{"id":48,"date":"2015-09-18T11:01:34","date_gmt":"2015-09-18T11:01:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/aaas16\/?p=48"},"modified":"2015-09-18T17:44:42","modified_gmt":"2015-09-18T17:44:42","slug":"the-meaning-of-the-negro-problem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/aaas16\/2015\/09\/18\/the-meaning-of-the-negro-problem\/","title":{"rendered":"The End of White America? The Rising Tide of Color?"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure style=\"width: 280px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/upload.wikimedia.org\/wikipedia\/commons\/6\/6a\/Dust_jacket,_first_edition_of_The_Rising_Tide_of_Color_Against_White_World-Supremacy.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"280\" height=\"400\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Mentioned in The Atlantic article &#8220;The End of White America,&#8221; the book reflected white anxiety in the 1920s about how to maintain white supremacy in the face of the &#8220;rising tide of color.&#8221;<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<figure style=\"width: 239px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"\" src=\"http:\/\/library.sc.edu\/spcoll\/mailer\/mailer004.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"239\" height=\"350\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Norman Mailer&#8217;s 1957 book on &#8220;the original hipster,&#8221; i.e. white youth disaffiliating from whiteness to adopt aspects of what was considered black culture.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Rachel Dolezal Breaks Her Silence: &#039;I Identify As Black&#039; | TODAY\" width=\"604\" height=\"340\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/lG9Q2_Hv83k?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The Election of Barack Obama is just the most startling manifestation of a larger trend: the gradual erosion of \u201cwhiteness\u201d as the touchstone of what it means to be American. If the end of white America is a cultural and demographic inevitability, what will the new mainstream look like\u2014and how will white Americans fit into it? What will it mean to be white when whiteness is no longer the norm? And will a post-white America be less racially divided\u2014or more so?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<section id=\"article-section-9\">IF THEY\u2019RE RIGHT\u2014if white America is indeed \u201closing control,\u201d and if the future will belong to people who can successfully navigate a post-racial, multicultural landscape\u2014then it\u2019s no surprise that many white Americans are eager to divest themselves of their whiteness entirely.<\/section>\n<section><\/section>\n<section id=\"article-section-10\">For some, this renunciation can take a radical form. In 1994, a young graffiti artist and activist named William \u201cUpski\u201d Wimsatt, the son of a university professor, published <i><a href=\"http:\/\/www.softskull.com\/detailedbook.php?isbn=1-887128-44-5\" target=\"outlink\">Bomb the Suburbs<\/a><\/i>, the spiritual heir to Norman Mailer\u2019s celebratory 1957 essay, <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/The_White_Negro\" target=\"outlink\">\u201cThe White Negro.\u201d<\/a> Wimsatt was deeply committed to hip-hop\u2019s transformative powers, going so far as to embrace the status of the lowly \u201cwigger,\u201d a pejorative term popularized in the early 1990s to describe white kids who steep themselves in black culture. Wimsatt viewed the wigger\u2019s immersion in two cultures as an engine for change. \u201cIf channeled in the right way,\u201d he wrote, \u201cthe wigger can go a long way toward repairing the sickness of race in America.\u201d<\/section>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>The \u00a0preceding quotes are taken from <em>The Atlantic<\/em> article\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/magazine\/archive\/2009\/01\/the-end-of-white-america\/307208\/\">The End of White America<\/a>\u00a0(an interesting read in its entirety that I recommend). Professor Bobo mentioned the article last\u00a0class \u00a0in reference to the salient questions: <strong>&#8220;What is race?&#8221;\u00a0<\/strong>and<strong> &#8220;What are the competing views of the deep structure of race?&#8221;<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The article poses the questions: <strong>&#8220;What will it mean to be white when whiteness is no longer the norm? And will a post-white America be less racially divided\u2014or more so?&#8221;<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Considering what the end of whiteness might mean is inextricably linked to the meaning of \u00a0non-whiteness broadly and blackness, specifically, especially for our course as scholars thinking about the sociology of the black community. As many of you queried in class: <strong>what are the contours of \u00a0&#8220;the black community&#8221; as a sociological object of study? \u00a0And to go a step further, what are the contours of \u00a0&#8220;blackness&#8221; as an identity?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp; &nbsp; The Election of Barack Obama is just the most startling manifestation of a larger trend: the gradual erosion of \u201cwhiteness\u201d as the touchstone of what it means to be American. If the end of white America is a cultural and demographic inevitability, what will the new mainstream look like\u2014and how will white Americans &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/aaas16\/2015\/09\/18\/the-meaning-of-the-negro-problem\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">The End of White America? The Rising Tide of Color?<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7270,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[142768],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-48","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dubois-sociology-week-2"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/aaas16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/aaas16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/aaas16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/aaas16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7270"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/aaas16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/aaas16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":137,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/aaas16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48\/revisions\/137"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/aaas16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/aaas16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/aaas16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}