Why do white males identify with “niggaz”?

A reader writes:

I was reading today about the decision by Reebok to make a big investment in rappers JayZ and Fifty Cent. This crossed synapses with the recent hubbub about Terrell Owens/Philadelphia Eagles and the NBA “dress code” flap, and made me think:

Why is the gangsta culture (really the nigg*r culture) such a hit with young and middle aged white sports and music fans? If you go to an NBA game, you can see the spectacle of six-and seven-figure income stockbrokers, lawyers, and others acting like homeboys.

And the acting out of the above-mentioned rappers and athletes is very calibrated to keep that white audience. Every once in a while, one of the “stars” will step over the line into the REAL gangsta world, and either get dead or lose the big contract.

For the most part, though, the white world richly rewards “niggaz” who play the role to the hilt, stay in character, and don’t screw up.

Whazzup wit dat?

My reply:

In personal terms, I don’t know, the whole thing is alien and repellent to me, beneath notice or contempt, like so much of our culture.

But in general terms, it’s no mystery. It’s part and parcel of the long-existing white impulse to identify and empathize with the foreign, the exotic. This can take positive or at least unharmful forms, or very sick forms as identifying with your own destroyers. In the contemporary mode, I guess Steve Sailer’s articles in NR back in the ‘90s explained a lot of this. Black males with their exaggerated masculinity appeal to white males whose own masculinity is suppressed by the liberal culture. In the larger sense, our culture makes blacks into sacramental objects. Whites no longer have a culture or collective self they can believe in. The culture encourages them to believe in and celebrate black culture, and they find a kind of fulfillment in that. Forget about what John Paul II said. This is the real Culture of Death: whites identifying with lower-class thuggish blacks.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 20, 2005 10:45 PM | Send