23 Feb 2010, Written by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein in music

White Self Indulgence

I can’t wait for you to shut me up!

This line pops into my head a lot because I often need to rev myself up with defiant words. I like this particular version of it because the music, the words and the delivery are furious, and lurking underneath it all, I’ve got a competitive fury. Deep, I know.

The problem is that Mindless Self Indulgence (MSI), the band that performs the song “Shut Me Up,” also really, really likes to throw the word “nigga” around in their lyrics. Well, the problem is that I’m not quite sure this is a problem.

Many people would say there is room for some deep, nuanced discussion about the history of the words “nigger,” “nigga” and “negro.” I could throw in some smart references to the Senate Majority Leader, the President, Ralph Ellison, Cornel West and hip-hop. And apparently crack too, since I wrote to IGT editor Paul M. Davis the other day that MSI’s sound is “like crack to me. I crave it.”

And maybe that’s the problem. Their sound, to me, is so infectious that I wasn’t even able to think straight when a couple of months ago, annoyed by my constant listening of MSI, my white boyfriend noted that they used the word “nigga” a lot. He said, “you don’t approve of that, DO YOU?” (The caps are my emphasis.) I knew what he was getting at. He knows me well enough to know that generally my response to a white person appropriating a culturally sensitive term like that is, “Oh helllllllllllll no!” (a la Girlfriends) But I was so hooked on what I thought was a completely brilliant sound that I mentally scrambled to come up with an explanation for why it was okay while simultaneously thinking, “Fuuuuck.”

Let me back up and explain. I’m a light-skinned Black woman. This means that I know who I am but sometimes other people get a little confused. For example, when I was 15, I went with some white friends to a New Year’s party in small-ass, middle-of-nowhere Bowie, Maryland, where a couple of the guys started talking about niggers. Of course my immediate response was, “say what?” And yes, I have some cojones, so I challenged them. In a moment of revelation, one said, “I thought she was a Mexican! But she’s a nigger!” And we were thrown out of the party, into the cold, with no cell phones, completely unreasonable skimpy clothing, and no ride home. Thus began 1998, and the end of any illusions I had about racism in my age group.

Twelve years later, that evening stays with me. Like a lot of Black folks, I think “nigger” and variations of it have special meaning. And by special, I mean BAD. Bad bad bad. For months after that New Years incident, I was convinced that every white guy my age was secretly thinking, “Nigger nigger nigger” in the back of his mind. Yes, people, the word has power. I had been branded, for life. The good things stayed with me too: my white friends never abandoned me and never made me feel guilty about what we had just been through.

I eventually got over my irrational fear of white guys my age and went back to listening to KROQ, even as I became better able to appreciate things like Malcolm X and the eventual development of Afro-Punk. I continued to rock out to the good stuff (Nirvana and Tamar-kali) and the bad stuff (I once bought a P.O.D. album) when I wasn’t grooving to Mary J. Blige and or nodding in agreement with 2Pac. Not much has changed in the intervening 12 years except that I’ve integrated more good and bad and in-between into the mix. Enter MSI.

For those of you unfamiliar with their sound, MSI = (hip-hop + guitars) x speed. I have no idea whether this band is any good. I just know that when I feel like I need to scream, they do it for me. This music speaks to me. And it often feels like it speaks for me. It releases things that I’m not allowed to, at least not without the neighbors calling Waterloo Regional Police. So, I’m sitting there, in my car or on my bed rapidly nodding my head, “Two hookers and an eight ball/ Can you believe that I write this shit?” And it’s all totally awesome and then, “Nigga for all the stolen goods/ As I rock that niggas and get freaky-deaky/ with a front row ticket for all my bitches.” And then it’s ‘ummm, no, no that doesn’t speak for me at all!’

As I read the lyrics, it’s clear to me that the lyrical style here is meant to reference hip-hop. The question is whether it’s mimicking or mocking hip-hop? How am I supposed to tell the difference? Can I make that evaluation based on the skin color of the singer? Do I have to check the skin colors of the rest of the band? Thanks society, thanks a fucking lot for making this so complicated! If only you hadn’t dicked around with that whole enslaving my ancestors thing, I wouldn’t have to ask these questions.

But then again, maybe hip-hop never would have come to be without those fucked up experiences. Yes, of course, I’d happily reverse history and kill hip-hop if it meant there had never been and never would be a Middle Passage. But there was and it was born, and now whites like it too. What the hell is a Black girl to do?

Ask Google of course. And I did. Statements on the band’s forum and other websites indicate that the lead singer of the all-white band is a huge fan of hip-hop. He’s very inspired by it. And he’s decided this gives him license to say “nigga” (notably not “nigger”) as much as he damn well pleases. I can’t articulate it, but this doesn’t sit right with me. Maybe because while he might understand when that word is okay (because maybe it is okay in the context of hip-hop), his white listeners might not. White listeners who might throw Black girls out of parties for being niggas or niggers or whatever the hell.

Until everyone understands which way is up, maybe it’s better if the signs aren’t confusing. Annnnnd . . . that’s about as conclusive as I can get about this. I want to say something snarky about how I’m going to keep listening because it’s like crack to me, but I’m not particularly proud of the crack reference, given the history of the drug as a destructive force in the Black community. I want to say something honorable about getting white folks to listen thoughtfully, but I’m too jaded to believe that that’s going to happen any time soon.

What I can say is that my experience with MSI reflects a larger problem of being a person of color or any other divergence from straight-white-maleness in this world: over and over again, we are reminded that as much as we want to connect and think that we can, we are still outsiders in a world that never meant to properly include us. This makes me mad. Defiant. Furious even. Time to listen to some . . . Mindless Self Indulgence?

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is in the process of building a veritable cornucopia of degrees in physics and astronomy. The black hole of academia is a dark and dangerous place. In a perhaps related story, she also seems to be known as a trouble maker. She blogs at Disordered Cosmos.

View all articles by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein.