Save the World, Bomb the Suburbs
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How the privileged son of an upper-middle-class white family came to embrace black culture is the framing story of Wimsatt’s book, Bomb the Suburbs, which was self-published last year and excerpted in the Reader. It’s a brave and ambitious work that hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves. The book, now in its second printing, is a spirited paean to graffiti, a screed on the suburbs’ role in the decline of the late-20th-century city, an intellectually fearless exegesis on black-white relations, a hymn to public transportation, and a good, if slightly disconnected and quite pessimistic, overview of the evolution of hip hop in the last five years. Wimsatt–the “Upski” is tagger slang for having your name around, “up,” noticed–has a disarming ability to take on hard subjects. He runs through his own feelings about blacks–from obsession to fear and back again–with a great deal of intellectual clarity. One of Bomb the Suburbs’s continuing metaphors acknowledges the advantages he’s had. “I was, after all, born biking with my back to the wind,” he writes. “If after 11 years, I decide to swing a U and retrace my path going into the wind for a while just to see what it’s like, it does little to even my personal score.”
He stands by his book’s title both for its literal meaning and its slang one, graffiti-speak for tagging. But it’s not the suburbs’ blandness that irks him; it’s the economic decay city-fleers leave behind. Taggers should fight back where it counts, he thinks, and leave the city and public transit alone. “The best places to bomb are rich areas, particularly rich suburbs,” he writes. He also takes on Farrakhan: when his son–a high school classmate–“talk[s] shit about Jews,” Wimsatt lashes back with a time-honored epithet. Interestingly, he rationalizes the minister’s antiwhite rhetoric; his main complaint is against the Nation of Islam’s groupthink. Wimsatt positions himself somewhere between the group and the individual. “The cool thing about America–what de Tocqueville said really makes America work, the foundation of our democracy–is the art of associating, and I’m for that. That’s my mission,” he says. “As long as people are dealing with each other, and have to deal with each other on a one-to-one daily basis, and the less they’re in the ghettos and suburbs, geographically or mentally, the richer all of our lives are. Everything good happens from that.”
