Posted 2:28 PM by sport

I, like any right-thinking person, reject the term “wigger” to describe a Caucasian immersed in / obsessed with the perceived trappings of African-American culture. “Whegro” is slightly less odious, but sounds like a brand of cereal. Besides, “Negro” is perilously close to THAT word… ssshhh… and calls to mind, if anything, images of early-sixties “protest” as opposed to late-sixties “revolution.” While the former actually accomplished much more than the latter, the latter is way sexier, and sexy / aggressive means less - therefore more - than dignified / determined.

It would be an offensive exercise in futility to cobble other portmanteau constructions out of terms like “spear-chucker,” “cracker,” “mouli” or “peckerwood,” but this leaves us with a dilemma. How may a Caucasian person respectfully refer to a fellow Caucasian who has accepted the irresistible call to embrace the “urban aesthetic?” After all, even those persons of pallor who stubbornly cling to the hegemonic paradigm of…
(…wait… got a chunk of something caught in my wordflow… brain Heimlich, please! …ugh… GAK… splat… OK, thanks.)

Even Caucasians who act and speak in conventionally Caucasian ways cannot, for example, resist using words like “bling” whenever a piece of jewelry is under discussion. It’s true! Walk up to any ofay… the more well-heeled the better… and wave a necklace or ring under his/her nose.
“What do you think?”
“Look at you with the bling bling! That’s what I’m talking about.”

With this in mind, we would do well to indicate respect - if not deference – to those who’ve taken it the full nine. We must seek to establish a useful, non-demeaning term for these specific forms of transracialreselfidentification (and remember that there are many variants, from the “albino jazz cat” to the “hip hop honkie” to the “alabasta rasta” and beyond). While it is generally accepted that the correct informal term for a Caucasian male is “whiteboy,” it should also be understood that, for Caucasians referring to fellow Caucasians who affect African –American traits, the term is inadequate.

Worse, it even smacks of postcolonial epithet-appropriation, a pernicious and subtle strain of Eurocentric linguodomination. Whoops! There I go again, typing over my head. To the point, then.

Here's my "two cent": I’m thinking “Caucafrican-Urbmerican.” It seems a little unwieldy perhaps, but consider that it actually adds only one syllable to the accepted term “African-American, ” which also seemed at first awkward to our lazy white tongues, so accustomed to simply saying “Black.” It is historically appropriate that we load on another syllable: from “Colored People” to “Negroes” to “Blacks,” an evolving lexicon of awareness reduced the syllabic count in steady increments. Naturally, we grant less significance to terms that require less effort to utter, and this subconsciously minimizes the subject’s importance:
Trump Tower / home
Lobster Fra Diavolo / beans
Ludwig Van Beethoven / sport
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder / nerves

It took a great deal of corrective effort to establish the 7-syllable majesty of “African-American.” Is it a coincidence that the 3 –and- 4 arrangement of syllables mirrors our standard ordering of local phone numbers? Or is it a “wake-up call” to adopt “standards” and “act locally?” What do you “think?” If my line of reasoning seems to suggest that an additional syllable somehow elevates the status of a Caucafrican-Urbmerican above that of an actual African-American, then you are obviously trapped in a tangle of niggling semantic bugbears and I can only pity you.

Let us work to cast off disuseful habits of thought and their correlative verbal signifiers, which reinforce cultural prejudices by making implicit mock of those who seek to overcome same by means of their own off-casting of antiutile complexion-based norms in their day-to-day life-modes. It’s simple common sense.