“Hoes can be hoed out, players can be played out, but pimp is for life”—The Pimp Phenomenon as Strategy of Identity Formation

Abstract

The pimp’s ubiquity in popular and youth culture belies its divergent interpretations along racial lines. This article is an ethnographic study of how adolescents at a multiracial urban high school vary in their performance and interpretation of the pimp and how they create racialized identities through these variations. All peer groups studied understood the pimp as representing sexual prowess, but for the African American peer group, the pimp more importantly represented manipulation and generalized power. Departing from Goffman’s concepts of performance and stigma, the study illustrates the limitations of both in capturing the racializing and empowering aspects of the pimp persona for the African American students who enacted it. Merging symbolic interaction with the poststructuralist concepts of identity as lodged in discourse and with performance as transgression, this article explains how adolescents’ pimp performances produced identities that were informed by white supremacist logic but also subverted this logic in their construction of racial differences. Over the last decade, the pimp has become a central figure in American youth culture, traveling from urban rappers to suburban consumers and from inner city schools to private colleges. At my home campus in upstate New York, dedicated engineering students wear T-shirts stating “pimpin’ ain’t easy,” decorate their windows with posters stating “Pimpin’—Ho’ sale since 1869,” and approvingly greet each other with “hi pimp, what’s up?” The pimp, signifying endearment and achievement, has also become a standard in cyberspace, where Web hosts frequently feature themselves as pimp, pimp daddy, or pimptress, and has a career in the daily aired MTV show “Pimp My Ride.” But the ubiquity of this expression belies its distinct meanings and usages among young people today. This ethnographic study of students in an urban, multiracial high school examines the different meanings adolescents attached to their particular performances of the pimp and the racialized