THE WHITE NEGRO A DISTURBING CULT IS APPEARING IN BRITAIN

Press, Volume CV, Issue 30980, 9 February 1966, Page 12

THE WHITE NEGRO A DISTURBING CULT IS APPEARING IN BRITAIN

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RICHARD DENMAN

I of the ‘'Economist."!

[From the '‘Economist” Intelligence Vnit.l

Pick up almost any copy of the weekly “Melody Maker”—or just about any other magazine for Britain’s youthful “pop culture"—and you will meet one of the newest and in many ways most disturbing features of current British life: the White Negro.

What, exactly, is a White Negro? Norman Mailer, that ageing stormy petrel of American literature, invented the expression as the title for a tract on the so-called “hipster,” an oddity of American life a few years back. Mailer did not put it quite like this, but what it came down to was that his hipster—his “White Negro”—was someone whose own uncertainties and guilts led him to identify himself with the underest underdog he could find: the American Negro. To Mailer’s hipster, anything associated, rightly or wrongly, with the American Negro—jazz, the social disorganisation of Harlem, marijuana: it did not matter —was good. Anything white, including the hipster’s own skin, was something to be rejected, and the disadvantages of having a brown skin were conveniently overlooked. “Soul” Groups All this would have been a worn-out bit of American social history—Mailer’s hipster is basically as dead as a doornail now—if the White Negro had not appeared on this side of the Atlantic. He is there whenever a member of a leading beat group (sorry; now they are “soul” groups) says that nobody can play music like a Negro. He is there when — as happened not so many months ago—a singer of the stature of Miss Dusty Springfield says she wishes she had been born a Negro so she could have the “soul” Negroes are supposed to be born with, Whatever one feels about it, the White Negro is here and deserves some honest examination. What is more surprising about the whole business is

that it has not a thing to do i with Britain's own colour proj bletn. When the popsters and I beatsters praise Negro music they’re praising American Negro music— something neither they nor for that matter most Americans know much about. When Miss Springfield said she wished she’d been born a Negro, she prettv obviously was not thinking of a Jamaican in Brixton or a Barbadian in Smethwick. The Negro she was thinking of bears about as much relationship to reality as a pantomime Man Friday or a Black and White Minstrel. Uncle Tom Types That is what is disturbing about the whole White Negro business. No fairminded map would complain if Britain s new White Negroes associated themselves, in their minds at least, with Britain’s own coloured population if they made some effort to understand and alleviate the terrifying lack of communication between the white-to-tan majority and the tan-to-black 3 per vent minority. Whether they would admit it or not, our home grown hipsters’ idea of a "Negro” is still the pantomime stereotype. The jolly li’l ol’ plantation ditties have been replaced by the blues and the rock: the over-amplified guitar has taken over from the cot-ton-pickin’ banjo. The watermelon and south’n fried chicken have been replaced by the illicit thrill of a whiff of reefers in a dark corner. A modern version—but it is still the same old picture of Uncle Tom and Aunt Jemima and all the li’l pickaninnies playing and singing and dancing in the sun. Somehow, to these people, Negroes are just a bit magic. They claim that coloured people have a “natural sense of music.” (There is absolutely nothing to suggest that dark-skinned people are more lor less musical than Bulgarians or Lapps or Basques. If we had not been so stifled by a couple of centuries of Puritanism and prudery we would be just as musical ourselves.) Negroes, it is maintained, are' “natural sportsmen.” (A German team of anthropologists currently making the rounds of Africa is acutely embarrassed at finding nothing at all to suggest that Negroes are any better at sports than the rest of us, except that sport is one of the ways a man can make a hit In our white world in spite of a dark skin.) Phony Picture Magic? Yes. Slightly out of the ordinary. Yes. Terrifying? Emphatically yes! That is all part of our picture of darkskinned people—and part of the White Negro's picture of them. But human? No. Our picture of the coloured person is the end result of generations of superstition, misinformation and halftruth. And the White Negro's picture of him is just as

phony, if not quite the same. It is this very phoniness that makes the cult of the White Negro so disturbing. It may come as a surprise to Miss Springfield and others of like mind, that the ordinary Negro—or the ordinary Indian or Pakistani or Malay or Chinese—does not want to be regarded as a superman or a god or even an amiable and entertaining oddity. He wants to be regarded as an ordinary human being, complete with the ordinary human being’s vices and virtues. The contempt with which the White Negro is held by the real one ought to be a warning. In one sense this White Negro business is not a bad thing. It means that, to an increasing number of young Britons, a dark skin is not automatically bad or inferior. Perhaps, when the pendulum swings back, both the White Negroes and the rest of us will start looking for the man underneath instead of the skin colour. Meanwhile, though. Britain has a colour problem, small but increasing. If our own domestic brand of White Negro is really concerned about human understanding, there is lots of work to be done right here in Oldham and Slough and Paddington and Dudley.