The Oprah people were on the phone with my mom. Someone had given them my name as an expert on wiggers. You know, Wiggers. White kids who identify themselves with hip-hop. I was an expert on that.
How do I dress?
My own thoughts about race started pretty naively. Not that anyone would have thought to ask, but for moments in my early life I must have believed that black people ruled the Earth. I owe this inverted world view to two contradictory sources.
(James T. Farrell’s short story “The Fastest Runner on 61st Street,” written back when 61st was white, tells of a white gang from 61st Street spotting a black boy who had strayed across Washington Park. The white boys chased the black boy, and when the fastest of the white gang crossed 51st Street into the black neighborhhood he was killed instantly–within a block. In the logic of white Hyde Park, certain death was the only plausible result.)
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Nevertheless, it was their veneer of power rather than their underlying powerlessness that attracted me to blacks. I was drawn by admiration rather than pity–this is what separates the white rap fan from the white missionary. I had always had delinquent tendencies, and who could symbolize my wild side better than the bands of boisterous black boys who I and everyone I knew feared? Newspaper columnist Mike Royko once compared housing projects to beehives. Like a lot of boys, I would kill bees, and throw rocks at their hives–not because they had stung me, but because my fear of them became an excuse to unleash my own violence. I felt the same way about blacks in the ghetto. It’s lucky I was raised by liberals!
The six-flat condo I grew up in was perfectly integrated: two white families, two black, and two mixed. The apartments across the street were home to many black youngsters. But even in these harmonious circumstances, whether by parental design, personal preference, or simple habit, my playmates of choice were almost always white. For all my fascination, I knew little of black people. Even in places like Hyde Park, most whites never do.
Effort is why the white b-boy, the Wigger, rather than the white liberal is at the center of my attention. The white liberal is a worthless frustration to black efforts at finding equality and dignity in America; he has never put any skin on the line and he never will. The white missionary has guts, but he also has his own agenda, whether religious or ideological. The white b-boy at his best avoids the drawbacks of both. He has the zeal of the missionary but he lacks a firm agenda. And unlike both, he knows blacks first as people, not as issues.
