Great Article about “White” as a Pejorative
February 4th, 2010
Nitsuh Abebe has written a great exposé on the insult “white” when used to refer to non-white people, specifically in the context of seemingly “white” band Vampire Weekend.
Mostly The Game (of race) just uses non-white people as cudgels for Americans to outmaneuver one another on the subject of who’s too bourgeois. In order for The Game to criticize bourgeois “whiteness” as privileged, over-educated, too polite, and too clever, it needs various non-white people to go on representing some kind of “realness” — plus, accidentally, poverty, lack of education, and vulgarity. Better cudgels, you know?
Brilliant. Thanks, Douglas, for bringing this to my attention.