The white negro
Related: African Americans - white - black - hipster - Norman Mailer
Wigger
A Wigger (alternatives: Wigga, Whigger, Wafrican-American ) is a stereotype of a Caucasian person who emulates phrases, mannerisms, and fashion commonly and stereotypically associated with Black or hip-hop cultures. The stereotype of the wigger usually involves a young Caucasian person who generally knows little about their own background, or the culture they are appropriating, with the exception of the music, style, and slang associated with that culture, attributes generally understood as not fully representing any culture.
The term is a portmanteau combining the words "white nigger", or "wannabe nigger," and is thus it has historically been used in a derogatory manner. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wigger [Jun 2006]
The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster (1957) - Norman Mailer
The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster (1957) - Norman Mailer [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster (1957) - Norman Mailer
Our search for the rebels of the generation led us to the hipster. The hipster is an enfant terrible turned inside out. In character with his time, he is trying to get back at the conformists by lying low ... You can't interview a hipster because his main goal is to keep out of a society which, he thinks, is trying to make everyone over in its own image. He takes marijuana because it supplies him with experiences that can't be shared with "squares." He may affect a broad-brimmed hat or a zoot suit, but usually he prefers to skulk unmarked. The hipster may be a jazz musician; he is rarely an artist, almost never a writer. He may earn his living as a petty criminal, a hobo, a carnival roustabout or a freelance moving man in Greenwich Village, but some hipsters have found a safe refuge in the upper income brackets as television comics or movie actors. (The late James Dean, for one, was a hipster hero.) ... It is tempting to describe the hipster in psychiatric terms as infantile, but the style of his infantilism is a sign of the times. He does not try to enforce his will on others, Napoleon-fashion, but contents himself with a magical omnipotence never disproved because never tested. . . . As the only extreme nonconformist of his generation, he exercises a powerful if underground appeal for conformists, through newspaper accounts of his delinquencies, his structureless jazz, and his emotive grunt words.
- "Born 1930: The Unlost Generation "
by Caroline Bird
Harper's Bazaar, Feb. 1957
See also: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~DRBR2/whitenegro.html [Sept 2005]
inspired by Cool Rules: Anatomy of an Attitude (2000) - Dick Pountain, David Robins [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
see also: hip - cool - white - black
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