Author: Adam Mansbach
Publisher: Crown/Three Rivers Press
Employing the conceptual and satirical prose created by Paul Beatty in White Boy Shuffle, Adam Mansbach has penned a dynamite novel that explores race from the perspective of a hip-hop generation white male.
Macon is a white kid from Boston who has immersed himself knee-deep in “golden age” socio-political rap music. He becomes a cab driver spurned into robbing white fares in a narcissistic sense of racial revolutionary enlightenment. After purposely getting arrested for the crimes, Macon suddenly finds himself a media darling and newly appointed “black leader,” leading to a bizarre chain of events that culminate in a disastrous “Day of Apology.”
“I hope to jump start a discussion on race that has been dormant, largely due to a lack of investment on the part of white people.” A discussion that “when whites do participate”, Adam observes, they set the “parameters” for the discussion, or simply leave when it becomes “uncomfortable.” For the character Macon, it his refusal to accept responsibility for his rhetoric that serves to illustrate the existing myopia far too many white kids bring in their miscegenation into hip-hop culture.
The most important aspect of white experience in black culture (as Adam articulates) is whites’ false sense of absolution. “The white desire to be accepted in hip-hop is largely a desire for absolution, a desire to shed our institutional and economic privilege symbolically. Not abandon it. Just no longer be held accountable for it, to trade action for identification.” By wearing phat gear and empathizing with the struggles of black youth, many white kids are fooled into thinking they have been pardoned. However, when called to task about the continued institutional effects of white privilege, most whites are willing to retreat, continuing what Adam describes as an “individualistic experience” that ignores community responsibility in deconstructing issues of race and white privilege.
Angry White Boy is not a panacea for white self-criticism. Mansbach tackles a myriad of issues including the commercialization of hip-hop and pseudo Black nationalism. He utilizes fiction to highlight the “absurdity of the fact we are forced into these rigid identities that ultimately cannot sustain themselves, and when they bump into each other, they tend to shatter and expose their own brittleness and subjectivity, revealing the humanity inside.”
In this age of shifting racial, ethnic, and even cultural identities, what better time then now to examine what whiteness means, both “individualistically” and rhetorically? Angry White Boy is an excellent vehicle to open that discussion.
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