Talk:The White Negro

With all due respect to my man Morgan, I don't think this phenomenon is verifiable or notable enough to create an article. Moreover, this movement basically has nothing to do with the wigga movement in the '90s to now. The only similarity is both involve white (although wiggas can be interpret as Wannabe "Black" which could include any race) attempting to be African American.-Certified.Gangsta 23:05, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

Name of article
I personally think that this article should be the full name of Mailer's essay. People searching for "The White Negro" will be redirected correctly. I guess it is just a matter of taste. To me the full title seems more dignified and makes it clear the article is not about the people but the essay. I have no problem if people think the shorter title is better, I don't see any harm either way. Jaque Hammer (talk) 16:36, 3 October 2010 (UTC)
 * If no one objects I will change it back to the full title. Jaque Hammer (talk) 10:38, 4 October 2010 (UTC)
 * There is no misunderstanding. The full title is unnecessary, as there is no disambiguation issue here.  There is no other article with this, or similar, title, and there is no article about the "people," whatever you mean by that.  The full title is simply unnecessary, and there is no reason to use it. ---  RepublicanJacobite  The'FortyFive'  15:46, 8 October 2010 (UTC)
 * By "the people" I meant the "white negroes" themselves. By giving the full title you make it clear that the article is not about them but about Mr. Mailer's essay. And it is the title he gave it. Why is that not also a good title for an encyclopedia article about it? Jaque Hammer (talk) 15:50, 8 October 2010 (UTC)
 * It is highly unlikely anyone will search for "White Negro" and find themselves in the wrong place. This does not seem like a likely search term.  If someone searches for "White Negro" they are searching for the Mailer essay. ---  RepublicanJacobite  The'FortyFive'  15:56, 8 October 2010 (UTC)
 * I had never heard of the essay before, or else I had heard of it and had forgotten about it. I came to this article by a link and I expected it to be about white people who want to be black. I don't see what's wrong with giving the full title. For one thing it's more dignified. You wouldn't title the article on President Lyndon Johnson "LBJ" although that title makes it clear who you are talking about. (More clear in fact since there is another President Johnson.) Jaque Hammer (talk) 16:01, 8 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Your example is apples and oranges. The full title is unnecessary, and has nothing to do with dignity. ---  RepublicanJacobite  The'FortyFive'  16:27, 8 October 2010 (UTC)
 * If you like I will nominate the article for deletion. Jaque Hammer (talk) 21:23, 8 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Then again, probably not. It is mentioned in Mailer's article as one of his most important short writings, or at least as one that attracted a lot of attention. Jaque Hammer (talk) 23:40, 8 October 2010 (UTC)
 * The article was taken to AfD back in '07 and the vote was overwhelmingly in favor of keeping it. I have no idea why you would even suggest such action. ---  RepublicanJacobite  The'FortyFive'  00:44, 9 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Only because WP mostly does not have articles on essays and magazine articles. I also had the impression that some people didn't like the article. Now that I know more about it I am thinking about adding to the article with more sources, if I get around to it that is. Jaque Hammer (talk) 07:27, 9 October 2010 (UTC)

(←) If there is an article on the theme in general then it should be at White Negro and distinguished from The White Negro by hat notes. Kenilworth Terrace (talk) 06:33, 9 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Actually White negro, which is a possible article. Jaque Hammer (talk) 22:42, 9 October 2010 (UTC)
 * That's good too. Kenilworth Terrace (talk) 11:49, 10 October 2010 (UTC)
 * If this article is renamed, I may as well rename the Robinson Crusoe article to its full length as written by Defoe: The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. WITH An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver'd by PYRATES.


 * I have not heard of wiggas until today but I have long known of Mailer's famous White Negro essay which is normally known by its short-form title. The subtitle is referred to within the article and there is no sense in including it in the main title.


 * As for Mailer's essay title and the question of dignity raised above, negro is not nigger. In any case, if Mailer had written an essay called The White Nigger, while this would be vicious, any article about it would have to bear that name. Wikipedia editors are not here to airbrush the record. —O'Dea  21:19, 25 October 2010 (UTC)

Contrary to RepublicanJacobite, I got here with no interest in Mailer. The 1940 movie Contraband includes action in a club called "The White Negro" and I wondered about antecedents for that. The term is years older than Mailer's essay.Colin McLarty (talk) 13:15, 23 August 2011 (UTC)

Link to text of The White Negro at original publisher, Dissent magazine
An older edit of the article linked to the text of the essay online at learntoquestion.com. This link was subsequently removed on 3 October 2010 with the edit note, "possible copy-vio". I have included a new link to the essay text at Dissent magazine itself, where the essay was first published in 1957, and which Dissent re-published online, in full, on the occasion of the death of the author. There is no question of copyright violation at that site. —O'Dea 08:00, 25 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Too bad it's full of typos. You'd think they'd be more careful. Grlucas (talk) 10:49, 23 August 2017 (UTC)

Beginning Revision, August 2017
This article needs help, so I'm going to attempt a big revision. Anyone want to help? Grlucas (talk) 10:49, 23 August 2017 (UTC)
 * Working on Bibliography. -Grlucas (talk) 17:53, 24 August 2017 (UTC)
 * Finally ready to replace the synopsis. (Gee, it only took a year.) Grlucas (talk) 16:18, 28 August 2018 (UTC)
 * Done. It was a pretty significant edit, and I saved original text, if anyone is interested. Grlucas (talk) 17:26, 28 August 2018 (UTC)

Annotated Bibliography
For HUMN 4472, fall 2018. Use templates linked from Template:Cite book, mostly book, journal, magazine, and web (sparingly). Format, as follows, and be sure to keep track of your citations for the text as you summarize; here you can put them parenthetically. As with all bibliographies, please put your entries in alphabetical order by last name. —Grlucas (talk) 13:09, 30 August 2018 (UTC)
 * Looking for articles? Check out Jason Mosser's super bibliography. —Grlucas (talk) 17:13, 30 August 2018 (UTC)


 * Adams details Mailer’s post- World War II Darwinian fixation on the necessity of human violence as a sort of catharsis of the dark reaches of the soul (5). She recounts how Mailer’s passionate advocacy for primal violence - most fully realized in the searing White Negro - made him persona non grata among the literary elites of the Eisenhower era. Adams argues that, bestsellers aside, Mailer never truly feels the embrace of the literati for years - not until he later turns his ire away from the staid, impotent, myopic and naïve anti-hipsters of Negro to enemies the liberal establishment can better appreciate, such as the Vietnam War and the rising military industrial complex (5-6). Though Adams argues that The White Negro achieves an impressive clarity of vision & level of artistic expression that surpasses Mailer’s other works from the period (58), and that enacting his theoretical advocacy of exorcism through violence should not be assumed to be Mailer’s motivation for nearly killing his second wife by stabbing her twice with a pen knife (56), Adams does contend that Mailer should have been held more to account for fomenting potentially dangerous propaganda by infusing Negro with an amalgam of selective facts, emotional manipulations and dubious hypotheses that blurs the line between promotion & provocation (54).Wilander2244 (talk) 17:41, 30 August 2018 (UTC)


 * Baldwin begins his essay by explicitly stating the difference between he and Norman Mailer: "I am a black boy from the Harlem streets, and Norman is a middle-class Jew" (269). His essay recalls the relationship between Baldwin and Mailer in the 1950s and just after Mailer published Advertisements for Myself. Baldwin upholds the social responsibility of the writer as a sacred duty, and shows his disappointment in that Mailer's socializing seemed to distract him from his duty to be "an absolutely first-rate talent" (278). While Baldwin felt that in many ways he and Mailer were kindred spirits, he critiques Mailer's naïveté in indulging a myth of black sexuality and wonders how the Mailer the knew could write something as "impenetrable" as The White Negro (272, 277). Baldwin argues that Mailer saw himself as having to top the beats by pushing their "mystique farther than they had, to be more 'hip,' or more 'beat,' to dominate, in fact, their dreaming field; and since this mystique depended on a total rejection of life, and insisted on the fulfillment of an infantile dream of love, the mystique could only be extended into violence" (277). The consequences, Baldwin concludes, leads to a notion of unassailable purity — just as dangerous, he implies, as the unchecked power of the state to the black American. —Grlucas (talk) 22:14, 29 August 2018 (UTC)


 * Heather Braun analyzes Mailer's The White Negro and Vladimir Nabokov "Lolita". Focusing on psychopathy in the The White Negro, Braun writes about Mailer seeing the psychopath's juvenile, pleasure-seeking narcissism as an opportunity for self-knowledge and rebirth. Mailer's admiration for psychologist Robert Lindner's description of the psychopath in Rebel without a Cause: The Hypnoanalysis Of A Criminal Psychopath influences his take on psychopaths - Linder decribes the behavior of the pychopath as self-reflexive as he is unable to do anything to benefit someone other than himself. Mailer interprets this as "one that, in the end, centers on his quest for love: at bottom, the drama of the pschopath is that he seeks love. Not love as the seach for a mate, but love as the search for an orgasm more apocalyptic than the one which preceded it...in this search, the psychopath becomes an embodiment of the extreme contractions of the society which formed his character. (Mailer 11)" The Hipster psychopathic behavior is the opposite to the norms of society. Their search for love entails risking their lives to express themselves. It relates to the negro whose lives and freedom are constantly limited by their oppressors by acts of violence. Bridgetterobb (talk) 19:26, 4 October 2018 (UTC)


 * Tracy Dahlby beings her review of "The White Negro" by describing the post-9/11 world full of consumer spending where Mailer's hipster is no longer an idea in the minds of most Americans. Dahlby provides three reasons how Mailer's hipster fighting against conformity, living under a "chronic threat of annihilation in a nuclear showdown" (220). Firstly, today's world doesn't have the same level of existential terror as the yester-years of generations before us. Secondly, economic convention has muddied the waters of what really matters in life; and thirdly, internet availability has brought the darkest actions of humanity to any screen with the touch of a button. In this world, there is little to no call for rebels to break up the pattern of consumer conformity, in fact, there is a dangerous lack of hipsters to save society from turning into a mindless army of consumers, un-bothered by the question of existentialism. Dahlby concludes her review questioning "where are the hipsters when we need them" (229), calling for the generation of "genuine nonconformists" that will help future societies to continue down the road of existentialism. --Aswieter (talk) 21:02, 12 September 2018 (UTC)


 * The chapter begins with Grimsted listing two books that was thought to contribute to the conflicts regarding popular culture, the center of American life. The present day morality and values were being evaluated similarly to that of a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde scenario. Brookman, author of American Culture and Society Since the 1930s, included many works in his bibliography, one of them being of Norman Mailer's The White Negro. He argued the opposite of an American society being free of conflict. It was said to be empty in nature as a totalitarian nation. Followers concluded that this may eventually lead to Nietzschean's "apocalyptic vision", but enthusiasm gave way to writers like Mailer to find solutions "in the better orgasm".Sarahqbentley (talk) 13:13, 4 September 2018 (UTC)


 * In the beginning it was noted that critics either dismiss contemporary work in literature, or it is sometimes "documented" to see what the thoughts of society were like during a certain time. Literature was taking a new turn with it's use of style and literary devices to build up on those thoughts based on experiences. By providing evidence in various novels and works, Hassan talks about 10 instances of what he imagines to be the face of a hero. The 7th instance talked about Norman Mailer's character, a soldier, from Naked and the Dead who was under that a victim of military orders. He illustrated a hipster's face as his last face, and he remarks how there are some present day heroes wearing a twisted mask. This twisted mask is due to the "grimace" that is always being worn due to their various encounters and experiences. He tells us the essay "The White Negro" in his eyes topped The Naked in the Dead in regards to the makings of literary heroes. He goes on to say how the literary device of irony which is used to put out in text what morality and ethics are.Sarahqbentley (talk) 13:13, 4 September 2018 (UTC)


 * John Clellon Holmes describes the culture of America during the 1950s and the often-misunderstood Beat Generation of this post-war, post-slavery era in his article “The Philosophy of the Beat Generation.” Holmes digs deeper than the speed, sex, drugs, and jazz surrounding the Beat Generation with some help from Jack Kerouac, who explained to a New York reporter that the Beat Generation was a generation seeking a deeper connection with God. When the reader continues through the Esquire article, Holmes explains that this deeper connection with God is less monotheistic and more of a universal search for something deeper, something existential to give life a deeper, more significant meaning. Holmes continues to explain how Kerouac traveled across the country, learning first hand from those in the Beat Generation, which helped to thrust Kerouac further into the title of “spokesman for a generation.” With the study of Kerouac’s observation and life with the Beat Generation, Holmes leaves his readers with a thought provoking argument that the generation, which has less of an age requirement and more of a belief requirement, would be the generation to heavily impact the future and change the world. --Aswieter (talk) 12:06, 13 September 2018 (UTC)


 * "Hip: The History" by John Laland is a sketch from Norman Mailer's famous essay The White Negro. It covers the history of the hip culture in the 18th-century origins in America's west African born slave population to today's culture. He writes about America's experience of a series of "hip convergences" which he describes as the shift in what is considered cool and what is not. In contrast to The White Negro where Mailer focuses on the appropriation of African American culture and Hips "expressing themselves" in ways that the negro cannot or they will be met with violent attacks, Leland instead took the stance to redefine "hip culture". Leland argued that "hip is simply moving on as it always has, sloughing off the old polarities that defined it in the past ---black versus white, straight versus gay, Iron Curtain versus NATO -- and redefining itself in a new world where whiteness is as much an adopted pose as blackness." - Bridgetterobb (talk)


 * .The essay that I chose to focus on in regards to “The White Negro” was “Black Power”. In Black Power just like in The White Negro the black man is endowed  with an ability that far surpasses the white mass.It opens building the black men, having an heir of knowledge that they could take the white man. He outright says that negroes think  they are superior, and they have the right to feel so because he puts the black man on a pedestal in a way that wasn’t seen back then. He is ahead of his time because black appreciation was not a thing favored thing back then, and most had opposing thoughts to any sort of progression within the black community. We are Hip, we are superhuman and have psychic powers and all dabble in witchcraft. “Hip depends on whether the Negro emerges as a dominating force in American Life”(TWN)“If one wants a better world one will have to hold one’s breath, for a worse world is bound to come first”


 * Malaquais starts his rebuttal of Mailer's "The White Negro" by mentioning the myth named le prolétariat that had a baby that turned out to be the brother of le prolétariat:"marijuana soaked Hip"(359). Mailer comments on this and by stating that Malaquais is calling the hipster our "old black sheep" and the estranged newphew of proletariat in the American community. Malaquais goes on to critique Mailer's thought on African Americans and white Americans embodying "a special brand of the human species". Since African Americans were marginalized by the this time, Malaquais says that the readers can not be convinced of that. He also begins to talk of hipster as those people who long to conform even though they are seen to want to do the opposite. Hip are seen as the rebels in America according to Mailer. He ends his rebuttal by saying that Mailer bestowing what he thinks are the wants of hip such as love and kitchenette with a white rob over his girl's waist are just "a gorgeous flower of Mailer's romantic idealism"(362). In this Malaquais ends with his thought that Mailer fantasizes over African American men. MGray96 (talk) 17:47, 30 August 2018 (UTC)


 * Menand traces the founding and evolution of The Village Voice newspaper, co-founded by Mailer in 1955. Throughout its lean, tumultuous, amateurish beginnings - largely overcome ultimately by industry strikes and work stoppages that for long stretches literally took its competitors out of circulation - Menand argues that one of the Voice’s most lasting legacies is its catalyzing of the personality-driven field of New Journalism, along with one of its most renowned practitioners in the form of Mailer. On the heels of brutally negative critical receptions of his two most recent novels, Mailer turns his attentions to writing non-fiction of a sort, parlaying the thousands of dollars he invests to help keep the paper solvent into a series of cantankerous columns. The columns are significant, if for no other reason, because they allowed Mailer to expound on his emerging existentialist, dystopian philosophies. In fact, the overwhelming bulk of The White Negro -which Mailer himself considered to be one of his seminal works - was taken directly from his Village Voice columns. Menand points out, however, that many of the ideas posited by Mailer on hipsters and non-whites are unoriginal and divisive. Menand even reveals the tidbit that Mailer’s second wife, Adele, was a former lover of hipster-chasing Beatnik poster boy Jack Kerouac. Wilander2244 (talk) 06:06, 30 August 2018 (UTC)


 * Petigny makes the hype behind Mailer known with an early soliloquy on how David Kirtzer skipped an exam to go protest at the pentagon and how he got arrested and met Norman Mailer in jail. Mailer wrote him a letter as an excuse and when he got back to school he had gotten into a fight with his professor about who would keep the letter. Though Mailer was revered he was opposed as well. Petigny explains mailer lists several disadvantages to the black community and how it’s almost impossible to succeed being black in society. Yet at the same time he relishes in the hipness of blacks and how their life is easy going and that they make the best out of what society allows the. To have. His claims were received as negative connotations as he list drugs and alcohol and a reason for their to the wayside attitude in the aftermath of war. Torioneason (talk) 16:57, 4 October 2018 (UTC)


 * In Ned Polsky's rebuttal to Mailer's "The White Negro", starts by acknowledging that Mailer is very much aware of the many struggles that African Americans face in America. Even though he is aware of the drawbacks, he still ignores many other issues because he romanticizes certain characteristics about them. He admits that "Mailer is right in seeing that the hipster during that time to be the only significant new rebel in american society"(365). One of the things that Polsky mentions that Mailer may have gotten wrong is that the hipsters are sexually liberated like many "liberals" are. Polsky mentions that this can not be true since the hipster has been crippled more than most people psychologically and sexually. He goes on in his rebuttal and mentions what Mailer calls the "white negro". Polsky states that the white negro is man who looks down upon the white world that he comes from but also is not fully accepted into the African American world. Since he is not accepted into either world, the white negro and the African American hipster, who puts down their own community, come together and create their own little world. In Mailer's reply to Polsky's rebuttal, he says that he has very little problem with anything that Polsky had to say. The only thing had to point out was the statement Polsky made about hipster's orgasms being premature and puny. He says that Polsky may be making assumptions about the orgasm based on the "square throne of psychoanalysis"(369).  MGray96 (talk) 17:18, 30 August 2018 (UTC)


 * Torioneason (talk) 16:57, 4 October 2018 (UTC)


 * In this excerpt from Advertisements for Myself, an interview between Richard G. Stern and Norman Mailer is documented and reflected upon by Mailer. Stern and Mailer discuss at great length what it means to be a hipster and whether or not a hipster can focus on both the experience and the expression of it. The interview between Stern and Mailer takes a turn for the philosophical, even going into topics such as the questioned omnibenevolence of God and if He is dying. They later talk about humanity separating itself from the senses and Mailer predicts that "this divorce from the senses" will mean the end of our civilized selves. Mailer actually leaves it open-ended as to whether the square or the hipster is the one becoming separated from his senses. RLSenter (talk) 17:45, 30 August 2018 (UTC)


 * In his chapter of the Laura Adams collection of critiques, Tony Tanner notes Norman Mailer's common theme of duality as explored in The Presidential Papers, Advertisements for Myself, and The White Negro. Tanner references the part of The White Negro when the main character begins thinking in "couples" and categorizing nearly every element of his life into pairs. Tanner also asserts that Mailer similarly reduces life to its "opposed extremes" in his own writing, perhaps as a way to bring clarity to a foggy existence. Some of the pairs that Tanner mentions are: "love and hate, victory and defeat... being and nothingness; cannibals and Christians --and finally God and the Devil." In context of The White Negro, Tanner identifies the duality of the conformists and the hipsters. Sickness and disease are also compared against several independent figures-- two of whom are the hipsters and the Negroes. RLSenter (talk) 16:49, 30 August 2018 (UTC)

Suitable for background?
The so-called white Negroes adopted black clothing styles, black jive language, and black music. They mainly associated with black people, distancing themselves from white society. One of the early figures in the white negro phenomenon was jazz musician Mezz Mezzrow, an American Jew born in 1899 who had declared himself a "voluntary Negro" by the 1920s. This movement influenced the hipsters of the 1940s and the beats of the 1950s.

I removed the above from the Analysis section in the article. Perhaps with a bit more sourcing (is an encyclopedia really the best source here?) and research it would be germane to Background? Grlucas (talk) 20:13, 28 August 2018 (UTC)

Removed
Probably the most prominent academic exponent of the New Left in the US was Herbert Marcuse. The essay is also very prescient because it anticipates the pejorative use of the word wigger in contemporary society to refer to white people who emulate the manner of speech, the fashion styles, or other aspects of the expressive culture of African Americans.

I do not see any critical support for the above, so I removed it. I have no problem adding it back if support is found. —Grlucas (talk) 12:26, 14 September 2018 (UTC)

Suggested Edits
Links to mailerreview.org are broken and need to be revised or removed. OrchardBreeze (talk) 21:56, 18 January 2020 (UTC)
 * Happy to do so. Which ones? Sorry, but I don't see any in the bib. —Grlucas (talk) 22:11, 18 January 2020 (UTC)
 * Sorry, I should have included in the original note. There are 2: 1) Dahlby, Tracy (2011). "'The White Negro' Revisited: The Demise of the Indispensable Hipster". The Mailer Review. 5 (1): 218–230. OCLC 86175502. Retrieved 2017-09-18. 2) —; Lennon, Donna Pedro (2018). Lucas, Gerald R. (ed.). Norman Mailer: Works and Days (Revised and Expanded ed.). Atlanta: Norman Mailer Society. ISBN 9781732651906.
 * Done. Thanks for the heads-up. —Grlucas (talk) 12:53, 19 January 2020 (UTC)