ebogjonson.com

Gary, I read your article. Nice job.

Besides giving us all a much needed refresher course in the dubious fields of Black Psychology and not-so dubious Black Studies, writ large - I am not sure you truly spelled out how exactly JW Lindh's early affiliation with nominal elements of black culture related to the media's (or society's) larger fears of blackness or the spread of jihadism.

Unless your point simply was that his sponsorship of jihadism was a natural progression from his previous "sponsorship" of black culture.

That was the subtle and not so subtle point other media organizations (http://www.eastbayexpress.com/2003-09-03/news/black-like-me/) have made -- sometimes by just REPEATEDLY mentioning his possession of "rap CDs" - as if that alone explained something about his character.

Was it your aim to simply nuance that position?

Damn. I lost you a couple times, but it always picked back up for me.

I wonder about some of the backpacker stuff...i listen to hip-hop, and i do tend towards some of that same material, more so than the top 40 stuff. and it does put me in a wierd position...about which black aesthetic i'm paying attention to, and what that says about my interaction with black folk who don't fit my aesthetic of preference. now, i haven't gone preaching on usenet boards about how folks are posing, but it's still a good question to keep me on my toes.

PS: "Attempts to queer Lindh were so successful because the rumors indicated something true about him. But it wasn't Lindh's heterosexuality that was unstable; it was his whiteness. " What do you mean there? It seems like both become unstable...that his het card gets pulled when his whiteness is challenged.

Hey, ProblemWithCaring, Thanks for reading!

>I am not sure you truly spelled out how exactly JW Lindh's early affiliation with nominal elements of black culture related to the media's (or society's) larger fears of blackness or the spread of jihadism. <

The format of the piece was more mediation than explanation, but with that in mind: I think Lindh's underlying issue is that at some point or another he decided that African Americans just weren't _extra_ enough for him: not radical enough, not moral enough, not righteous enough, not angry enough. In so much as Lindh represents a type (the so-called white negro), for me he illustrated the way black people and black culture remain just a means to an end for white people more interested in transforming themselves than in having an genuine encounter with difference. It really could have been anything for Lindh, it just happened to be hip hop. Azzam the American was a death metal head before he became an Al Qaeda spokesman and I'm sure if you put together a book of biographies of "white" jihadis you'd find a range of similar curious cultural way-stations before they entered their terminal, radical Islamist stage.

(There's a good article on Azzam the American here: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/01/22/070122fa_fact_khatchadourian )

Lindh me interests particularly for the obvious reasons. The different between Lindh and the millions of other white people who have transformative relationships with blackness is that for the vast majority of those folks that encounter opens them up, makes them more generous, more better. In Lindh's case though, the encounter with blackness made him more narrow, more demanding, more self-righteous, more essentialist. I think the 95% of the difference there can be attributed to some or another fundamentalist defect in Lindh's character, but I think at least 5% of the blame can be attributed to the somewhat trumped up and largely industry-driven assumption that there's something inherently radical or political in hip hop itself. I think hip hop is profound medium, but I also think a lot of that juice is aesthetic, formal or embedded in the novel social relationships hip hop creates or allows. In contrast, people like Lindh strike me lyric and text fetishists, canonizing MCs and over-privileging a certain kind of overtly political content.