wigga wigger

- eytmology: because it comes from the word nigger and so that word is implicit in any usage, therefore wigger is always offensive.

- inaccuracy: because the 'wigger' type of person doesn't actually exist - there's nothing that needs describing, or there IS something that needs describing but 'wigger' does a bad job of it.

- misjudgement: using 'wigger' is wrong because the attitudes it describes are good not bad.

i brought up 'common people' in regard to yesterdays j-lo thread, perhaps thats a useful touchstone here also? allegations of cultural tourism but with racial dynamic?

is this more of an issue for people, because, in this case, 'the other' is identified as being synonymous with 'keeping it real', which introduces a strange, one step removed, dichotomy to the whole thing. simultaneously faux/real? the more real, the more faux?

(just want to clear it up)

Apparently, it's offensive enough that I, a white person, would feel compelled to take up the mic, much less think my "crackah ass" could hold their attention with my weak not-keeping-it-real flows(oddly enough I wasn't "keeping it real" in their eyes because I actually WAS keeping it real in terms of the aspects of my own life, and not making up a bunch of stuff about killing and drug dilling and blood spilling etc.).

Anyway, from my experience, the term "wigger" has been used mostly by white folks referring to some sort of white teenage sub-culture of kids who use mommy and daddy's money to install gigantor monstrous sound-systems with which they could "bump" some Master P make ya say UUUGGGHHH shit in their trunks, all the while speaking in an adopted vernacular completely unrelated to their geography and upbringing.

I mean, okay, someone who has been surrounded by conservative WASP-y types their entire life who suddenly begins talking like Bernie Mac would raise my eyebrows and cause me to laugh at them, but there's already a perfectly good word for that type of thing: POSER. Why bring race into it at all (unless, of course, your intention is to denigrate the race you associate with that culture as well as the person aping it, in which case carry on but don't be surprised if I never speak to you again)?

there are a lot of internet sites/bbs where 16 year old suburban kids will adopt hip-hop superhero personas and battle each other as a form of escapism.

i think the extreme controversy behind the term is that it assumes that there is only a one way appropriation of culture: slang, language, dialect from one group to another without any cross-pollination. i think this runs contrary to hstencil's comment above... suburban kids adopt hip-hop culture as a form of credibility. what does the hip-hop community get in return? record sales?

Furthermore, not all suburban kids are white.

Dude, the term has been around as long as Norman Mailer.

Playing devil's advocate: the type of posing with which the word wigger is usually associated is not simply "white folks acting black" in general, but imitation of the very particular form of blackness expressed in hardcore hip-hop--which already tends to be a somewhat hyperreal form of blackness, and one that makes use of the word 'nigger' a lot as a means of expressing that blackness... ie, you're not 'bringing race into it,' because it's already so there...

hence 'wigger' both plays on that usage and suggests that when white kids imitate this already-hyperreal blackness, they make its performative nature more evident... from this perspective, the word 'wigger' tends to be overused (like, just being white and dropping hip-hop slang now and then would not make you a wigger) but not totally inappropriate... an example of appropriate use of the word might have been when Vanilla Ice felt the need to fabricate a gangsta past...

Not sure if I actually believe that, jes' thinking out loud...

(There are links between Norman Mailer's 'white negro' and 'wigger', but they are not the same thing)

(perhaps the counterargument to that is that since two essential component of these stories are that a) they not be acknowledged as fiction and b) they are heavily marked as 'black,' it is harder for a white kid to pull that off so convincingly)

(but then, i don't think emimen is a wigger, so maybe i'm just talking horseshit)

(unless maybe being a wigger simply means that you're not convincing anyone of the truth of your stories!)

if white suburban kids adopt it, doesn't it make it white suburban culture too?

Ben, I strongly disagree with the assumptions of your initial post unless your notion of "a form of blackness expressed in hardcore hip-hop" encapsulates behavior seen on trash talk shows like Ricki Lake and Jerry Springer. Also, "hardcore hip-hop" could be (and has been) used to describe anything from X-Clan to NWA to Esham to The Coup to Li'l Kim to [insert old-skool idol here]. At which point you've expressed such a wide variety of viewpoints and opinions that the "found in hip-hop" restriction becomes meaningless and you're right back at "white people acting black". Which, going back to my "culture is not bound to race" argument, is a fucking stupid thing to say.

Really, what I meant by 'hardcore hip-hop' was more the gangsta end of things... Obviously hip-hop represents a wide range of positions and subject matter. I listen to most of them.

I'm not sure what assumptions you think were in my initial post, but I am not saying anything about culture being bound to race.

I disagree with it because I have seen/heard people use the term "wigger" on anyone who does anything remotely associated with black culture, from using slang to dressing certain ways to associating with a black people. The hip-hop restriction you posit doesn't really exist (even if it was restricted to people aping apsects of hip-hop, I think you'd find that someone who aped Mos Def, Queen Latifah or Andre 3000 is just as likely to get called "wigger" as someone aping Tupac, which implies to me that the term is much more about the race associated with hip-hop culture than it is hip-hop culture itself).

I disagree with it because I have seen/heard people use the term "wigger" on anyone who does anything remotely associated with black people, from using certain slang to dressing certain ways to even associating with a black person. The hip-hop restriction you posit doesn't really exist (even if it was restricted to people aping apsects of hip-hop, I think you'd find that someone who aped Mos Def, Queen Latifah or Andre 3000 is just as likely to get called "wigger" as someone aping Tupac, which implies to me that the term is much more about the race associated with hip-hop culture than it is hip-hop culture itself).

I wasn't trying to say that Ben is saying culture is bound to race. I was trying to say that the restriction he put on the use of the word "wigger" is false.

To answer your second point, I would say that "black culture" exists, but I try to avoid using it as a term because I think humanity in general isn't intelligent enough to fully appreciate what is actually meant when people speak in these terms.

there are a lot of internet sites/bbs where 16 year old suburban kids will adopt hip-hop superhero personas and battle each other as a form of escapism.

URLS, please!!! "Hip-Hop superhero personas" sounds very 1981.

just like not all white people are not businessmen who listen to Journey.

Interesting double negative there.

And you are probably correct that wigger is used more often in the way you describe it than the way I did. And I agree that that way is not a good way. But I wasn't really trying to proscribe general usage of the term.

I think that saying there are all kinds of hip-hop and all kinds of people of all different colors listening to it in all different places is all well and good. But there are cultural transactions going on between these sounds, groups and places, that often involve race. You're talking about one type of transaction, or rather a way in which people try and shut down transactions.

I was just making a suggestion (not an 'assumption' or a 'restriction') about how another type of transaction might work, and how the word 'wigger' might apply to it. Probably I'm being too abstract about it.

???? The first statement of the post I was arguing against did try to proscribe general usage of the term, though.

Curtis: HA!

Where are the blonkies? Or Afreckerwoods?

Actually, I met a guy awhile back that wrote a book called Afralachia, about generations of black folks living in Appalachia, it was very friggin good.

And then, there's the phenomenon of the "frullet", which is the combination of the "mullet" and "afro" hairstyles, quite popular on shaggy unbathed hippies...and don't get me started on the white-guys-with-dreads.

URLS, please!!! "Hip-Hop superhero personas" sounds very 1981.

Or even 1995 if yr the American Taliban.

allah akbar!

i agreed with this above, but, i got to thinking, it does depend on who is doing the calling. listeners of the above artists might call a tupac listener (right here on ilx you see can ox listeners calling trife a wigga for his populist hip hop stance - which is what i suspect trife was hinting at in the question)

i agreed with this above, but, i got to thinking, it does depend on who is doing the calling. listeners of the above artists might call a tupac listener a wigga.

(right here on ilx you see can ox listeners calling trife a wigga for his populist hip hop stance - which is what i suspect trife was hinting at in the question)

One of the big socialist movers and shakers in student politics down here addressed a Bangladeshi friend of mine as a "brother" - and not in the familial sense. For some reason this pisses me off more than a hundred pasty-faced gangsta wannabes.

Speakers at union meetings in the u.s. still tend to start off with "brothers and sisters" and I would imagine that what with the ALP and all the term "brother" still has that meaning in australia too.

not that i have ever said it to anyone

in fact, usually i say "boss" unless it iz a gurl when i say "guy"