White Negroes

What I love most about Lauren Jackson's incisive and richly detailed work in White Negroes is how it does not imagine any cultural phenomenon as something that does not have a history attached to it. And through the work of charting that history, a new cultural understanding arises. This is a vital text--one that offers new ways of seeing, hearing, and consuming. --Hanif Abdurraqib, author of They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us Like 'intersectionality' and 'diversity' and 'neoliberalism' and perhaps even 'capitalism, ' the word 'appropriation' has taken on so many interpretations and interpolations as to court ontological disaster: what does it even mean? Lauren Michele Jackson wrestles with the idea, the concept, the history, the bodies, and the selves that are implicated in cultural appropriation. Jackson does not absolve anyone, but she does point toward some of the most complex corners of culture. In those corners she asks us to consider not freedom and choice but power. That emphasis on who can commodify appropriation is different from pedestrian debates about who can do appropriation. White Negroes is a mature meditation for debates that have, at times, wallowed in their own intellectual infancy. The collection is witty, wry, and welcome. In the vein of Imani Perry and Zoe Samudzi, this book is an excellent addition to critical thinking about culture and contemporary racial orders. --Tressie McMillan Cottom, author of Thick and Lower Ed We've needed this book for years, and yet somehow it's right on time. Miraculously, Lauren Michele Jackson is able to write about cultural appropriation in a way that doesn't make you want to drink a glass of sand. She brings incredible nuance and a sharp critical voice to a discussion that has sorely lacked both--yet somehow emerges with a text that is as accessible as it is theoretically relevant. Jackson avoids platitudes and easy answers, has a keen eye for history and popular culture, and, moreover, she is funny. --Eve L. Ewing, author of Electric Arches and Ghosts in the Schoolyard Blacking up--the American caucasoidal desire to inhabit, stage, and master an imaginary Black identity--has been a national obsession and a national enterprise since the antebellum days of traveling tent show minstrelsy. With language laced with critical clarity, tempered outrage, radical snark, and researched detail, Lauren Michele Jackson's White Negroes interrogates and exposes our present-day society of appropriated racial spectacle--highlighting a plethora of the ways contemporary white minstrelsy reproduces the erasures and violence of its Jim Crow-era predecessor, then circulates its bad-to-rad copies for profit and mockery through viral technology. Jackson eruditely connects the dots between such disparate phenomena of the modern racial age as Eminem, Christina Aguilera, Kim Kardashian, Rachel Dolezal, the fashion and cosmetic industries, the Whitney Biennial, and the appropriation of 'Bye Felisha.' In so doing, Jackson makes us wiser and even more disturbed about how much stolen Black imaging and ideations matter to the cultural, political, and economic maintenance of the nation's anti-Black status quo. --Greg Tate, author of Flyboy in the Buttermilk and editor of Everything but the Burden: What White People Are Taking from Black Culture Lauren Jackson takes a topic you've heard debated ad nauseam on social media and breathes much-needed new life into it. White Negroes is engaging and laced with wit and intelligence. --Ira Madison III, writer and podcast host