"Kill whitey!" yells Tha Pumpsta into the microphone as he bounces to the beat. "What . . . gonna . . . do dance . . ." he raps to the beat. "Kill whitey!"
The kid by the bar busts out with a break-dancing move. Women drop their booties and the guys slide in close. Tha Pumpsta struts around in an all-white outfit from his headband to his high tops, shouting it again: " Kill whitey!"
Guess what, everyone at the party is white. It gets even better...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."
What that means, precisely, is debatable, but it has something to do with young white hipsters believing they can shed white privilege by parodying the black hip-hop life. In this way, they hope to escape their uptight conditioning and get in touch with the looser soul within them.
Because the opposite of whiteness is black hip hop. Because shaking your ass to culturally appropriated music makes you understand how your life and priviledge are directly connected to the oppression of people of color in your own little gentrified hood.
Fortunately, the sound of my soul just happens to come from white Europeans with synthesizers. And I'm okay with that.
"I'm throwing this party, and it's obvious that I'm white and I'm kind of appropriating this culture but in an ironic way," said Tha Pumpsta, whose name is Jeremy Parker. The 25-year-old takes his Pumpsta moniker from his high-top sneakers. "Kinda poking fun at myself and my origins and white people in general," he said.
You know, sometimes I'm not such a big fan of irony.
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