The Rap on Whites Who Try to Act Black

Throughout the 1950s and '60s, Bob Dylan and others would also borrow from black music. To make themselves sexually alluring, white female singers including Mae West and Janis Joplin mimicked the styles of black performers such as Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith.

Most of these white artists made undeniable contributions to American popular culture, and their gifts and the value of their work, unlike Seltzer's, are not in dispute. At the heart of the matter, though, lies the question of whose voice should speak about and interpret the black experience in America -- and whose voice white America wants to hear.

As a member of Generation X, I've witnessed the trend of whites' embracing and interpreting black culture for white audiences continue with the likes of Eminem, the discredited rapper Vanilla Ice and, more recently, the white character "Buckwild," a.k.a. Becky, from the modern-day coon show "Flavor of Love." Even Paris Hilton put on blackface to transform herself into a black woman on an episode of her reality show "The Simple Life."

Today it appears to be cool for white middle-class youths to spit rap lyrics, wear sagging jeans and call each other variations of the N-word. It's cool to act black without having to live with the reality of actually being black in America. Blackness has become a commodity, along with crime, violence and other kinds of social dysfunction. And even black artists and writers have trafficked in black dysfunction, seeing that they can make money by using the stereotypes in their own work. Think of gangsta rap, or former Washington Post reporter Janet Cooke, who had to return a Pulitzer Prize in 1981 for concocting a story about an 8-year-old black heroin addict.

At the same time, the black middle class has persistently challenged white depictions of its experience with counter-narratives of its own. Black leaders and their communities have emphasized respectability, thrift, domesticity, hard work, religion and education. But positive images of blacks and their aspirations have been largely written off or ignored by the white media and entertainment establishments. Uplifting depictions of black progress apparently aren't very marketable to white audiences, while black failure, pathology, sexuality, criminality and music-making continue to fascinate.

The folks at Riverhead Books seem to have embraced Margaret Seltzer's minstrel act because they thought it would sell. I can imagine that the idea that a vulnerable white girl had operated in a black community must have appeared to the publisher to be a new and sexy variation on an old theme -- something it might not have if there were more diversity in publishing's editorial ranks. Those of us who do circulate in the kinds of worlds that Seltzer imagined would have seen the red flags and challenged the veracity of her story.

Unlike Seltzer, I didn't write my memoir purely to win literary fame and strike financial gold. I wanted to tell the truth about my experience, the experience of a world I lived in and was part of. I wanted to give voice to the thousands of anonymous foster children and abused children who slip through the cracks, and to effect some kind of change so that they, like me, might find a way out of their world of dysfunction and sorrow.

That Seltzer appropriated their story makes me angry. But that white America appeared ready to lap it up as an "authentic" account of a world it knows so little about is what I find really troubling.

info.meanoldyesterday@yahoo.com

Stacey P. Patton is a PhD candidate in African American history at Rutgers University.