompson 1998). Rather than consistenly blaming youth who are striving to engage some form of multiculturalism, despite its stereotypical nature, it is the subjects who initiate the moral panic that should be interrogated. These teenagers are the products of an unstable middle-class environment where their role in a future labor market is uncertain. Teenagers are pressured to reproduce the social position of their parents and when identity formation contradicts this trend, panic occurs. When a parent asks their teenager how they are going to get a job looking like that?this speaks to larger issues that affect the suburb which should be interrogated. Yes, the formation and projection of whiteness found in the wigger stereotype must be interrogated as well, but this should only serve as a starting point for the analysis of white privilege in historical white space. As far as the wigger is concerned, these youth are gaining cultural capital, stereotyped or not, which can be used later on in lifethe question remains as to how they will broker it.