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I saw white resentment of black success when I stayed up late to watch Saturday Night Live. Daddy and his friend Kenny watched me watch Eddie Murphy put on makeup to pass as a white man—a satirical reversal of the social experiment from Black Like Me, a book I’d seen on my teacher’s shelf. “Slowly I began to realize,” said the white Eddie Murphy, “that when white people are alone they give things to each other for free.”
Kenny shook his head. “Shoot, ain’t nobody ever give me nothin. Have they you, Mike?”
“They sure ain’t,” said my dad. “They wouldn’t give me air if I was in a jug.”
Kenny’s was a common resentment among the adults I knew: they resented that black people had cornered the market on pity; they resented that black people were free to assume white people had it easy by virtue of being white, even as black people had also—somehow, after centuries of being subjected to the offhand vitriol of whites—cornered the market on taking offense to jokes about race. In 1961, less than twenty-five years before I watched Eddie Murphy on Saturday Night Live, Dick Gregory—one of the first black comedians to regularly perform for white crowds—joked, “Segregation is not all bad. Have you ever heard of a collision where the people in the back of the bus got hurt?” In 1961, the joke was on segregation. In 1984, the joke was at long last on white people.
I laughed as the white Eddie Murphy sat, stiff and pale, as the last black man exited a bus and the remaining passengers—all white, or so they thought—began to sing and dance, free at last from the burden of his presence. I laughed at Eddie Murphy, in another SNL sketch, playing a grownup Buckwheat from the Little Rascals, mispronouncing the lyrics of popular songs. “Shoot,” said Kenny. “He don’t even know he’s making fun of himself, does he?” Buckwheat kept mispronouncing lyrics. “Well, that’s a nigger for you, ain’t it? Hell, I can’t stand ’em, can you, Mike?”
And Daddy said, “Aw, now I reckon some of ’em’s okay. There’s good ones and bad ones, same as us.” He believed that—or I choose to tell myself he did—but I watched him set aside his convictions to make a joke. I watched him get big laughs in our kitchen on Martin Luther King Jr. Day—the first one our school district had deigned to observe; Kenny asked why I was off school and Daddy shrugged and grinned and said, “Some nigger’s birthday.” Listening to him, I learned that it was okay to make jokes as long as you didn’t mean it. But as irresponsible as he was in leaving me with that lesson, I still find myself wanting to defend my dad, to say he dropped out of school in the eighth grade, didn’t have the advantages of a higher education, grew up in racial isolation in rural Kentucky, or was just joking. White Americans have spent so many decades making these kinds of excuses for our ancestors, and devoted so little time to trying to distinguish the jokes from the threats, or to ask ourselves if there was ever any difference at all.
I heard the word “nigger” as frequently in my dad’s body shop as I did on my N.W.A. cassettes. When presented with a repair estimate, a customer might respond, “Well, I ain’t got the money to fix it right, so I reckon we’ll just have to nigger-rig it.” To barely fix a car was to “nigger-rig” it, but to make a car look too flashy was to “nigger it up,” e.g., “My cousin put ground effects on his pickup, but it just looks too nigger for me.” Black people couldn’t win.
My teachers and church deacons clung to the stereotype of the young black male criminal, but they didn’t like to see young black males getting rich rapping about being criminals. They told me rappers were not as poor as they claimed to be—if they were really from the street they wouldn’t even get past security to sign a record deal. It was all exaggeration, they assured me. The white grownups around me made jokes about black people using food stamps and stealing hubcaps, but they didn’t like to see them use crime or poverty as a means to succeed. “Just look at them waving their guns and their gold chains around,” they might say. “Martin Luther King would be ashamed of them, the way they act.” White people kept buying songs and movies that told those stories—the desperation of drug-dealing, the power of the gun—even as they used those same stories to keep black people right where they were.
White rock bands sued rappers for stealing little slices of sound, after all the moves rock bands had stolen from black guitarists. White rappers stole stories about growing up poor and desperate so that their biographies fit some stereotypical sense of what it meant to be black. White rapper Vanilla Ice outsold any rapper to come before him, his promotional materials presenting a “colorful teen-age background full of gangs, motorcycles and rough-and-tumble street life in lower-class Miami neighborhoods, culminating with his success in a genre dominated by young black males.”3 Black journalist Ken Parish Perkins pulled Vanilla Ice’s high school yearbook from the Dallas suburb of Carrollton, Texas—1,300 miles from Miami—and called Ice’s manager to question the contradiction. His upbringing “could have been well-off,” said his manager, “but maybe he chose to go to the street and learn his trade. When he said he’s from the ghetto, it may not be true that he grew up in the ghetto—but maybe he spent a lot of time there.”4 Makes sense. If there’s one thing rap tells us the ghetto welcomes, it’s well-off white kids dropping by for apprenticeships. “If you ain’t never been to the ghetto,” warned Treach of Naughty by Nature, “don’t ever come to the ghetto. Cause you wouldn’t understand the ghetto. So stay the fuck out of the ghetto.”5
Ice’s lies might have struck a nerve with Perkins, a black man who’d grown up in the kind of neighborhood Vanilla Ice only visited. One of the few black journalists at the Chicago Tribune, Perkins rejected the paper’s plan to publicize his rise from the housing projects to the Tribune newsroom in order to promote its commitment to diversity. He refused to allow the paper to publish his photograph with his column; “[Readers] see a black man,” he reasoned, “they think he’ll be a certain way.”6 A black journalist hid his face and his life story from readers, even as he exposed a white rapper for faking his life story to appear something closer to black. A black journalist brought down a white rapper for having stolen his struggle story from his black peers, but when it came to presenting his own struggle, he preferred readers assume he was white.
A white rapper cribbed his struggle story from black rappers and outsold any rapper before him. When black rappers complained, he tried to turn the backlash into a struggle in itself. “People are out to bust Vanilla Ice,” his publicist Elaine Schock told the Philadelphia Inquirer, “because he’s successful and because he’s white. I do think it’s reverse racism.”7 Was it, though? Vanilla Ice was a guest in the house of hiphop and he sneaked out with a piece of its foundation and stood on it to reach the top of the pop charts. Facing the backlash, Ice brought Public Enemy’s Flavor Flav with him to his interview on The Arsenio Hall Show, but his strategy backfired when Hall asked Flav to wait offstage while he took Ice to task. “A lot of black rappers,” he said, “are probably angry because some of the white people screaming [for you] didn’t buy rap until you did it, until they saw a vanilla face on the cover of an album.”8
“You saw Flavor Flav. Me and him, we’re homies,”9 Ice asserted, although only moments earlier he’d received the man’s handshake so awkwardly it looked more like they’d met for the first time ever right there on stage. “Is that why you brought him out? Just to show you have a black supporter?” asked Arsenio.10 I was fifteen years old when I watched this interview air live on Arsenio Hall, and it was the first time I felt like rap didn’t belong to me; I’d discovered it, after all, on that hike through the woods to Wolf Creek Dam. Now, re-watching the clip when I’m forty-two and preparing to teach a lesson on white rappers, I have to ask myself this question—when I bring rappers as guest speakers, how pure are my motives? I’m dedicated to having students talk face-to-face with rappers, but I can’t deny that I also mean to enhance my own credibility by making my course look legitimate enough that a rapper would drop by.
Vanilla Ice positioned himself as an anomaly among white people, telling Hall he was the unicorn among “the majority