The ‘White Negro’ Hall of Fame Needs a New Wing for Rachel Dolezal
22nd June 2015
Let’s welcome Rachel Dolezal to the “White Negro” Hall of Fame, a place named in honor of Norman Mailer’s seminal 1957 essay about race identity and the world of hipsters. We’ll do a quick sprint through the exhibits, checking out some musicians, writers, and of course its founding theorist. As you’ll see, this Hall of Fame is really a labyrinth, and Ms. Dolezal’s unexpected induction could require the place to build her a wing of her own.
And our government is just the one to build it. At your expense, of course.
Surely the most famous credo of ‘White Negro’ yearning belongs to Beat master Jack Kerouac. In On the Road (1957), he wrote, “At lilac evening I walked with every muscle aching among the lights of 27th and Welton in the Denver colored section, wishing I were a Negro, feeling the best the white world had offered was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy , kicks, darkness, music, not enough night…. I wished I were a Denver Mexican, or even a poor overworked Jap, anything but what I was so drearily, a “white man” disillusioned…. I was only myself… sad strolling in this violet dark, this unbearably sweet night, wishing I could change worlds with the happy, true-hearted, ecstatic Negroes of America….”
Hipsters always want to be something other than what they are. Yoda would’ve spanked every damned one of them.
Baldwin lets on in his 1961 Esquire essay about Mailer, “The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy,” that none of these jazz players regarded Mailer as remotely hip. “They thought he was a real sweet ofay cat, but a little frantic.”
Real black people aren’t fooled by fake black people.