Dude, where’s my white privilege?
CVK
I take it back. This is now officially the most asinine thing I’ve ever read. Actually, it’s more disgustingly racist than asinine. The Washington Post describes the latest craze amongst the (white) hipster set:
Tha Pumpsta, who happens be white, has built a following in the past few years by staging monthly “Kill Whitie” parties in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, for large groups of white hipsters. His proclaimed goal, in between spinning booty-bass, Miami-style frenetically danceable hip-hop records that are low on lyrical depth and high on raunchiness, is to “kill the whiteness inside.”
What that means, precisely, is debatable, but it has something to do with young white hipsters believing they can shed white privilege by parodying the black hip-hop life. In this way, they hope to escape their uptight conditioning and get in touch with the looser soul within them.
Essentially, these parties are creating a safe space where white people who are scared of black people can get together and enjoy/mock black culture without worrying about retribution from black people. My favorite quote is this:
A regular Kill Whitie partygoer, she tried the conventional (that is, non-hipster) hip-hop clubs but found the men “really hard-core.” In this vastly whiter scene, Casady said that “it’s a safe environment to be freaky.”
In other words, “black men scare me, but I still want to be slutty so I come here to this non-threatening, all-white environment instead.” Ridiculous. You know that these parties are filled with women who clutch their handbags tighter and turn their rings around whenever a black man gets too close to them.
Thankfully, one of our own pointed out the inherent racism of these parties:
Sekaran, a native New Yorker from a mixed-race family — part black, part South Asian — occasionally works as a deejay and knows all about hipster irony. “That doesn’t make it any less disturbing,” Sekaran said. “Their attitude is, ‘It’s our privilege to do this because we’re in our own little clique, in our own little world.’ “
Mixed Media Watch - tracking media representations of mixed people on 29 Jun 2006 at 5:30 am
[…] Apparently he and Sandra Bernhard are on the same “hipsters like us are beyond race so it’s ok for us to spew racist garbage because it’s like, you know, meta and post-modern and stuff” bandwagon, along with Kill Whitey and Blackface Jesus. […]