Race and Hip: The History

I'm frustrated, but let's start by saying something positive, shall we? There are plenty of reasons to read John Leland's Hip: The History. So many, in fact, that I'll bullet point a few of them for easy consumption.

• As the on-point title indicates, it's a nonfiction book about the history of "hipness" in America, which according to Leland stretches all the way back to colonial times. I mean, come on; doesn't that sound awesome? It is.
  
  
• It's a nonfiction book about hipness published in 2004, making the book a sort of historical artifact itself. Apparently trucker hats were the cool thing to wear nine years ago.
  
  
• Hip: The History is not nearly as smug as its title implies. Leland obviously knows way more than most of us on the subject of cool, but there's rarely a note of condescension or cleverness. "There's something inescapably nerdy about compiling a history of hip," he writes in the preface, and he apparently means it, since the nerd historian (read: endearing nerd historian) is how Leland comes across.
• It never once uses Wes Anderson- or Portland-derived signifiers to describe "hipsters," a welcome relief from the inexplicable and increasingly stale pigeonholing that a lot of people seem obsessed with perpetuating.
• It's surprisingly educational. Leland traces an often unpredictable path of hipness through American history, and he rarely spares the historical details to flesh out the journey. The book is full of some seriously interesting historical and cultural connections. In addition to hitting the obvious "hip" touchstones (jazz, beat poetry, drug culture), Leland spends a great deal of time fleshing out more nonstandard portions of the hip story, including the history of blackface, the connections between hardboiled detective novels and gangsta rap, the rhythms of Chuck Jones cartoons, and the role of the dot-com boom in shaping hipsterdom. It's all pretty fascinating and insightful.
• Speaking of insightful, Leland does a wonderful job of examining race as a significant factor in hipness for most of the book (most—we'll get to the rest in a second). If the book has a thesis, it's the idea that hipness is the interplay between the white and black races throughout American history, with an emphasis on interplay. While the book doesn't minimize the damaging role white supremacy, slavery, and outright racism play in the story of America, Leland argues (quite effectively) that "hip" consists of contributions from both white and black culture. His analysis interrogates clear-cut racial narratives such as "the white boy who stole the blues" to find the cultural swirl between the races that yielded "cool"—the blues, for example, was created by American slaves drawing on both their African heritage and the European musical traditions taught to them by their white owners.

Just keep all those things in mind as I go on, because I want to make it clear that I thought this book was overall pretty great. For fourteen chapters, Leland examines the cultural history of America with style, depth, and nuance, avoiding easy answers and classifications while still providing a convincing case why "hipness" is important. And it's all good. The problem is that there are fifteen chapters, not fourteen.

Chapter 15, "Everybody's Hip: Superficial Reflections on the White Caucasian," is meant to bring readers up to speed with the state of hipness in the present day (which, for today's readers, means nine years ago). And in that chapter, Leland says this:

"The trucker hat[*] and other post-hip accessories play with the meaning of whiteness in a multicultural world. They make white visible. Without the black/white dichotomy to anchor it, and without numerical dominance to give it weight, whiteness is up for grabs. Especially in cities that are now 'majority-minority,' or less than half non-Hispanic white, whiteness is no longer the baseline, something taken for granted; it's something to be explored, turned sideways, debated for its currency. It's a mask, like burnt cork or 'blackting,' the slang for acting black ... Post-hip treats whiteness the way fashion and entertainment have historically treated blackness. It swaths white identity not in race pride but in quotation marks. Whiteness doesn't define you, you define it—and you don't have to be white to wear it ... The history of the white negro [i.e. how white culture mimics black culture] has not come to the end, but without the binary opposition of black and white, it has come to an end."

Long quotation, I know. So I'll be to-the-point: I just... think Leland's wrong. Dead wrong.

Listen, I was fourteen and living in the American South in 2004, not fifty-five and living in the East Village like John Leland, so maybe I missed out on some gloriously transcendent cultural moment when the Millennial generation shrugged off America's history of racial tension. I could have missed that. My life exposure is limited; I get that. But to say that contemporary culture is "without the binary opposition of black and white"? I just don't understand that.

I realize that in this quotation Leland talks mostly about whiteness. But it's only a page earlier that he writes, "For the post-hip generation, the black and white poles that for so long defined race have given way to a kaleidoscope of color, race, and ethnicity," including all ethnicities in the discussion. To be clear, I agree that "race" is a somewhat fluid concept that resists hard definitions; what I'm about to say has nothing to do with what I think races are or aren't in a scientific sense. I'm just talking about how society views race. And that's my problem with what he's saying. We aren't in this "kaleidoscope" utopia of race, or at least we don't act like we are. We may have gotten better than previous decades, but can we really say that America still isn't huddled around reductive definitions of white and black?

Racial relations in America are still broken and binary. I'm white, I'm privileged, I'm mostly free from any sort of racial discrimination, and even I can see that. I don't want to speak with any sort of authority on the issue of race, because I am certainly not in a position to do such a thing. But I don't think I'm stepping over any line by saying that race (particularly that binary white/black definition Leland mentions) is still a big issue in the United States.

It's still widely acceptable for a person (even our president) with only one parent of African heritage to be viewed as "black." Doesn't that show a culture that tends toward "black and white poles" rather than a kaleidoscope? We just saw a major court case painted in racial terms of "white" and "black" by the mainstream media, despite that one of the individuals involved was of mixed race. I don't really see a free-flowing definition of race there.

Or fine, let's stay within American pop culture, the parameters of Leland's book. Can anyone listening to the new Kanye West album really say that racial identity isn't a part of the pop culture conversation anymore? And I can't even count how many people, even my own peers, I've heard place blame on hip hop for the corrosion of morality, responsibility, grammatical proficiency, etc. in black youngsters—always black, despite how kids of all races listen to rap, and always hip hop, as if it's the only musical genre that uses slang and occasionally promotes negative behavior. Or, on the other end of the spectrum, consider Vampire Weekend, a band that has been plagued with criticisms of being "too white" for their world music stylings since before they even dropped their first album**. I'm not saying there aren't nuances to any of these examples, nor am I saying whether or not race should be a factor in pop culture (that's a whole new conversation). I'm just saying it is a factor, and we need to be open about that.

Hip: The History has plenty of great things to say about race and its role in culture. It's one of the best things about the book, actually, and that's why I devoted a whole bullet point to it at the beginning of this post. And that's why I'm so disappointed. For a book that, prior to its final chapter, does such a good job avoiding easy answers on America's racial issues, dismissing race's role in modern culture just strikes me as awfully reductive and naïve. John Leland is throwing in the towel on an issue that's not at all in the past. "Well," he might as well be saying, "good thing we don't have to worry about that anymore." But we do.

Look, I realize that there's something kind of pompous and futile about ragging on a passage in a book almost a decade old. And I'm really trying to do my best to avoid that pompousness. Normally, I wouldn't even be saying anything about it, this little anecdote about a cultural moment nine years ago. The thing is, though, I still hear stuff like this today. I keep hearing people (even myself not so long ago) say things about how racism isn't such a big problem anymore or how we live in a post-racial society, and I've just gotten to the point where I can't get behind sentiments like that anymore.

Race is something we need to talk about. It's something we need to talk about with sensitivity and nuance. It's isn't something to ignore or dismiss with quick, all-inclusive answers. So... let's not do that.

And that's all, folks. Sorry. Had to get that out of my system. I'll get out of the pulpit now. Next time, it's back to carefree pop culture talk, I promise.


*I know, right? Who knew??

**Just for a moment can we sit back, put aside our differences, and reflect on how freaking good Modern Vampires of the City is? Man, I could listen to that album all day.