White musicians and "artistic" use of the N-word: A Discussion and Social History

As a non-parent, I am amazed at the amount of landmines you have to negotiate but if you do it in the right spirit, I think it tends to lessen the chance that your kids will turn out to be sociopaths.

This seems like the kind of thing that people of the color-blind school would like to get behind: Just raise a kid in an environment where race is no big deal, and your kids will see race as no big deal. But unfortunately, they say, things don’t often work out that way. Several long-term studies quoted by the authors have shown that the more diverse the school, the more likely it is that kids will self-segregate. As a result, says University of Austin’s Rebecca Bigler, who considers herself a huge supporter of integrated schools, “Going to an integrated school gives you just as many chances to learn stereotypes as to unlearn them.”

I went to a v racially diverse elementary school and I don't feel like I saw that much self-segregation going on. Maybe I just didn't notice it. But I mingled with anyone of any race and didn't really develop conceptions of race beyond what people looked like until later on. (Then again I was an aspie rube who until first grade thought the only difference between genders was hair length. Then I saw a girl with short hair and realized there must be something else going on.)

It actually took me forever to realize that some white people might hear this word a lot, used casually, and then wind up thinking of it as a casual word they can "reframe" in a song. That honestly took me a while to realize. Because, you know ... if you are black, you're not really going to hear white people use this word in person in a way that's not extremely non-casual and/or aggressively pointed at you. I'm not sure white people who choose to use it have, like, a reciprocal realization along those lines.

was about exactly this just the other day, actually, when i heard one coworker had called another a "black mf" (twice, ugh). the incident was sort of a weird life-before-my-eyes flash of all the casual racist shit i've heard, all the "i'm-not-racist-buts", really, really angering, saddening. (curious about the homo perspective on this wrt casual gay bashing--cuz i know i hear a lot of it--and i mean gay isn't the color of your skin so god i bet ppl sit through so much of that horseshit. right there in front of them. and as infuriating it is to me as a hetero, i just can't imagine...)

the tendency to excoriate ian mackay kinda sticks in my craw, too.

i know this is a minor thread in this discussion, but i have to say. in my experience, ian mackaye's weirdness about race has tended to register on the radar of people of color i know much more than among white people. which is not particularly surprising, whatever. i know he means a lot to people, but the part of this that gets weird is how defensive white fans of his sometimes get when people point out his weirdness about race.

it's not really about excoriating him, but i will admit that i've never been able to get into minor threat/fugazi/whatever in the way a lot of my social cohort was into those bands because i found statements he had made about race...alienating. again, i know people love him but he's not jesus.

lol "minor thread" geddit. (that was unintentional)

if those dead sea scroll guys ever dig up that flipside interview with jesus, we're in for a shocker.

From a 2007 MySpace interview I just found:

Ian MacKaye: Another example, Minor Threat has a song called "Guilty of Being White." I grew up in Washington D.C., and at the time I was growing up it was 70 or 75 percent black, I went to a junior high school that was 95 percent black and I was beaten up for being a white kid. I wrote a song about how I thought it was wrong to beat me up for the color of my skin. Writing a song that was an anti-racist song. And yet fifteen years after I wrote that song I was in Poland and I had a white power skinhead guy thank me for writing such a great song about the white race. So you can see that the context has a lot to do with everything. In some ways to answer your question I feel like to hear this lyric I'm like "Wow, I wouldn't write those lyrics the same way again." But I wouldn't have the opportunity anyway. I love those songs. I stand behind them all.

"So you can see that the context has a lot to do with everything" just seems like a way to avoid talking about any specific lyrics in the song that are kind of clueless about the way racism operates in American history and in the culture more generally. I find it heartening that he wouldn't write those lyrics again, but it still seems like an insufficient response.

I was also surprised by how willing people were to give Ian MacKaye a pass. Reading the MRR interview, what sticks out most for me is actually what comes in between the two quotes that were singled out on this thread:

throughout my entire life, I've been brought up in this whole thing where the white man was shit because of slavery. So I go to class and we do history, and for 3/4 of the year slavery is all we hear about. It's all we hear about. We will race through the Revolutionary War or the founding of America; we'd race through all that junk. It's just straight education. We race through everything, and when we'd get to slavery, they'd drag it all the way out. Then everything has to do with slavery or black people. You get to the 1950's, they don't talk about nothing except the black people. Even WWII, they talk about the black regiments. In English, we don't read all the novelists, we read all the black novelists. Every week is African King's Week. And after a while, I would come out of a history class, and this has happened to me many times, like in junior high school, and you know that kids are belligerent in junior high, and these kids would jack my ass up and say, "What the fuck, man, why are you putting me in slavery?" To me, racism is never going to end until people get off this whole thing. It's going flim-flam, back and forth. When people will just get off the whole guilt trip... First, all the white people were like "Fuck the niggers", and all of a sudden, it's "The black man is great. We love him. We're going to do everything for him," all the time. It's never going to get anywhere, because one generation it'll be the KKK, the next generation it'll be the Black Panthers. Now we see the KKK come back in again, more popular. I think the best way we're going to have to deal with it is that if I am able to say "nigger" without everyone gasping, and if I'm able to say that word, because I don't have any problems with that word.

(Also, I'm not white and am way the fuck skinny.)

holy shit, ian

Also, these:

And I'm just saying I'm guilty of being white - it's my one big crime. That's why I get so much fucking shit at school, that's why I cannot get on welfare in Washington, most likely. That's why when we took the PSAT's, when Jeff checked off the black box, he got awards, he got scholarships, he got all kinds of interest, but when he admitted he was white, all that was gone...

I: No, I'm saying if someone made you constantly feel guilty, what do you think that may result in?

D: A resentment..

I: Thank you. And what would that resentment lead to? You just go right back. They're going to beat me over the head about African kings and stuff to the point where I'm going to say "Well, fuck the African kings. And fuck the black people too. Fuck all this shit. I've had it, blah, blah, blah..." Guilty of being white.

I'd tend to give him a pass on that because it's a common enough resentment borne of youthful myopia, and it's asking a lot of a kid to have some larger perspective when he's getting beat up.
It's the "purity of violence" stuff that gives me the creeps.

19 isn't that young!

ian mackkkye

i dunno 19 is just outta the cocoon imo. how long prior was he still being beaten up? god of all the idiot things i probably said when i was 19.

but that debate aside, that interview there was from 2007, SO LIKE UM

There's a pretty terrible Joe Jackson song called "Battleground" from his Beat Crazy LP which is totally relevant to this thread. By "terrible" I mostly mean terrible-sounding -- it's a sort of talking-reggae type of song very much in the vein of Linton Kwesi Johnson -- though I'm sure the words are just as embarrassing as I remember them being (though which I probably didn't completely know what to make of them at the age of 15 TBH).

there was so much fucked up "thinking" going on in the hardcore/straight edge world going on at that time - not giving him a pass whatsoever but shit was ugly in a ton of ways - a lot of it was just garden variety adolescent zombiedom, but in my experience full-on eighties hardcore esp sxe was a hair away from lord of the flies shit at the best of times - kind of a brutal environment that pulled out some awesomeness for sure but real ugliness like ian's racial shit too

woah that interview was 2007? fuck

So like I said before: fuck Ian MacKAye

the myspace quasi-apology interview is from 2007. the horseshit raving about African Kings one is from a long time ago.

er, the myspace one was 2007, i'm not sure on the one Sundar was quoting--which was a holy mother of a quote

xpost--A HA

i've always had trouble squaring the part of me that thinks minor threat rock with the part that wants to dick punch ian mackaye

The easy resolution to that is to dick punch Ian MacKaye and then feel slightly guilty about it years later, in the privacy of your own home.

I have that problem with tons of shit from around then. rollins & jello are dick-punchable too.

yeah, he would have been, what, 45 when he gave the interview I quoted from? is that old enough to be held responsible for your statements?

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3108/2656404984_31397e7cc6.jpg
from that bands in surprising t-shirts thread

(FWIW, the MRR interview is from 1983, when Ian M was 21. I say all kinds of ridiculous shit when I'm drunk and bullshitting but this was something he said in an interview that he knew would be published. He was explaining lyrics to a song (that he brought up in the interview) that he had written and thought about. You guys know you can vote at 18, right?

All that said, I'd be the first person to want to forgive someone for stupid stuff they said 30 years ago if they have shown that they have changed. [This is really problematized by the Myspace interview, however.] I'm just pointing out that these were seemingly earnest comments from an adult who had an audience. If anything, I think I find it kind of fascinating and bizarre more than anything.)

ian's used the more recent "context is everything" argument re: minor threat lyrics a lot in recent years, not just for "guilty" - how straight edge was just him talking to his 15 closest friends, that he was only recording his own teenage life, never meant to inspire a movement or be seen as a role model etc. which may have roots in the truth - but disingenuous at best as the whole Dischord thing had a pretty explicit political angle, if only on a kids unite! level... so kinda hard to buy that he was oblivious to the idea that he was writing anthems and that racially charged anthems are fucking noxious

eh that quote about history class, even if it's old, is fucking vile

YOU CAN'T "GET OFF THIS WHOLE THING," FUCKFACE

excuse me, i'd like to "get off" 500 years of history

http://991.com/newGallery/Prince-Gett-Off-Remix-EP-373500.jpg

23 racist positions in a one-night stand

i didn't know any of that about ian mackaye, btw. but i always thought he was a dick, so somehow not surprised.

yeah, since prior posts i've been mentally unearthing dumb shit i've said and thought during those just-into-the-real-world awkward years and through the pangs of embarrassment i've sat here feeling i could not come up with anything near as ridiculous and dead-dumb-poisonous as that MRR interview, thank god.

(like holy lol me after i first read zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance but that is a very different douche plateau to inhabit)

To respond to something from Will earlier: I checked an online transcript, and you're right, Tarantino's character doesn't use the word in Reservoir Dogs. (Other characters do, five times altogether.) Apologies to Mr. Brown.

yeah, he would have been, what, 45 when he gave the interview I quoted from? is that old enough to be held responsible for your statements?

― horseshoe, Tuesday, June 22, 2010 7:13 PM (56 minutes ago) Bookmark

i mean, that's all i'm saying.

Yeah, I think we're all in agreement, ultimately.

in the thread that occasioned this one, i worked hard to defend the cocorosie song. i did this because i genuinely liked the album at the time of its release (less so since), and because i want to believe that the band's heart was in the right place, even as they stuffed their mouths with feet. i can't resolve the questions about white artists and "that word." i like the oblivians. i like the country teasers. i think rock 'n' roll nigger is an incredible song and love a lot of elvis costello stuff from his early years, including oliver's army. but i've never been in the least comfortable with the word, especially not when it comes from the mouths of white musicians. there's a part of me that always has and always will feel sick in response to rock 'n' roll nigger and jesus loves me, stuck with knives.

in the 70s, maybe, it was easier to find some value in that experience of lacerated revulsion. it was the sign of something awful being exorcised, a pain that might lead to healing or transformation. the shock of a taboo transgressed, valuable in itself. our sad track record since indicates that this wasn't ever true. the wounds still fester, still ache. the "liberating" rush we get from bravely shattering those taboos only seems to etch them deeper. but i won't condemn the artists that try, in good faith, to solve the unresolvable. maybe this is the most craven sort of apologia, but there's potential value even in showing people where they can't go. what remains untouchable and why. and if it weren't for well-intentioned (and questionably intentioned) fools, we might not know this. that sounds forced, and i suppose it is. no one who's spent any conscious time in the last fifty years can really claim to have been in the dark about that word's power to do real and lasting harm.

maybe in some imaginary future, when we've resolved or at least papered over our racial damage, people will look back at songs like jesus loves me and see them as forward-thinking harbingers of a better way. but i doubt it. and in the here and now, much as i want to grant cocorosie the benefit of the doubt, it's hard not to see their experiments as rather selfish, thoughtless and naive. however well-intentioned and aesthetically compelling i might find them.

A friend (Jewish '70s punk from Queens) went on a rant about Patti Smith and Lennon on this very topic last week, his main point being the two songs in question resulted directly from their being pompous asses who saw themselves as "heroes."

A friend (Jewish '70s punk from Queens) OTM

did you guys mention white n***** by The Avengers? penelope houston was probably 10 when she wrote it. the fact that she looked like hitler's dream date at the time doesn't help. the lyrics always confused me. can't believe that they still do it live for reunion shows. though it is one of their famous punk anthems, guess they have to. the original recording (late 70's) seems of its time a la patti's song, but today...yeah, just seems doubly wrong. (or maybe recent youtube footage of 50-something ex-punks never makes anyone look good)

http://www.penelope.net/white.nigger.html

Not sure why Ian wanted to get on welfare when his parents were pretty well off from what i've heard/read. Wikipedia tells me he was raised in a super tolerant open minded environment....so maybe this stuff is what it took for him to rebel; he had to talk some major shit to feel like a proper rebellious teenager? A dose of fascism to piss off his liberal parents/teachers? That probably also ties into the macho violent side of M.T. (which always seems ironic when you look at the lyrics to Bottled Violence etc)... I know listening back to some Minor Threat boot that chunklet posted recently I was REALLY embarrassed by the amount of really sexist language and violent posing coming from Ian; and it just stunk of angry teenage inadequacy/lashing out at people for attention.

Always struck me as slightly silly that Ian got so pissed about Slayer covering Guilty Of Being White (they notoriously sing "Guilty Of Being RIGHT!" at the end) when they were probably just being more honest about trying to shock/piss off people than he was when he wrote it; most of his annoyance is probably just embarrassment at that song being focused on again. Also funny when you consider one of Slayer isn't 'white'...

Given all that; I'm inclined to let by gones be by gones (despite him being at the totally responsible age of 19 when he said/did all this) shit, just because he's made up for it since then by supporting a lot of good causes, doing speeches against racism at shows etc, and because despite 19 being a responsible age, it's still possible for people to be idiots then and still change for the better and realise what dicks they were in hindsight....

here's that minor threat bootleg by the way: http://chunklet.com/index.cfm?section=blogs&ID=559

i deleted it a while ago but i recall there's some ranting from ian about some drunk girl in the audience which is so far away from fugazi show banter its crazy! and as i haven't listened to it for a while i won't quote it here because its pretty awful and i don't want to misquote.

Also funny when you consider one of Slayer isn't 'white'

yeah that lyric change was Tom Araya's brainwave as I always understood it - he seems like a 'complicated' guy shall we say

I do tend to give MES a pass on The Classical; something about throwing the word "obligatory" in there always implies in my mind that he's saying that certain groups of people need to be marginalized in order for society to structure itself

Pretty sure it's about annoying white middle class liberals (esp. those who worked at the NME)

one of Slayer isn't 'white'

Two, actually. Araya is Chilean and Dave Lombardo is Cuban.

Am I alone in having trouble with this American definition of Latin Americans as non-white?

It's complicated, obv. I don't know what the Slayer guys look like though.

Indeed, some pretty white Cubans and Chileans out there!