Jeremy Parker's "Kill Whitie" Parties in Williamsburg

8/26/05 - I don't even know where to begin on this one. Somebody call Tim Wise on the bat-phone.

I've been saying for years that irony is now the last refuge of a coward. A singularly dishonest and deluded sort of coward who imagines his behavior a mark of courage, as he fearlessly refuses to take anything seriously.

But the true mark of courage is a willingness to engage the world, and your place in it, with honesty and sincerity. Those who lack that sort of courage will spend their lives looking for something to hide behind. This cowardice is the root of all hipster irony.

And this is never more obvious, or more ugly, than when issues of race are involved. There's a lot more I could say about this but right now I just don't have the patience.

8/29/05 EDIT: Note the reply from Mr. Kill Whitie himself below in the comments, and the equally impassioned visit from his collaborator Debbie D (veteran of Vice magazine, predictably) in my other post. I may post rebuttals if time permits, but I'm not sure it's even necessary.

Also worth reading (especially for the Kill Whitie apologists now visiting us), the discussions on okayplayer and ILM, which led me to this fantastic Lester Bangs essay, The White Noise Supremacists (pdf).

href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9080429/">Deejay’s appeal: ‘Kill the whiteness inside’

Tha Pumpsta, who happens be white, has built a following in the past few years by staging monthly "Kill Whitie" parties in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, for large groups of white hipsters. His proclaimed goal, in between spinning booty-bass, Miami-style frenetically danceable hip-hop records that are low on lyrical depth and high on raunchiness, is to "kill the whiteness inside..."

...A melanin-lacking hip-hop party might be a fact of demographics in a few corners of the United States. But in New York, where hip-hop was born in black and Latino neighborhoods, the all-white parody of black culture can strike a jarring note.

A few months ago, 29-year-old Sharda Sekaran was hitting dance spots with friends when she stumbled into a Kill Whitie party. "There was a bunch of white people acting like a raunchy hip-hop video," she said. "I don't get why that wouldn't be a characterization of black people for the entertainment of themselves."

Sekaran, a native New Yorker from a mixed-race family -- part black, part South Asian -- occasionally works as a deejay and knows all about hipster irony. "That doesn't make it any less disturbing," Sekaran said. "Their attitude is, 'It's our privilege to do this because we're in our own little clique, in our own little world...' "

...Casady was raised in Santa Barbara, Calif., but quickly notes her worldliness by listing the cities where she has lived along the trail to Brooklyn. A regular Kill Whitie partygoer, she tried the conventional (that is, non-hipster) hip-hop clubs but found the men "really hard-core." In this vastly whiter scene, Casady said that "it's a safe environment to be freaky..."

[Jeremy's] street flyers come emblazoned with the words "Kill Whitie" across a woman's backside. Another flier offers free admission to anyone with a bucket of fried chicken...

On a vaguely related note, Prometheus 6 is a blog everybody should read.

(passed on by O-Dub)