Everything But the Burden: What White People Are Taking from Black Culture [Paperback]

Greg Tate (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 9, 2003

White kids from the ’burbs are throwing up gang signs. The 2001 Grammy winner for best rap artist was as white as rice. And blond-haired sorority sisters are sporting FUBU gear. What is going on in American culture that’s giving our nation a racial-identity crisis?

Following the trail blazed by Norman Mailer’s controversial essay “The White Negro,” Everything but the Burden brings together voices from music, popular culture, the literary world, and the media speaking about how from Brooklyn to the Badlands white people are co-opting black styles of music, dance, dress, and slang. In this collection, the essayists examine how whites seem to be taking on, as editor Greg Tate’s mother used to tell him, “everything but the burden”–from fetishizing black athletes to spinning the ghetto lifestyle into a glamorous commodity. Is this a way of shaking off the fear of the unknown? A flattering indicator of appreciation? Or is it a more complicated cultural exchange? The pieces in Everything but the Burden explore the line between hero-worship and paternalism.

Among the book’s twelve essays are Vernon Reid’s “Steely Dan Understood as the Apotheosis of ‘The White Negro,’” Carl Hancock Rux’s “The Beats: America’s First ‘Wiggas,’” and Greg Tate’s own introductory essay “Nigs ’R Us.”

Other contributors include: Hilton Als, Beth Coleman, Tony Green, Robin Kelley, Arthur Jafa, Gary Dauphin, Michaela Angela Davis, dream hampton, and Manthia diAwara.



From the Hardcover edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

There's an old remark to the effect that if you toss a Harvard boy in a locked room with a ghetto kid for a month, well, who'll come out sounding like whom? This collection, edited by Village Voice critic Tate (Flyboy in the Buttermilk), attempts a sociology of that transaction, as repeated perpetually throughout American culture. Contributors including Carl Hancock-Rux (on Eminem), Hilton Als (on Richard Pryor) and Renee Green (on a complex of film and social theory) advance considerations more specifically directed than Norman Mailer's classic "The White Negro."
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Library Journal

How does the majority, dominant, power-holding culture appropriate elements of the disenfranchised minority culture? In myriad ways, according to this collection of new essays edited by Village Voice writer Tate. From Picasso and Pollock to Steely Dan and Eminem, the white imitation of black ways has profoundly "colored" Western culture. Despite the book's subtitle, this work is as much about the varied emotional and intellectual responses of black thinkers to this phenomenon as it is about cultural appropriation per se. Ranging from Hilton Als to Jonathan Lethem, the contributors include professors, artists, musicians, and writers, and their essays embrace research (on the Left and the "Negro Question"), theory (on the primal history of thugs), and personal reflection (whether an impassioned account of sexual jealousy or reserved observations on James Brown and Malian youth), plus snippets of verse and drama. The degree of formality in the language varies enough to be distracting. The collection's stylistic diversity and idiosyncratic selection of topics create a provocative, if rather trying, reading experience. Recommended for substantial academic and public collections on race and American culture.
Janet Ingraham Dwyer, Worthington Libs., OH
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Broadway (September 9, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 076791497X
• ISBN-13: 978-0767914970
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.5 x 8.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #700,076 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

26 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Read Cornell West instead, April 21, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Everything But the Burden: What White People Are Taking from Black Culture (Hardcover)

I had very high hopes for this collection--so high, in fact, that I kept hoping that it would get better all the way to the last essay. The first and main problem, I think, is that this is a topic better dealt with in a book-length and coherent manner. Oddly, though, I found "Race Matters" by Cornell West much more satisfying than this book even though that, too, is a collection. Perhaps the topic of black cultural influence needs at least a coherent idealogy within a collection of essays in order for a book to address it properly. Either way, this collection lacks a cohesive theme, and also a discernible sense of the problem. Because the essays deal with different aspects of white appropriation (and some, like the essay discussing "kinky afro human hair" don't seem to touch on white appropriation at all), a clear discussion of the issues surrouding white appropriation is impossible.

The second problem I had with this collection was the emphasis on anger--as discernible from indignation, a sense of irony, or irritation. I have never felt that emphasizing rage or race hatred is a productive method of dealing with racial issues, and I maintain my position here. Race is already an emotional issue, and I feel that a book exploring white appropriation of black culture should (1) explore the causes for such appropriation, (2) analyze the emotions that such appropriation elicits throughout the black community--and the white community, and (3) perhaps suggest possible ways to use white appropriation to raise the socioeconomic position of blacks as a community. This book emphasizes step (2), wih almost nothing of (1) and (3), and further almost exclusively highlights anger as the prevailing emotion. Surely there is SOMEONE in the black community who has some other emotion, at least in combination with anger, like a sense of irony, or sadness, or disappointment with regard to WHICH aspects of black culture are being appropriated. In addition, the attitudes of the white community (including the appropriators and the older generation who often dislike appropriation of black culture) with regard to approriation, and the reasons for such attitudes.

Last, I don't even feel like this collection explored all the ways that whites appropriate black culture! The most important aspects were covered, like the exoticization of black men and women as sexual objects, music, and athletics, but I still felt like there were other topics that weren't covered. For instance, the discussion of athletics and speech patterns was cursory at best; additionally, there are political and religious appropriations that have taken place (the religious appropriation being especially visible in the South, where numerous traditional Gospel songs have found their way into white churches). The efforts black politicians have to make to attract white constituencies is left undiscussed, as is the co-opting of black worship traditions by white evangelical churches.

On the whole, I'm very disappointed, and I'm going to re-read "Race Matters" to erase this book from my mind.

6 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars speaking hip hop's mind, April 6, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Everything But the Burden: What White People Are Taking from Black Culture (Hardcover)

greg tate's "everything but the burden" is a wide ranging collection of literary essays most of which deal convincinglyand several quite brilliantly,with the subject at hand- how white folks appropriate and misappropriate black culture.
the writer attributes the book's title to his mother who "once wrote a poem called 'everything but the burden'" in which she railed against white people's wanting everything culturally identifiable as black---but the burden.
my personal favorites among the essays are the ones by the brilliant writer and editor greg tate; fashion stylist michaela angela davis' poignant piece on growing up black and beautiful but not sure of being either; historian and jazz scholar robin b d kelly; writer and etherealist latasha n diggs satire on her satirical fetish for asian men ; and a breathtakingly informative and analytical piece on musician james brown's cultural influence on post- colonial west african youth by author/filmmaker/scholar manthia diawara.

an altogether welcome addition to the increasingly important writings about what"burden" contributor and artist/cinematographer arthur jafa calls the "post-soul culture".

4.0 out of 5 stars Everything But the Burden, January 28, 2009

By 

lyngirl (Massachusetts, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Everything But the Burden: What White People Are Taking from Black Culture (Paperback)

Everything But the Burden: What White People Are Taking from Black CultureThis collection of essays and short commentaries is well-written and hits the mark not just for African Americans, but for those people who keep current - or want to keep current - with the origins of all those hip, cool sayings. It will be surprising to find that among some of us, this phenomenon is far from new.