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Adam Mansbach’s Postracial Imaginary in Angry Black White Boy

2018, Neo-Passing: Performing Identity after Jim Crow

AI-generated Abstract

This analysis explores Adam Mansbach's satirical novel "Angry Black White Boy" as a neo-passing narrative, examining the protagonist Macon Detornay's attempted embodiment of black radicalism within a white identity. The paper critiques the societal implications and consequences of cultural appropriation and identity formation, emphasizing the importance of anti-racist work being authentic and non-consumptive. Mansbach's portrayal serves as a cautionary tale regarding the complexities of race, identity, and the limitations of performance in a postracial context.

University of Illinois Press Chapter Title: Adam Mansbach’s Postracial Imaginary in Angry Black White Boy Chapter Author(s): BRANDON J. MANNING Book Title: Neo-Passing Book Subtitle: Performing Identity after Jim Crow Book Editor(s): MOLLIE GODFREY, VERSHAWN ASHANTI YOUNG Published by: University of Illinois Press. (2018) Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/j.ctt21c4tm7.10 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms University of Illinois Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Neo-Passing This content downloaded from 138.237.48.235 on Mon, 15 Jul 2019 18:54:24 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms chaPtEr 3 Adam Mansbach’s Postracial Imaginary in Angry Black White Boy brandon J. ManninG In the fall of 2014 I went to the Renegades of Rhythm concert that featured DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist, two white disc jockeys, who played and scratched Afrika Bambaataa’s personal record collection. I had recently moved to the Las Vegas area with my family, and this was the first trip to a show on the strip as a local. The concert was in a venue that served gourmet Southern cuisine ($25 fried chicken). I stood there feeling the bass vibrate through the soles of my feet, looking at two DJs mixing up Bambaataa, who at the time was a visiting professor at Cornell University. The DJs mixed on six turntables for a Las Vegas crowd that was mostly white, middle, and upper class—an audience that excitedly yelled when the music said, “It all began in Africa.” The DJs began to create a sonic space that historicized and contextualized Bambaataa’s influences and, by extension, the influences for hip-hop. This sonic genealogy began with James Brown as digital images of graffiti scrolled across the jumbo screen behind the DJs. These images were followed by album art for the records they were playing as well as an assortment of subway trains and pictures of how-to pop-and-lock manuals—it was a postmodern pastiche of hip-hop culture. The scene reminded me of hip-hop’s far-reaching impact as the music was sonically contorted, respected, commodified, and jammed by a younger whiter audience. The experience prompted me to question if the afrofuturism embedded in Bambaataa’s drums and vision revamped George S. Schuyler’s Black No More This content downloaded from 138.237.48.235 on Mon, 15 Jul 2019 18:54:24 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Adam Mansbach’s Postracial Imaginary (1931) into a 2014 “white no more” or whether this was the progeny of Langston Hughes’s “when the negro was in vogue.”1 All the while, I questioned what the convergence of deference, commodity, authority, and authenticity meant in this space—what it meant for the DJs or for Bambaataa. For the majority of the audience, I realized that this was merely a show, something to go to, something to consume, when they visited Las Vegas. The DJs recognized this point when they repeatedly asked the crowd to do their own research. However, I was more interested in the two white DJs and how they performed this deference, authority, and authenticity over the turntables. They played Bambaataa and the Soulsonic Force’s “Looking for the Perfect Beat,” the fifth track on Planet Rock: The Album, and I wondered what the perfect beat was for this audience in this moment. What bass, synthesizer, 808, or offbeat could capture the rhythm and the breaks of different bodies attempting to do different work because of their understanding of sociocultural traditions and movements? Was this a postracial groove? By way of further examining these questions, I turn to Adam Mansbach’s satirical novel Angry Black White Boy or the Miscegenation of Macon Detornay (2005).2 Mansbach’s novel takes place over the course of a year and follows the protagonist, Macon Detornay, a white freshman at Columbia University from the Boston suburbs. Macon identifies himself as a hip-hop head, graffiti artist, and black radical/militant. Mansbach’s interest in exploring the interplay between identity formation and cultural appropriation with Macon Detornay creates a critical line of inquiry that echoes E. Patrick Johnson’s opening questions in Appropriating Blackness (2003), “What happens when ‘blackness’ is embodied? What are the cultural, social, and political consequences of that embodiment in a racist society? Or, alternatively, how are the stakes changed when a ‘white’ body performs blackness?”3 Most critical perspectives like that of Eric Lott in Love and Theft (1993) cite the legacy of minstrelsy as an early white expressive form that attempts to embody and perform blackness.4 While this critical approach yields insightful analyses around the potentiality of such performances for black and white subjects alike, I question what it might mean to locate Mansbach’s novel as a neo-passing narrative, instead. By neo-passing narrative, I mean a narrative that contemporizes the historical legacy of black bodies passing into the realm of whiteness as a means of negotiating and surviving the white-supremacist racial hierarchy of American racism. Devon W. Carbado and Mitu Gulati give a more contemporary understanding of passing by asserting that one can “partially pass . . . by affirmatively identifying or associating with institutions, cultural practices, and social activities that are 85 This content downloaded from 138.237.48.235 on Mon, 15 Jul 2019 18:54:24 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms brandon J. ManninG stereotypically perceived to be white.”5 Although Carbado and Gulati focus on the traditional notion of passing as an act where the “outsider,” to use their expression, is a person of color trying to pass into whiteness, I am choosing to use it in a broader context to think about Macon’s desire to transcend whiteness into blackness and no longer be understood as “a white devil.”6 I reimagine this historical and literary trope, at the center of works like Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929) and James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-colored Man (1912), to consider how neo-passing narratives incorporate the nuance and complexities of the new millennium to the racial ideology of American passing. In this chapter, I argue that Mansbach’s novel serves as an exploration into a postracial imaginary that thinks about the future of resistance and race in America. Mansbach creates this postracial imaginary by juxtaposing the neopassing site of Macon’s identity formation with the racial logic and history of black people passing for white during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Mansbach’s attention to Macon’s white privilege makes this a postracial project. Mansbach utilizes popular tropes from black satirists such as an investment in destabilizing the idea of race, an intraracial self-reflexivity that allows Mansbach to critique whiteness, and an awareness that the idea of race is both socially constructed as well as a sociocultural and political reality with real stakes for people of color. Thus, similar to DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist, Angry Black White Boy is Mansbach’s performance of deference, authority, and authenticity to a black satirical tradition and as such functions as an aggregate of Schuyler, Fran Ross, Ishmael Reed, Percival Everett, Paul Beatty, and others in a nonappropriative, nonconsumptive, and nonexploitative way. After a successful presidential campaign in 2008, the iconicity of the Obamas in Grant Park on election night engendered an American postracial imaginary that sought to look beyond race or, more aptly, in spite of race to a homogenous future free from the wounds of racism. Barack Hussein Obama’s successful campaign marked a moment in history that sought to erase or resolve a racist past and to decentralize race and American racism from social, cultural, and political conversations for a utopic racial future. Within this formulation, the presidency, as an office, serves as a symbol of the highest success or actualization of the Civil Rights moment. Legal scholar Terry Smith succinctly defines postracialism as “one in which racial disparity persists but race as national issue falls out of vogue.”7 Smith’s pragmatic definition of postracialism highlights an American racial ideology that at its core is hostile toward issues of race in a post–Civil Rights America and that uses Obama’s presidency as a signpost of racial cohesion. Similarly, legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw plays with the 86 This content downloaded from 138.237.48.235 on Mon, 15 Jul 2019 18:54:24 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Adam Mansbach’s Postracial Imaginary utopic notion embedded within the rhetoric and ideological underpinnings of postracialism by referring to it as “the postracial Promised Land.”8 Crenshaw, a leading legal scholar, defines the phenomenon as “the idea that our basic quest for social justice is complete.”9 Whereas Smith’s and Crenshaw’s definitions of postracialism, while different, both speak to dominant culture’s similar utopic conclusion about the future possibility of race being a nonfactor, Mansbach’s novel provides an alternative to thinking about postracialism in America—a way that centers those on the margins. For Mansbach, telling Macon’s story and critiquing him at specific moments throughout the narrative allow Mansbach to conceptualize an understanding of postracialism that contradicts contemporary formulations of the term, and while Mansbach never specifically uses the term postracial in the novel, Macon consistently tries to and, arguably, succeeds in provoking a “racial apocalypse” in the form of a race riot and destabilizes whiteness through his own racial performance and political ideologies.10 For Macon, hip-hop serves as a conduit into black history, rage, and antiracist activism. For example, early in the novel as Macon is driving his taxicab, “The light clicked green and Red switched up the soundtrack, segueing into ‘Days of Outrage, Operation Snatchback,’ X-Clan’s song about being assaulted by cops at the Yusef Hawkins rally on the Brooklyn Bridge.”11 Here, Mansbach uses X-Clan’s song as a sonic space of legitimacy and authenticity for himself and for Macon. In addition, the song’s history in telling the story of police brutality at a rally decrying police brutality and the wrongful death of Yusef Hawkins illustrates how resistance and rage serve as a central concept in hip-hop music and culture. In doing so, Mansbach embraces a history of conscious hip-hop that performs and encourages black rage. For bell hooks, there is political work in rage as “a necessary aspect of resistance struggle” and “as a catalyst inspiring courageous action.”12 By adopting that rage, Mansbach demonstrates how Macon’s conception of racism and white privilege and desire for other white people to be critical in the same ways could potentially usher in a type postracial utopia. In other words, by reading Macon’s use of rage and self-reflexivity as neopassing and as a precursor for a postracial imaginary, Mansbach combats the contemporary hegemonic notion of postracialism by attempting to represent a different kind of postracialism—one that interrogates the adoption of blackness as neo-passing. He is able to accomplish this by having Macon adopt a black cultural identity as a way of resisting white privilege. Indeed, there are pivotal moments throughout Mansbach’s novel where Macon considers himself black 87 This content downloaded from 138.237.48.235 on Mon, 15 Jul 2019 18:54:24 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms brandon J. ManninG or at least blacker than other characters. When attending a meeting held by a black student organization at Columbia, Macon thinks to himself, “He was blacker than each and every last one of these bourgeois motherfuckers,” referring to the black students at the meeting.13 Macon’s treatment of blackness in the novel oscillates from deference to indignation depending upon how black characters fit into his fixed, overdetermined understanding of blackness. The illusion of blackness, for Macon, is that it is monolithic in its commitment to antiracism and the disenfranchised. Mansbach’s critique of Macon demonstrates that white people’s proximity to black cultural production, as a form of neo-passing, is not inherently postracial. The liminal racial space that the title gestures toward—the angry “black” white boy—is one that Macon wants to claim as solely his own. For instance, Macon’s authority, authenticity, and understanding toward blackness is something he feels that only he can claim: “He went to work constructing a rhetorical framework that would allow him to embrace the Five Percenter’s truths without capitulating his soul: White people aren’t evil, but evil is white people. There it was. Simple. Elegant. True. It bought Macon space to live in, to be special, angry, the exception, the crusader. The down whiteboy.”14 Mansbach outlines the possibility and failings of Macon’s turn toward hip-hop and his “down-ness” as an act of resistance to white privilege when Mansbach says in an interview, “White kids trying to absolve their guilt over their whiteness by getting into hip hop is an interesting thing, and a moment fraught with possibility: They’re getting involved in black culture . . . precisely because they understand the problematic nature of whiteness. But there are pitfalls . . . where you think you’re the downest white boy ever and no one can tell you shit.”15 Although Mansbach demonstrates the dangers of neo-passing especially as it pertains to white performances of racial authenticity, he also suggests that this form of neo-passing does begin some of the work of acknowledging the presence and problems of whiteness. Other white characters’ ability to misrecognize Macon as black typifies the meticulous way that he shapes and performs his identity and also serves as a more direct way to imagine Mansbach’s novel as a neo- passing narrative. In the first half of the novel, Macon drives a cab in New York City and robs some of his white wealthy passengers. However, it is also this moment, a moment where Macon is so enraged—presumably with a “black” rage—that he acts criminally to distance himself from other white people. The turning point for Macon is when he realizes that the white people that he has robbed thought that he was black. Unfortunately, his actions reinforce a stereotypical understanding of blackness for these white patrons whose conversations 88 This content downloaded from 138.237.48.235 on Mon, 15 Jul 2019 18:54:24 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Adam Mansbach’s Postracial Imaginary demonstrate their white-supremacist thinking. Mansbach’s narration is worth quoting at length: He’d done it: found some kind of worm hole in the white psyche, some uncharted reflex, and here he stood, divorced from his own color by the violence and conviction of his actions. Those fools hadn’t seen white knuckles gripping that gun. They couldn’t. Their brains weren’t wired to link whiteness to the words Macon had hurled at them, the fear he’d made them feel. It had to be a nigger. Macon was invisible. . . . Did the world merely call traitors to whiteness black? What was the turning point, the secret password, the moment when you were no longer recognized, the instant when your picture faded from the ferry pass and you had to stay on the island of Blackness forever or swim back on your own?16 Although Mansbach allows the reader to know that the white riders think Macon is black before Macon finds out, his narrative choice to portray this moment through a third-person narrator that ventriloquizes Macon’s tone and unmediated thoughts is helpful for the reader. The choice to use the words divorce and had to, in the abstract, are equally as telling as the use of the n-word. Indeed, the choice to articulate Macon’s assumed separation from whiteness and the force with which it is happening informs the way the reader understands Macon’s anxiety around “leaving” whiteness. Similarly, the use of the n-word seems to be a sign of his departure of whiteness and his full ascension into blackness. In addition, the imagery of being marooned solidifies Macon’s racial binary and his own anxiety toward performing race. If we believe Mansbach’s title to be true, then Macon is angry—very angry. Furthermore, the centrality of anger coupled with the liminality of Macon’s racial performance suggests that anger is operating in two different ways in the text. On the one hand, Macon demonstrates that through his understanding of history and hip-hop, he can perform a sort of pseudoblack rage, and on the other hand, he is an angry, discontented white youth—an anger and, more important, the public performance of that anger that are symptomatic of his white privilege. bell hooks describes the variations of rage: “The rage of the oppressed is never the same as the rage of the privileged. One group can change their lot only by changing the system; the other hopes to be rewarded within the system. Public focus on black rage, the attempt to trivialize and dismiss it, must be subverted by public discourse about the pathology of white supremacy, the madness it creates.”17 Similarly, in Angry White Men (2013), Michael S. Kimmel locates anger as the underlying affective position of contemporary white masculinity. By analyzing the centrality of white men in American mass killings, 89 This content downloaded from 138.237.48.235 on Mon, 15 Jul 2019 18:54:24 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms brandon J. ManninG the marketability and anger of political punditry, and other highly visible sites of white masculine hostility, Kimmel suggests, “It’s that aggrieved entitlement that fuels their rage: once they were in power, they believe, but now they’ve been emasculated, their birth-right transferred to others who don’t deserve it.”18 Macon’s “aggrieved entitlement” is important to his adaptation and performance of a hip-hop masculinity. Returning to that moment before Macon robs his first passengers, he is reminded of one of his high school tormentors, Scott. Macon’s memory retells a moment in high school when Scott corners Macon because Macon hangs out with the black children at school: “[Macon] wanted to kill Scott Cartwright, hated himself because at that moment he cared what Scott Cartwright thought of him—felt ridiculous, ashamed. And yet Macon knew he’d courted this. He wanted his defection from whiteness and his acceptance by black people to be public, the subject of wonder and envy, anger and scorn.”19 Here, Macon’s psyche suggests to the reader why he wants black people to accept him. If this moment is emblematic of a larger childhood narrative that situates his performance and acceptance of blackness as both a site of protection and derision, then the anger and zeal in which Macon appropriates this pseudoblackness is meant to protect him from the threat of white masculine violence. Miles White speaks to the cultural capital for white men performing a black masculine subjectivity: “In this new street theater of the racially absurd, the physical power, sexuality, and ability to inspire fear that black male bodies have historically conveyed become transferred onto white bodies in ways that usurp agency of the black body, exploits it as a site of social anxiety, and perpetuates its demonization.”20 For Macon, it is precisely this need to capitalize on the cool poses of black masculinity to help him through his adolescence as well as his own racial and historical consciousness and guilt. For instance, Macon thinks at one point, “Just being down with the brothers gave him a bigger dick by association, swelled his masculinity like it did that of every kid thugging it up in front of his bedroom mirror, rhyming along to a rap song.”21 Macon’s commitment to antiracist activism is undone by his exploitative relationship to blackness. Whereas Macon fails to acknowledge his white privilege and how it informs his antiracist activism and thereby fails to actualize Mansbach’s idea of postracialism, Mansbach succeeds in performing his vision of postracialism by being critical of Macon’s white privilege. In an interview, Mansbach states, “The main thing that Macon does that I want to be critical of is this idea that blackness is the opposite of white privilege. Because the true opposite of white privilege is the dismantling of white privilege.”22 Throughout the novel, Mansbach uses narration as a tool to critique Macon’s white privilege, referring to him as “Flyboy 90 This content downloaded from 138.237.48.235 on Mon, 15 Jul 2019 18:54:24 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Adam Mansbach’s Postracial Imaginary raceman asshole” in order to demonstrate the failed potential of his antiracist activism.23 Mansbach’s omniscient third-person narrator both echoes Macon’s problematic understanding of himself—one that occasionally uses the n-word and describes the extent to which Macon performs black authenticity but allows for this same narrator to refer to him as an “asshole.” In this way the novel’s narration is markedly different from Macon’s first-person-narrator prologue, “Letter from a Birmingham Bus,” in which his petulance and egotism are unmediated by a third-person narrator. Mansbach utilizes Dre and Nique, Macon’s two black associates, to illustrate how Macon’s white privilege is antithetical to his desire to transcend whiteness. Dre, who is characterized as “a stoic, amiable receptacle into which fake-empathetic whiteboys dumped their views, a priest who heard confessions and smoked joints with the sinners to absolve them,” serves as a site where Mansbach critiques Macon’s white guilt and misguided notions of authenticity.24 Mansbach’s strategic uses of the narrative voice and of Dre and Nique illustrate for the reader that Macon’s neo-passing falls short of Mansbach’s concept of a postracial imaginary. Unlike Macon’s inability to create coalitions, Mansbach’s use of signifying and intertextuality makes the antiracist work of Angry Black White Boy conversant with broader African American literary and satirical traditions. In the prologue Macon says, “I was hoping someone would call me the white Bigger Thomas, but nobody had the nutsack even though it’s an obvious comparison, what with Bigger being a chauffeur and me a cabbie. I talked a lot more shit than Bigger ever did, though. And I did what I did on purpose.”25 Here, Mansbach evokes Bigger Thomas, the protagonist of Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940), through the only moment of first-person narration in the novel: the prologue. The use of Bigger is then twofold: for the reader, it signifies that both the writer and protagonist are well versed in an African American literary tradition, and for Mansbach, it serves as a way to characterize Macon’s white privilege by appropriating a literary genealogy of black rage. It was Bigger’s lack of privilege that Wright foregrounds in Native Son, thus when Macon evokes Bigger and says, “It’s an obvious comparison,” he does so without realizing how white privilege operates within America’s racial landscape.26 Similarly, the prologue’s title, “Letter from a Birmingham Bus,” demonstrates Macon’s appropriation of Martin Luther King Jr.’s incarceration to juxtapose it with Macon’s celebrity and people misunderstanding him. Furthermore, Macon’s remark at the end of the prologue, “The question is not how I got this way, but how the rest of y’all didn’t,” demonstrates that his ignorance of white privilege is not limited to the specificity of his own neo-passing and misguided antiracist work but reveals a broader ignorance of the systemic nature of whiteness.27 91 This content downloaded from 138.237.48.235 on Mon, 15 Jul 2019 18:54:24 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms brandon J. ManninG African American satirists throughout the twentieth century and beyond have created a blueprint for troubling monolithic notions of race. Mansbach’s use of satire and his engagement with a black satirical tradition in Angry Black White Boy signal his use of this blueprint to critique whiteness in the same ways that black satirists have provided social commentary about whiteness and blackness. Later in the novel, when asked on a television show who his favorite authors are, Macon responds, “Gunnar Kaufman, Raven Quickskill, and Daniel Vivaldo.”28 All three of these “authors” are characters in African American novels, two of them as protagonists in satirical novels. Gunnar Kaufman is the protagonist in Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle, Raven Quickskill is the protagonist in Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada, and Daniel Vivaldo is a main character in James Baldwin’s Another Country. Here, Mansbach is signifying on the black satirical and literary traditions by evoking writers in metanarratives. “Signifyin(g),” as Henry Louis Gates Jr. articulates it, is a process of “repeating received tropes and narrative strategies with a difference . . . an extended commentary on the history of the black novel” and is an apt way to describe the work that Mansbach’s intertextuality is doing in the novel.29 Mansbach’s postracial signifying practices return to the ideological underpinnings of Schuyler’s Black No More—specifically, Schuyler’s nascent idea that blackness and, more broadly, race are socially constructed and not intrinsically tied to biological determinates.30 Black No More is a satirical, sciencefiction novel that demonstrates the allure of white privilege when a scientist, Dr. Crookman, creates a serum to turn black people white, thereby decimating vibrant black communities across America during the height of the Harlem Renaissance. Indeed, in the third and final section of Angry Black White Boy, Mansbach “repeats” and “extends” the theoretical framework about race in Black No More when Macon is introduced to a psychiatrist that is able to rid people’s racial anxieties and identity formations. Whereas Dr. Crookman in Black No More creates a serum to turn black people white, Donner in Angry Black White Boy is a psychiatrist that uses “a combination of hypnosis, therapy, psychodrama, various re-acculturation techniques, to alter an individual’s selfimage.”31 By contemporizing Schuyler’s disruption of essentialist notions of race, Mansbach is able to criticize Macon’s attempt at black authenticity and his self-centered, white privileged form of antiracist activism. If Black No More is the quintessential passing narrative for the ways that it foregrounds passing at the epidermal level during Jim Crow, then Mansbach’s psychological turn serves as an exemplary postracial neo-passing narrative for the ways that Mansbach extends the conversation on racial essentialism, authenticity, and privilege for the de facto racism of today. 92 This content downloaded from 138.237.48.235 on Mon, 15 Jul 2019 18:54:24 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Adam Mansbach’s Postracial Imaginary Ultimately, Mansbach’s postracial imaginary is realized by his authorial critique of Macon. In this way, Macon’s neo-passing acts as Mansbach’s cautionary tale for his reader. By centering Macon’s failed potential, Mansbach intimates that the impetus and execution of antiracist work have to be a nonappropriative, nonconsumptive enterprise. In essence, Mansbach echoes Audre Lorde’s claim that one cannot dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools. Mansbach’s tropological use of African American satire as a blueprint to critique America’s racial ideology allows for Macon to be conversant with Stephen Jorgenson in Wallace Thurman’s Infants of the Spring and other satirical critiques of white liberalism and antiracist work.32 Similar to Mansbach’s use of hip-hop as an antiracist mechanism, it’s the permanency of hip-hop in the Renegade of Rhythms concert that evokes this same conception of postracialism. By beginning the concert with “It All Began in Africa,” DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist demonstrated that they were going to keep Bambaataa’s politics central to the sonic space they were re-creating. On the tour’s website, DJ Shadow states, “Bambaataa as artist, exploring the influence of his classics like ‘Planet Rock’; Bambaataa as collector, and the genre-defining breaks he discovered; and Bambaataa as peacemaker and force for social change. He influenced an entire generation worldwide, so we feel a great obligation to get it right.”33 Furthermore, it is Afrika Bambaataa’s afrofuturism that parallels the future potential of Mansbach’s conception of postracialism. They exuded a deep knowledge, love, and respect for the music and for Bambaataa. Through the haze of a smoky stage, strobe lights, and scrolling hip-hop images on a giant screen, DJ Cut Chemist and DJ Shadow performed a postracial subjectivity for their audience while “Looking for the Perfect Beat.” Notes 1. Hughes, Big Sea, 228. 2. Mansbach, Angry Black White Boy. 3. Johnson, Appropriating Blackness, 2. 4. Lott, Love and Theft. 5. Carbado and Gulati, Acting White?, 29. 6. Ibid., 17. 7. Smith, Barack Obama, Post-Racialism, 1. 8. Crenshaw, “Racing to Post-Racialism.” 9. Ibid. 10. Mansbach, Angry Black White Boy, 207. 11. Ibid., 18. 12. hooks, Killing Rage, 16. 93 This content downloaded from 138.237.48.235 on Mon, 15 Jul 2019 18:54:24 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms brandon J. ManninG 13. Mansbach, Angry Black White Boy, 123. 14. Ibid., 18. The Five Percenters is a concept in the Nation of Islam that states only 5 percent of the population knows the truth about God and that all humankind derives from black people. Mansbach writes earlier in the novel, “Before he joined the five percent nation and gained Knowledge of self and realized that the Original Asiatic Black Man was the Maker, the Owner, the Cream of the Planet Earth, Father of Civilization and God of the Universe. Before he became part of the Five Percent of the population who overstood the Supreme Mathematics and threw off the shackles of mental slavery to become Poor Righteous Teachers.” Ibid., 14. 15. Mansbach, “Whiteness Visible.” 16. Ibid., 109. 17. hooks, Killing Rage, 30. 18. Kimmel, Angry White Men, 277. 19. Mansbach, Angry Black White Boy, 20. 20. White, From Jim Crow to Jay-Z, 105. 21. Mansbach, Angry Black White Boy, 180. 22. Mansbach, “Whiteness Visible.” 23. Mansbach, Angry Black White Boy, 195. 24. Ibid., 31. 25. Ibid., 2–3. 26. Wright, Native Son. 27. Mansbach, Angry Black White Boy, 3. 28. Ibid., 196. 29. Gates, Signifying Monkey, 217. 30. Schuyler, Black No More. 31. Mansbach, Angry Black White Boy, 292. 32. Thurman, Infants of the Spring. 33. DJ Shadow, “Announcing Renegades.” Bibliography Carbado, Devon W., and Mitu Gulati. Acting White? Rethinking Race in “Post-Racial” America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Racing to Post-Racialism: Critical Race Theory, Constitutional Law, and Sustaining Communities.” Lecture, California State University, Los Angeles, April 14, 2011. DJ Shadow. “Announcing Renegades of Rhythm Tour This Fall w/Cut Chemist.” DJ Shadow, June 16, 2014. Accessed February 16, 2015. http://djshadow.com. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. hooks, bell. Killing Rage: Ending Racism. New York: Holt, 1995. Hughes, Langston. The Big Sea. 1940. New York: Hill and Wang, 1993. 94 This content downloaded from 138.237.48.235 on Mon, 15 Jul 2019 18:54:24 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Adam Mansbach’s Postracial Imaginary Johnson, E. Patrick. Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. Kimmel, Michael S. Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era. New York: Nation, 2013. Lott, Eric. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Mansbach, Adam. Angry Black White Boy or the Miscegenation of Macon Detornay: A Novel. New York: Three Rivers, 2005. ———. “Whiteness Visible.” Interview by Scott Thill. Alternet, May 5, 2005. Accessed January 8, 2015. http://www.alternet.org. Schuyler, George S. Black No More. 1931. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1989. Smith, Terry. Barack Obama, Post-Racialism, and the New Politics of Triangulation. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Thurman, Wallace. Infants of the Spring. 1932. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992. White, Miles. From Jim Crow to Jay-Z: Race, Rap, and the Performance of Masculinity. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011. Wright, Richard. Native Son. New York: Harper, 1940. 95 This content downloaded from 138.237.48.235 on Mon, 15 Jul 2019 18:54:24 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms