The White Negro
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, William Styron — perhaps half-a-dozen others approaching or just past thirty — have numerous admirers, but it is clear that their impact on young intellectuals has not been remotely comparable to that made on a previous generation by Fitzgerald." -- "Born 1930: The Unlost Generation" by Caroline Bird, Harper's Bazaar, Feb. 1957 "The American existentialist — the hipster, the man who knows that if our collective condition is to live with instant death by atomic war, relatively quick death by the State as l’univers concentrationnaire, or with a slow death by conformity with every creative and rebellious instinct stifled … if the fate of twentieth century man is to live with death from adolescence to premature senescence, why then the only life-giving answer is to accept the terms of death, to live with death as immediate danger, to divorce oneself from society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self. In short, whether the life is criminal or not, the decision is to encourage the psychopath in oneself."--"The White Negro" (1957) by Norman Mailer |
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"The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster" (1957) is an essay by Norman Mailer that recorded a wave of young white people in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s who liked jazz and swing music so much that they adopted black culture as their own.
The essay was first published in Dissent magazine in 1956, and was reprinted in Advertisements for Myself in 1959. The so-called white negroes enshrouded themselves in 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 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, the beats of the 1950s, the mods of the 1960s, and the wigger of later decades.
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