The White Negro Reconsidered: An Exercise in Ethnographic Reflexivity

Abstract

Whites imitating Blacks is by no means a new phenomenon. Yet many contemporary observers have failed to note the resemblances between its most recent guise, as reflected in the global influence of New World Black youth subcultures, and Norman Mailer’s musings on the White Negro in post-war American society. Rather than resort to the conventional Marxist argument of commodification, in this paper I propose that there may be two alternative reasons why White middle-class males have looked to African American and Jamaican working-class males for cultural inspiration. On the one hand, there is the possibility that Black coolness offers White middle-class males a conception of male physical beauty that they find lacking in their own culture. On the other hand, it is also possible that White middle-class males discern within Black coolness the means for experiencing some form of bodily or emotional liberation from the constraining effects of their social environment. The merits of these alternative explanations are illustrated by reflecting on my own personal motivations for choosing to do fieldwork in Jamaica and further support is adduced by pointing to the parallels between Mailer’s ruminations on the White Negro and Max Weber’s theory of the rationalization of social life.