e waited until the bus was ready to leave before
squeezing up front to address the passengers. The
Greyhound was going from Chicago to Indiana. It
was winter. The sky was suffused with gray.
He surveyed the bunched rows of seats. There
were only 19 passengers, most of them young, most
of them black. Billy Wimsatt was white. It was an
audience that made him especially comfortable.
He held aloft a slender book. "I wrote this book,"
he said over the chitter of talk. "It's pretty good. It
normally sells for $12. On this bus, I'll sell it for $5,
and you can read it along the way free."
It was called "No More Prisons," and was about
incarceration and philanthropy and hip-hop, always
hip-hop, for hip-hop was the everlasting undertone
to his life. He was a writer and activist, and over the
years his work had made him something of a minor
cult figure in the hip-hop world, a white man with
unusual credibility among blacks deeply protective
of their culture. He was an unbudgeable optimist,
convinced he could better the world by getting
whites and people of other races to talk together and
work together. He spent most of his time on the
road, on a yearlong tour of several dozen college
campuses, preaching his message. Now the bus was
taking him to Earlham College in eastern Indiana.
Some passengers gave grudging looks of curiosity. What gives with this guy? Six people beckoned
for copies. One woman gave hers back after 15
minutes, opting for sleep. A man behind her bought
one. A woman said she'd take one, too. "Cool," Mr.
Wimsatt said. He gave her a big smile and a hug.
Billy Wimsatt was 27, still clinging to the hip-hop
life. He didn't look terribly hip-hop, and not because
he was white. He was balding and brainy-looking,
with an average build and an exuberant nature.
He was born as rap music was being invented by
blacks and Latinos in the South Bronx. What began
as party music became their cry of ghetto pain and
ultimately their great hope for a way out. And as
hip-hop -- not just rap music but fashion, break-dancing, graffiti and the magazines that chronicle it
all -- blossomed into the radiant center of youth
culture, Billy Wimsatt and lots of white kids found in
it a way to flee their own orderly world by discovering a sexier, more provocative one.
Like many young hip-hop heads, he regarded hip-hop, with its appeal to whites and blacks, as a bold
modern hope to ease some of the abrasiveness between the races. Hip-hop, as he saw
it, endowed him with cultural elasticity,
allowed him to shed the privilege of whiteness, to be as down with blacks as with
whites. For a long time, he felt black in
every respect but skin color, he says, which
was why he had been able to get away with
that much-noticed article seven years ago in
The Source, a magazine considered one of
the bibles of hip-hop.
It was a withering critique of "wiggers,"
whites who try too hard to be black so they
will be accepted. Soon, he argued, "the rap
audience may be as white as tables in a jazz
club." In the last paragraph, which The
Source cut from the final version, he warned
black artists that the next time they invented something, they had better find a way to
control it financially, because whites were
going to steal hip-hop.
"And since it's the 90's," he concluded,
"you won't even get to hear us say, 'Thanks,
niggers.' "
Yes, Billy Wimsatt seemed about as authentically hip-hop as a white guy could get.
But as he slid into the complexities of adulthood, he said, he often found himself wondering if that was enough, unsure which
culture was truly his. He had drifted a long
way from his black hip-hop roots. Now, on
these unsettled grounds, he was far from
certain he could stay true to his ideas.
|
Nancy Siesel/ The New York Times |
Billy Wimsatt embraced hip-hop as a boy to slip the bounds of his whiteness.
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A Believer on the Brink
On a clangorous Manhattan sidewalk, Elliott Wilson stopped to study the bootleg rap
tapes splayed on a street vendor's blanket.
Music emanated from a portable stereo.
"Some dope stuff here," Mr. Wilson, a
gangly, light-skinned young black man with
inquisitive eyes and a contagious laugh, said
approvingly. The bargains got him pumped
up. He peeled off a five-dollar bill and
bought "Opposite of H2O" by Drag-On.
Elliott Wilson had never met Billy Wimsatt, but their lives had traced similar trajectories across the hip-hop landscape. As a
writer and editor, he too had spent much of
his adult life thinking about hip-hop. And not
just hip-hop, but race and hip-hop. Race was
unavoidable in hip-hop -- what with all those
black rappers idolized by white teen-agers
-- and like Billy Wimsatt, Elliott Wilson was
preoccupied with that conjunction and what
it meant in his own life.
Which culture was his was not Elliott
Wilson's worry. Hip-hop had inspired him to
believe that, precisely because he was
black, he could achieve what whites simply
assumed was theirs by birthright -- a gainful life over which he asserted control.
When he read Mr. Wimsatt's "wigger"
article, he and a black friend were beginning their own hip-hop publication, Ego
Trip. They saw it as a brash challenge to the
established, white-owned magazines like
The Source. Bubbling with assurance, Mr.
Wilson had judged the "wigger" article
amusing; for all its ridicule of whites, he
had still considered it "a white boy's perspective on hip-hop." He certainly hadn't
seen it as a prophecy of personal doom.
Now, he sometimes had to wonder. He
was closing in on 30, trying to hold fast to his
own idea of the hip-hop life. He had watched
with anger and growing pessimism as Ego
Trip folded and whites asserted ever-greater control over the hip-hop industry. Recently, he had become editor of a promising hip-hop magazine, XXL. It was white-owned.
And so he wondered if he was selling out, if
he would ever become what he wanted on
his own terms. Was hip-hop his story, the
black man's story, after all? Did hip-hop
unite the races or push them further apart?
A White Boy Confined in His Skin
Growing up in Chicago, Billy Wimsatt
remembers, he believed the only way he
could have a good life was to be black.
His own life felt proscribed. He was an
only child. There was rarely music in the
house, just the droning news stations. He
saw an awful lot of "Nova" on PBS. He was
to avoid the unsavory black neighborhoods.
Yet, he recalls, black children seemed to
roam freely. They seemed to grow up faster.
In fourth grade, his teacher asked if anyone
baby-sat. A black girl's hand shot up. Incredible. Black girls were mature enough to
baby-sit. He says he longed to live in the
projects.
Where he lived was the integrated neighborhood of Hyde Park, in a perfectly diverse
six-flat: two white families, two black, two
mixed. His father taught philosophy of science at the University of Chicago. His mother was sort of a perpetual student.
At his mostly white private school, he was
not especially popular. He imagined becoming a computer programmer, a scientist, an
astronaut. Then, in sixth grade, a black kid
told him to listen to a rap song, "Jam On It."
"It was like a message from another
world," he said.
|
Nancy Siesel/ The New York Times |
"My magazine isn't some white-boy magazine," says Elliott Wilson, who has been editor of XXL for a year. Still, "it can't be totally black if a white man is signing the check."
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Increasingly, he disconnected from a
white culture that he equated with false
desires. He had jumped out of his container,
he said, "like spilled milk." After sixth
grade, he persuaded his parents to transfer
him to a largely black public school. The
cool kids, he noticed, wore fat sneaker laces,
favored gold jewelry, did graffiti. He began
shoplifting fat laces, fake gold jewelry and
markers and selling them to hip-hop heads.
He started break-dancing on the streets.
And at 13, he began sneaking out at night
and riding the trains with black and Latino
friends, bombing the city with spray paint.
Upski was his chosen tag. From then on,
little Billy Wimsatt became Upski, one of
Chicago's most prolific graffiti artists.
His frazzled mother, dogged by insomnia,
would discover him gone at 2 a.m. She
barred his graffiti crew from the house (one
of them even burglarized the place), sent
him to a psychiatrist, threatened military
school. When he persisted, his parents
plunked him back in private school. But he
barely associated with white classmates, he
says. Hip-hop had cloaked him in a new
identity.
Astonishingly, and much to the dismay of
many older people who abhorred its defiant
attitude, its frequent misogyny, violence
and vulgarity, hip-hop culture was becoming a great sugar rush for young people of
all races. Before long, rap would eclipse
country and rock to become America's top-selling pop-music format. And whites would
be the ones buying most of those rap albums
-- a full 70 percent.
For many, even most, young whites, hip-hop was ultimately a hobby, to be grown out
of in good time. For Upski, it became a
cause, especially as the late 80's gave rise to
politically conscious rappers like Public Enemy, with its peppery blend of black nationalism and rebellion. "Once it became a
pretty full critique of American life -- race,
politics and political hypocrisy -- that's
when it really registered with me," he said.
A Black 'Leader of the Nerds'
Elliott Wilson grew up in the Woodside
Houses project in Queens, the oldest of three
brothers. His mother was of Greek and
Ecuadorean roots; his father, a printer
from Georgia, was black. Elliott was very
light-skinned, and his hair was different
from the black kids'. When it came to skin
color, he picked up some mixed messages.
He was 5 when his father told him:
"You're going to be judged by who your
father is. I'm black. So you're black. Accept
it before you get hurt." And he did, he said:
"I felt like the black man from the jump."
He also spent a lot of time with his father's mother. She was tough, and she had
friends of all races. She called white people
crackers, but told Elliott, "Never trust a
black person darker than you."
Attending predominantly white schools,
self-conscious about his looks, he never really fit in, he says, recalling that time now.
The black and white students didn't mix
much, and while the black football players
were cool, he was no football player. Instead, he befriended the outcasts.
"I wanted to be a cool kid and I wasn't,"
he said. "But I didn't want to sacrifice who I
was to fit into the system. I'd rather create
my own system. I wasn't going to be a fake.
So I was the leader of the nerds."
His parents sheltered him from the influence of the streets. He watched a lot of
television. He loved "Happy Days" and
"Good Times," admired Howard Cosell and
imagined becoming a sportscaster. In high
school, he says, he increasingly felt himself
an outsider. His grades, always good, fell.
But there was hip-hop. Hip-hop was cool,
and his growing love of it made him begin to
feel cool. His parents bought him a set of
Technics 1200 turntables and a mixer. On
weekend nights, while classmates were out
on dates, he would be home taping the hip-hop shows off the radio.
When he listened to Public Enemy, he
began to shake his head knowingly. For
young Elliott Wilson, unaware of so much,
the group's powerful lyrics of oppression
and rage, especially the album "It Takes a
Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back," were
an awakening to what it meant to be black in
America. He got a Public Enemy jacket,
with the group's logo on the back: a black
man in the cross hairs of a gun.
He became more aloof. He no longer said
hello to white people, even family friends,
unless they greeted him first, he now says.
They asked his parents, What's gotten into
Elliott?
He went to La Guardia Community College -- in part because Run of Run-DMC had
gone there to major in mortuary science --
and then to Queens College. He began writing for hip-hop publications. One day first
semester, he had an interview with Kool G.
Rap. School felt irrelevant. He walked out of
class and never returned. He entrusted his
fate to hip-hop, and hip-hop breathed possibility into his life.
"If I came out of school without hip-hop, I
wouldn't have thought of owning my own
business and having power," he said. "As a
person of color, to be legit, you think you
have to be a worker for someone. Hip-hop
made me believe."
But hip-hop was full of bizarre crosscurrents. When he saw white kids simulating
his behavior, he got annoyed. It was one
thing if they had grown up in the culture. But
those well-to-do young whites who tried to
appropriate hip-hop for themselves, he says,
were simply insecure "image chameleons."
Right here was the enigma of hip-hop:
The black rappers certainly weren't preaching integration, inviting whites into their
homes. They were telling their often dismal
stories, the pathologies they felt had been
visited on them by a racist system they
yearned to escape. But so many white kids
were turning that on its head. They wanted
to live life large, the way the rappers did.
A Reason for Rhymes
The phone rang. Dog got it: "He here. We
here. I'll hit you back later. You gonna be in
the crib?"
It was afternoon. Like a lot of aspiring
rappers, Dog and his friend Trife were
living life small, passing time in Dog's rampantly messy apartment in Brooklyn's Clinton Hill section. Passing time was what they
did most days. They played games, gossiped, drank Hennessy, chewed over the
future. Weekends, they went bowling. They
were 23, young black men seeking sanctuary from the streets by rhyming their lives.
With their friends Po and Sinbo, they had
formed a rap group, Wanted and Respected.
Dog's closet was stuffed with recording
equipment; his specialty was creating the
beats. He made some slim money doing
tapes for kids with their own rap dreams
($100 a tape) and selling shirts on the street.
The group had played a few clubs, always
gratis. Others shuttled in and out, but life
weighed on the composition: members kept
getting jailed, and one had been killed.
Dog and Trife had followed a trajectory of
intense poverty and outlaw life. Dog's
grandmother basically raised him -- a dozen relatives packed into a three-bedroom
place. Trife grew up with his mother, an
R & B singer, and seven others in the nearby
projects; he still lived there with her.
They had belonged to a gang called the
Raiders, they said, selling drugs and doing
other things that landed them in prison. If a
white person came into their neighborhood,
they said, they robbed him. They all packed
guns. "It was bad as Beirut," Dog said. Trife
said he still sold drugs, and some of the
others did dubious things.
A few years ago, they gravitated to rap,
embracing it the way so many poor blacks
have long embraced basketball. But it was
better. There were more slots. And it
seemed to demand less talent. "You don't
even have to sing well," Dog said.
"Music is my sanity," Trife said. "If I
wasn't doing this, I'd probably be doing 25 to
life."
Dog laughed. "If it weren't for rap, I'd be
dead."
Many older blacks felt rap denigrated
their race. They hated the constant use of
"nigga" in the songs. Dog and Trife
shrugged this off. Rap was raw and ugly, but
that was their lives, they said. Rap was a
blunter truth.
Dog found it curious that whites -- suburban mall rats, college backpackers --
bought most rap records. "White people can
listen to rap, but I know they can't relate,"
he said. "I hear rap and I'm saying, 'Here's
another guy who's had it unfair.' They're
taking, 'This guy is cool, he's a drug dealer,
he's got all the girls, he's a big person, he
killed people.' That is moronic."
|
Nancy Siesel/ The New York Times |
Dog, right, Po and Trife, left, the members of Wanted and Respected, at a
housing project in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. Trife sees music as his sanity. "If I wasn't doing this," he said, "I'd probably be doing 25 to life."
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Later, Dog said: "Hip-hop is bringing the
races together, but on false pretenses to
make money. Look at Trife. He's got two
felonies. That means he's finished in society.
But he can rap. His two felonies, in rap, man,
that's a plus."
"It's messed up," Trife said. "In hip-hop,
I'm valid when I'm disrespected."
Trife recited some lyrics he had written:
You can't walk in my shoes,
If you ain't lived my life.
Hustling all day, clapping out all night.
The Cool Rich Kids' Movement
The road to Earlham was speckled with
billboards for Tom Raper RV's, the Midwest's largest RV dealer. The trees were
sheathed in glass from the freezing rain.
Earlham, a small Quaker college, was
predominantly white, marginally into hip-hop. Upski was to give a talk, accompanied
by a hip-hop group, Rubberoom.
Upski had dropped out of Oberlin College
in his junior year. He had only reluctantly
gone to college at all. He spent more time
doing graffiti and reading magazines than
going to class. He wrote an anonymous
column for the black paper that scathingly
denounced white people. He had a hip-hop
radio show: "Yo, this is live from Chicago."
Many people thought he was black.
Even so, he says, he was sporadically
queasy about his hip-hop moorings. He knew
his infatuation with blacks could be taken
different ways. He could be accepted as
credible, or taken as exploitative.
"That is the great fear of blacks," he said.
" 'Oh, you'll be fascinated with us, and then
go back to dominating us and you'll be
better at it because you'll have inside information.' " When he had shown drafts of his
writings about race to a black classmate at
Oberlin, she had slipped them back under
his door and stopped talking to him.
He committed himself to journalism and
activism. As he put it, "I saw it as my job to
get white people to talk about race."
In 1994, a year after his influential "wigger" article, he self-published "Bomb the
Suburbs" -- part memoir of a white man's
life in hip-hop, part interviews with hip-hop
figures, part treatise on race and social
change. It sold an impressive 23,000 copies.
The gangsta rapper Tupac Shakur declared
it "the best book I read in prison."
Upski hitchhiked around the country, promoting the book, pushing his views on racial
cohesion, further cementing his eccentric
renown. "I thought white people would start
listening to and liking black people," he said,
but ultimately, he was discouraged.
He refocused. He would become a social-change agent, motivating whites to be activists. Last fall, he published "No More Prisons" and began the "Cool Rich Kids' Movement." He would coax cool rich kids to give
money to the cause. He started the Active
Element Foundation and, with an ally, a
well-to-do white woman, also started a
group, Reciprocity, that paid him a modest
salary. This year, he began his college tour.
At Earlham, before a mostly white audience, Upski said: "The thing that drives me
is getting to know people and making relationships across race and class, which doesn't happen so much in America. Some of the
stuff I'm going to say is going to sound
heavy, and you're going to say, 'Let me go
smoke some weed and chill.' "
He bounced around the room, his manner
that of the motivational speaker. He said:
"My goal today is to encourage you to
accept the best and worst things about yourself." He talked about how they were too
comfortable in this school, and how he had
been "saved" by transferring to a black
school after sixth grade. And then Rubberoom performed, and a lot of people left and
the remaining ones danced. Upski danced.
|
|
Chronicles of hip-hop abound. Like The Source and XXL, they are mosty white-owned. A brash and satiric black-owned hip-hop magazine, Ego Trip, did not survive in print. A white prophet of hip-hop, Upski, wrote a memoir, "Bomb the Suburbs," and followed it up with "No More Prisons."
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Upski had brought along a copy of Stress,
a small hip-hop magazine published by people of color. Upski told the students to read
this, not the white-owned magazines.
He used to write for XXL, a fledgling
magazine with a white owner and publisher.
In 1997, the original black editor and black
staff quit after being refused an ownership
stake. There were innuendos of racism, but
whether it was just business or race depended on the vantage point. Upski, however,
swore never to work for XXL again.
After all, there were always ways for a
smart white guy to make money.
Agonizing at the Monkey Academy
When the editor's job at XXL was offered
to him last August, Elliott Wilson was put in
a delicate spot. He was broke. In college, he
accepted a flurry of credit cards and bought
all the "fly" clothing. Now he owed $8,000.
He remembers thinking about how blacks
needed to think more like whites. "We have
a short expectancy in life," he said. "So we
go for the quick buck. That's why kids sell
drugs. That's why they rob. We don't feel we
can be on a five-year plan to success."
The XXL job came with excellent pay --
low six figures. But talk of racial tension
stained the place. He asked himself, he said,
could blacks think he was selling out? First,
he had to discuss it with the Ego Trip
collective. He went over to the Monkey
Academy.
Two rooms in a Chelsea basement, the
Monkey Academy was a shrine to hip-hop.
Roosting on a shelf was a "Talking Master
P" doll ("Make 'em say uhhh") and a
memento from Puff Daddy's 1998 birthday
gala. Rap posters adorned the wall: Snoop
Doggy Dogg, RZA, Jungle Brothers.
Ego Trip was five young men of color with
ambitions of hip-hop entrepreneurship: Mr.
Wilson, Sacha Jenkins, Jeff Mao, Gabriel
Alvarez and Brent Rollins. They saw race as
a depressive undercurrent to everything,
and it was the focus of their scabrous humor. "We're always talking about the
blacks and the whites," Mr. Wilson said.
"That's the way me and my boys are."
The very name Monkey Academy reflected their saucy attitude. As Mr. Jenkins
explained it: "Call me paranoid, but when I
meet with white people, I feel that with their
eyes they're calling me monkey. So why not
wear that proudly? Everyone in hip-hop
wants to use the N-word, so why not take it
to the next level? Call us monkeys." They
especially liked to trace their understanding
of society to the "Planet of the Apes" movies, where the light-skinned orangutans controlled the dark gorillas.
Several years ago, the group published
Ego Trip, which they saw as a magazine
about race disguised as a hip-hop magazine.
They invented a white owner, one Theodore
Aloysius Bawno, who offered a message in
each issue, blurting his bigoted views and
lust for Angie Dickinson. His son, Galen, was
a Princeton-educated liberal who professed
common cause with blacks. But in truth, he
was an unaware bigot, as Mr. Wilson says he
feels so many young whites are.
So much of the hip-hop ruling class was
white. As Mr. Wilson put it, Ego Trip wanted
"to strike at all the black magazines that
are white-owned and act as if they're
black." It was a small irony that Ego Trip's
seed money of $8,000 came from a white
man, but at least he was a passive partner.
Though it gained a faithful following, Ego
Trip stayed financially wobbly. No new investors came forth; the collective suspected
the reluctance had to do with skin color. Ego
Trip gasped and expired.
Now its founders scrambled with day jobs
and worked on projects like "Ego Trip's
Book of Rap Lists" and a companion album.
Hip-hop Web sites were proliferating, and
they hoped to start one, too. They said they
wanted to hear the roar of money, on their
terms.
"Black people create, but we don't
reap the benefits," Mr. Wilson said. "We get
punked and pimped. If we were white boys,
we'd all be rich by now."
On that August day, he recalls, he sat on
the couch, his emotions in an uproar. He had
to wonder: was he now going to work for a
true-life Ted Bawno? The others, he says,
expressed a dim view of the XXL offer:
"They were feeling I was pimping."
Not long before, he had been music editor
of The Source. One duty was to rate new
albums, on a scale of one to five "microphones." When he gave three microphones
to "Corruption" by Corrupt, he says, the
white publisher, David Mays, increased it to
three and a half without telling him. When
he confronted Mr. Mays, he concluded that
the publisher did not respect him. Mr. Mays
wouldn't give his side, but as Mr. Wilson
tells it, he quit over half a microphone.
He felt strongly, he recalls, that he had to
help himself. He no longer saw hip-hop as a
great equalizer. "Who because of hip-hop
now believes, 'I've seen the light, I'm going
to save the blacks'?" he would say.
Sure, there was something positive in
white kids' idolizing black rappers, but
"what's going to happen when these white
kids lose their little hip-hop jones and go
work for Merrill Lynch?" he said.
What should he do? Months later, he remembers the confusion, the vectors of his
life colliding. His throat tightened and he
began to cry. He went to the bathroom of the
Monkey Academy and composed himself.
The message left hanging in the air from the
others was, Do what you got to do.
As a black man, how many opportunities
would come his way? He had this unslaked
desire to prove his mettle. He took the job.
Tapping the Unconscious Biases
Upski went to the laundermat. Shaking in
detergent, he talked about how he was a
bundle of contradictions, subject to irrational racist phantasms for which he had no
cogent defense. "I have patterns like every
other white guy that I'm not very aware of
that play out as racist," he admitted. He
laughed at racist jokes. Walking down the
street at night, he felt threatened if he saw a
shabbily dressed black man. "I frequently
feel I have more of a level of comfort and
trust with white people," he said.
He talked differently to black friends
("Yo. . . That's wack. . . Peace, brother."). It
infuriated his white girlfriend, Gita Drury.
"I'll say to him, 'Do you know you're talking
black now? Can you talk white, because
that's what you are,' " she said. "I think it's
patronizing." When he got on the phone, she
could detect at once the caller's race. When
he talked black, she would wave a sign at
him: "Why are you talking like that?"
She saw this episodic behavior in other
ways: "If we walk down the street and a
black person walks by, he will give this nod,
raise his chin a bit. He wouldn't do it with a
white guy. I'll say, 'Oh, you have to prove to
a black person that you're down.' "
Not long ago, Upski recalled, he spoke
about race at a prominent college along with
a black friend. He was paid twice as much
as his friend. He spoke longer, but not twice
as long. He never told his friend.
Sometimes, he said, he believed that black
people were dumber than whites. Sometimes he felt the opposite. Now, as the
washers ended their cycles, he hauled the
wet clothes to the dryers. A stout black
woman stood beside an empty cart. He
asked if she was using it. She stared at him,
bewildered. He asked again. Nothing.
Exasperated, he simply grabbed the cart
and heaped it with his clothes.
Later on, he said: "When that happened,
part of my gut reaction was, 'This is a black
woman who has limited brain capacity, and
it fits my stereotype of blacks having less
cognitive intelligence.' "
Would a white woman have understood?
"It's dangerous for me to even say that,"
he said. "But that's what I thought."
Embarrassed by Rap's 'Babies'
The strip club was scattered with patrons
with embalmed looks, solemnly quaffing
their beverages. Elliott Wilson pulled up a
stool beside a dancer. A fistful of dollars
flapped from a rubber band curled around
her wrist, the night's rewards.
Strip clubs, in particular this one in
Queens, had a powerful hold on him. Though
rap was his music, he said, he liked to
unwind here rather than at a hip-hop club.
There, everyone wanted something. Here,
no one wanted anything but his money. "I'm
not caught up in me and Puffy having each
other's cell phone numbers," he said.
He had conflicted feelings about rap and
rappers. "A lot of rappers rap about sex and
violence, because people are interested in
it," he said. "But it's art. It's poetry. If a
rapper says, 'Kill your mother' in a song, it
doesn't mean kill your mother. You can't
take anything at face value." The real-life
violence and arrests of rappers were something else. "Rappers are babies," he said.
"They don't know how to balance their
success and their street life. When I hear
about Jay-Z this and Puffy that, I'm embarrassed to be part of the profession."
Mr. Wilson and his friend Gabe Alvarez
shared an apartment in Clinton Hill, next to
Fort Greene, a gentrifying neighborhood
promoted by Spike Lee before he moved to
the Upper East Side.
"Part of it's good and part isn't," Mr.
Alvarez said. "You go a block over and
there're the drug dealers."
"It's like the classic black neighborhood,"
Mr. Wilson said. "The liquor store, the bodega. I want good restaurants. I don't want
to live in the 'hood. Who wants to live in the
'hood?" He wanted to move to Park Slope.
It was not his thing to go out of his way to
patronize black businesses. It was fruitless,
he said. He had seen that so much in hip-hop.
"There's always a white man somewhere
making money," he said. "You can't avoid
the white man. My going to a black barber
or something doesn't do anything."
Upski Meets Dog and Trife
Upski had gone to get his hair cut at the
black-owned Freakin U Creations. He only
went to black barbers, and part of his manifesto was to direct at least half his money to
minority stores. Fort Greene afforded plenty of possibilities.
All in all, though, he found
the neighborhood imperfect, already too
gentrified. His girlfriend lived there, so he
did. He had lived in a black neighborhood in
Washington. He said he felt he belonged
either in a rich white neighborhood, where
he could persuade residents to integrate, or
in the true 'hood, where he could organize.
He mused about moving to East New York.
Upski chatted with one of the owners,
Justice Cephas. Two young black men waited their turn. Mr. Cephas was a hip-hop
promoter on the side and was working with
their group. They were Dog and Trife.
Upski said, "Don't take anything off the
top."
Dog studied Upski's pate and said,
"What's there to take off?"
Upski laughed. He asked how they felt
about whites' moving into the neighborhood.
"Five years ago, I would have beaten you
up just for sitting in that barber chair," Dog
told him.
"Oh," Upski said.
"But I've matured," Dog said.
Later, though, he talked about how he was
still deeply bitter toward white people. No
white person had ever done anything positive for him, he said. As he remarked of
whites: "I've never been with you. Why
would I want to be with you now?"
Trife added, "If you're not my people now,
you're not my people down the line."
Dog and Trife had told Upski about their
group, Wanted and Respected. Trife's older
brother had started a record label, Trife-Life Records, and they were working on its
first album. They hoped to sell it on the
street, create some buzz. All the while, Trife
said later, he was thinking, "What is this
white guy doing in this barbershop?"
Upski smiled. These young men, he said,
reminded him of the black friends he used to
run with in Chicago. If he were younger, he
mused, he might want to run with them.
The Beatles Parallax
Inside Elliott Wilson's XXL cubicle was a
computer, a stereo and a table strewn with
rap albums. The music was on -- loud.
His eyes scanned the screen -- copy for
the next issue. He fiddled with it. "I'm
adding curse words," he said. "Putting in
ain'ts. Making it more hip-hop."
The publisher, Dennis Page, came in with
his beneficent smile. "Hey, man, we doing
O.K.?"
"Yeah."
Mr. Page peeked over his shoulder at the
screen. He nodded: "That's dope."
They went on like that, bantering.
Mr. Wilson called his boss D.P.G. -- Dennis Page Gangsta, after Snoop Doggy
Dogg's crew, the Dogg Pound Gangstas. Mr.
Wilson had given D.P.G. an inscribed copy
of "Ego Trip's Book of Rap Lists." He
wrote, "I don't care what people say, I know
your favorite color is green."
It was how he felt about the relationship.
They were both there for the money, he said.
Dennis Page was 46. He had the black
walk, the black talk. His father had run a
liquor store in Trenton, and Mr. Page had
hung around with black kids and absorbed
their ways. Now, he says, he has no real
black friends. He admits he's been called a
wigger. "I feel stigmatized by black people
in hip-hop who feel I'm exploiting them," he
said. "I don't feel I'm exploiting. It's a
business. The record companies are white-owned. But I feel I take more heat. Certain
black people feel that white people shouldn't
even buy hip-hop albums, no less write
about it. I'm not saying a black man can't
buy a Beatles record."
XXL was just going monthly, and its
circulation, which it gave as 175,000, was
still far below the leading magazines' --
Vibe sold more than 700,000 copies, The
Source 425,000. XXL had been heavily political, clearly aimed at blacks. To build up the
white audience, Mr. Page and Mr. Wilson
agreed to tone it down, focus it almost
entirely on the music.
"My magazine isn't some white-boy magazine, though," Mr. Wilson said. "It's black,
too. I'm not sacrificing what XXL stands
for." Even so, he added, "it can't be totally
black if a white man is signing the check."
'I Preach to Mess Up'
Tuesday dawned muggy. It started badly
and got worse. Upski was addressing about
250 students at Evergreen College in Olympia, Wash. Maybe 10 weren't white.
He had gathered a panel of half a dozen
students. One, Evelyn Aako, was black. Introducing her, he said: "I don't know her
very well, but she's black. And she's going to
talk about issues of being black on campus."
Ms. Aako gave him an arch look. "That
was very weird," she recalled thinking.
"Like I was a little dark object."
As Upski began talking, the white audience got defensive. One student said: "Why
do we have to talk about race? Why can't we
talk about how we're alike?"
Ms. Aako was getting disgusted. Finally
she told Upski: "I've been sitting here with
an uncomfortable feeling in my stomach
about how you introduced me. I felt tokenized and on display. This follows a tradition
where black people serve as entertainment
for white people. That's not what I do."
Upski said: "I screwed up. But what can
we do? The world is screwed up."
Some white students were looking irritated. One said: "Can't we hear Upski talk?
We can talk about race later."
A black student said: "What do you mean
later? We never talk about race."
Some whites left. Virtually all the students of color followed. Before leaving, Ms.
Aako said, "It's not my job to educate you."
Later, Upski sounded no less confident of
his ability to stimulate change. But perhaps,
he said, he needed to refine his approach.
"I think the main thing that keeps white
people from growing is they're afraid to
look bad," he said. "So I preach to mess up.
One of my blind spots at Evergreen was that
Evelyn wasn't going to trust me, that black
people and white people, we're still at war."
Increasingly, he said, he was questioning
his own evolution. Here he was intent on
helping blacks, and spending most of his
time in white culture. He had had a string of
black girlfriends, but now he was with a
white woman. A few years ago, probably
two-thirds of his friends were black and
Latino. Now it had flip-flopped.
Hip-hop itself had moved away from political and racial talk and for the most part
sold excess and riches, women and violence.
So much of hip-hop, he said, was self-denigrating, imitative and shallow. It was candy.
"One of the things I have the least respect
for about parts of black culture," he said,
"is there's so much pain and insecurity that
it gets medicated by aping the worst aspects
of white culture."
He talked about how so many of his old
black and Latino graffiti friends hadn't survived hip-hop too well. One got locked up for
firebombing a car. Another fell from a fire
escape while trying to rob an apartment. He
is now a paraplegic, drinking away his life,
Upski said.
And yet, Upski had to admit, he was
cruising along. His girlfriend, Ms. Drury,
had inherited money, though they lived
modestly. He didn't earn a lot, but he didn't
worry. Until recently, he never took cabs
and rarely ate out; he called it flaunting
privilege. But now he was traveling more in
white circles where everyone took cabs and
ate out. So he did, too. And, he acknowledged, he liked it.
"The part of Billy that wanted to be black
for a good part of his youth, that's fading,"
Ms. Drury said. "One of the issues in our
relationship is he's a chameleon. The thing
with Billy, he wants to be liked."
He had always cared so much about how
he looked through black eyes, he said. Now
his success depended on how he looked
through white eyes. He had always dressed
poorly and now he owned three suits. Where
was he going? he wondered. As you got
older, holding onto your hip-hop values
seemed a lot harder if you were white.
Traps and Trappings of Success
Elliott Wilson climbed the stairs to the
basketball court. The old guys were already
there. The doctor had told him he had high
blood pressure, a real slap in the face. "I've
got the black man's disease," he joked.
Who knew the factors, but he had never
eaten properly. He was also feeling the
pressure of his job, he said. A friend who had
been editor of The Source said the same
thing had happened to him.
His doctor put him on medication, urged
exercise. So he had begun playing full-court
basketball three mornings a week. There
was an early crowd of young guys, but Mr.
Wilson wasn't ready for them. He played
with a bunch of white guys, some in their
50's and 60's, and one black guy in his 70's.
He hit some baskets and missed some. He
changed and headed for XXL.
| About This Series |
|
Two generations after the end of legal discrimination, race still ignites
political debates -- over Civil War flags, for example, or police profiling.
But the wider public discussion of race relations seems muted by a
full-employment economy and by a sense, particularly among many whites,
that the time of large social remedies is past. Race relations are being
defined less by political action than by daily experience, in schools, in
sports arenas, in pop culture and at worship, and especially in the
workplace. These encounters -- race relations in the most literal, everyday
sense -- make up this series of reports, the outcome of a yearlong
examination by a team of Times reporters.
|
He had now edited four issues. The first
one, with DMX on the cover, had outsold any
previous issue. He felt he was making a
mark, he said. He had his disputes with
Dennis Page, but they got along. His Ego
Trip comrades felt proud of him.
He was making such good money, more
than three times what Upski made, but
somehow, he said, that wasn't the point.
What he really wanted was to "take The
Source out in a year or two," then expand
the reaches of Ego Trip. Still, there were
always seeds of self-doubt.
"Do I feel secure?" he said. "No. Because
I'm black and I have bad credit. Having bad
credit in this country is like being a convict.
You don't have a prosperity mind-set when
you're a person of color. You have something, you always feel someone is going to
take it. You're always on edge, wondering
what next."
'I Just Want the Money'
Dog twirled the dials and gave Trife the
signal to start. In the tiny apartment, Dog
and Trife and Sinbo and Po were rehearsing
for their album, the one they hoped might be
destiny's next chosen one.
Scrizz, Trife's brother and the C.E.O. of
Trife-Life Records, was listening like a jittery father. With no product yet, Trife-Life
was not a paying job for him. His background, like that of the others, was drugs
and crime. At the moment, he was out on
bail while fighting an assault charge.
Wanted and Respected started in on its
song "All the Time." Golden bars of light
streaked through the windows. Scrizz
tapped his foot. He, too, had a got-to-happen
mentality. He didn't much care who bought
the album, white or black, but he knew
where the money was. "I just want them to
eat it up," he said. "I just want the money."
It came down to that. A group of young
black guys in Brooklyn rhyming their lives,
betting on a brighter tomorrow sponsored
by white kids' money.
Dog turned up the music. They cleared
their throats and kept rapping.
.
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