Miles White
In his penetrating essay “Eminem: The New White Negro,” Carl Hancock Rux1 characterizes the platinum blonde/platinum-selling rapper as an outcast minstrel rebel superstar icon of the outlaw reborn as a postmodern pop culture hip-hop badass. More or less. Rux calls attention to the extremes Eminem has gone to in order to transform himself not simply into the new post–Elvis, late-millennium, white-meat Other doing racialized vaudevillian slapstick, a wigged out incarnation of what Ice Cube might call “The Wigga Ya Love to Hate”—a white cat doing a hopped-up machismo Black Like Me drag so viciously surreal that when he broke on the scene America was not sure whether to hate him or buy up all his records, so naturally (given the intense ambivalence of American attitudes around bad boys and racial carnivalesque) it did both. Rux’s analysis notwithstanding, I think it is possible to examine Eminem more deeply in the context of his most controversial put-on and alter egoistic creation Slim Shady, the Monster Mack Daddy who conflates previous incarnations of the black male as Boogey Man into a single serving. But before we get to that, we must consider this: In many ways, hip-hop music and culture since the 1980s have brought issues of gender and race to the forefront of popular culture studies. Yet scholarly studies have largely failed to fully investigate the ways in which hardcore styles of hip hop in particular have recast ideas about masculinity and the performance of the body, and how these have both come to be informed by a dominating racial subtext that is at once obvious yet seemingly invisible. The performance practices of contemporary mainstream rap music privileges hypersexual and spectacularized representations of the black male body that have subsequently come to be performed by social actors of other races—but this is not your great-great-granddaddy’s T. D. Rice Jump Jim Crow shtick; this takes playing the Other to a whole ‘nother level. Yet much of the scholarship in this musical culture has not fully addressed how representations of black masculinity engaged as performance art in global popular media have perpetuated pejorative racial feelings and attitudes that demonize young black males even while such representations have become increasingly appropriated by others as totems of “authentic” masculine performance.2
In a genre with no shortage of contradictions it is also somewhat ironic that the victims of demonization are also the primary perpetuators of these representations. Nonetheless, contemporary hard and hardcore styles of hip-hop performance and the culture of masculinity that surrounds them have reformulated and helped to articulate new models of self and identity for many young males over the last quarter century. Objectified, fetishized, and commodified representations of black males and the performances of masculinity associated with them have been appropriated in any number of global geographical locations using the same language of codes, signs, and gestures that have exerted a defining influence on young male constructions of identity in the United States. This obscures the fact that the gender constructions and expressions of masculinity popularized in hip hop with the arrival of Run-D.M.C. in the early 1980s are not naturalized any more than any gender performance is somehow natural in itself. James Messerschmidt argues in his book Flesh and Blood that “men and women construct varieties of gender through specific embodied practices”3 that replicate and perpetuate certain kinds of “hegemonic masculinities” as dominant forms of masculine gender practices in a given social milieu. Hegemonic masculinities, he suggests, are “culturally honored, glorified, and extolled at the symbolic level and through embodied practice, and constitute social structural dominance over women as well as over other men.”4 Hegemonic masculinities are constructed in relation to other kinds of masculinities including subordinated masculinities, oppositional masculinities, and complicit masculinities, for instance, and represent different strategies to the practice of masculine gender performance. These gender practices are not all equal, however, “because certain forms have more influence than others in particular settings.”5 What this opens up is the possibility of yet another kind of masculine performance based on racial tropes.
Hardcore hip-hop performance by African American youth, on the one hand, reinscribes the black male as the historical “Bad Nigger” figure, who John W. Roberts describes in his book From Trickster to Badman: The Black Folk Hero in Slavery and Freedom as a lawless man feared by blacks and whites alike during American slavery since he exerted his power by resisting all social and moral control. The kind of man regarded as a Bad Nigger tended to be viewed as a threat not only by whites but by other blacks as well since he acted in his own self-interest. Antebellum slaves who were labeled Bad Niggers did not simply provoke confrontation with whites by disregarding the rules of their masters but “were also as likely to unleash their fury and violence on their defenseless fellow sufferers” as on their masters.6 Black slaves may have relished the defiance and the rebellious exploits of such men but did not celebrate them as heroic figures even though they stood up to white authority; such men refused “to accept the values of the black community as binding on them,”7 and their rebelliousness tended not to be in service to their community. After emancipation, “Whites continued to view almost any black person who challenged their authority or right to define black behavior and social roles” as a Bad Nigger type who could be socially sanctioned or killed.8 A number of black heroic figures emerged in the late nineteenth century, Roberts points out, who became catalysts for black heroic creation as a necessary step toward community building, but are more properly referred to by the term Badman.9 This type of figure tended to exert a positive influence on the world around him because his interests and law-breaking were more often than not in service to a community under siege by racial oppression. Roberts accuses folklorists of having erroneously and “consistently painted a portrait of this figure [the heroic Badman] as a champion of violence, directed primarily at the black community”10 rather than as a man of good works. Consequently, this portrayal of the black folkloric Badman “as a source of unrelieved violence in the black community”11 has marked him as a source of fear “and not a model of emulative behavior adaptable to real-life situations”12 or as a normative expression of black heroic ideals. What this has led to is confusion between the redemptive rebelliousness of the Badman and the anti-heroic Bad Nigger. It is a mistake, Roberts argues, to use the terms Badman and Bad Nigger interchangeably or as synonyms for a black male character type unlikely to be differentiated between by whites.
In the styles of hard (think Run-D.M.C., LL Cool J, and Public Enemy) and hardcore (think Schoolly D, Ice-T, and N.W.A.) rap performance and that emerged in the 1980s, the politicized black radical and militant of the 1960s gave way to the depoliticized nihilism of the gangbanger and the thug. Furthermore, the urge toward a ghettocentric authenticity posited on inner city street culture helped to elevate the Bad Nigger, in the guise of the Badman, as an iconic figure in rap music performance. The term “bad” has always more or less suggested an empowered and liberatory masculine performance in black folklore, and men labeled bad certainly skirted both sides of the law. In late twentieth century hip-hop culture however, it also reflected an aggrieved masculinity (read this as pissed off) and an increasing disengagement with mainstream society, its norms, and mores by young black males—real social outsiders and outlaws who found their Post-Civil Rights Era Asses marginalized, disenfranchised and abandoned to America’s impoverished neighborhoods and drug-infested ghettos. The New School rap performer aspired to a heroic badness by embracing an antiheroic niggerhood. Run-D.M.C. were Badmen from the jump-off—with songs like “It’s Like That” and “Proud to Be Black” engaging issues around race and class while “King of Rock” and “Walk This Way” bumrushed the Rock ’n’ Roll Ivory Tower with hard beats and the B-Boy Lean. Public Enemy were Badmen with Nat Turnerish uppityness and black nationalist rhetoric that back talked white hegemony like they were channeling Malcolm × before the Hajj. Thrown in the mix was LL Cool J, one of the earliest rappers to spectacularize the black male body by ripping off his shirt to show off a powerful, muscled physique as he took on the aggressive persona of a rhetorical prize fighter. In the introduction to his 1987 song “I’m Bad” he also dramatized himself as a criminal and a fugitive in conflict with society in general and the law enforcement community in particular, a motif that would become integral to rap music’s thug-masculinist meta-narrative over the next decades. Greg Dimitriadis recalls that it was LL Cool J who “began to wed aggression against dominant society … with an often racialized masculinity.”13 “I’m Bad” was critically important in establishing a new type of pop culture social actor defined by aggressive masculine performance, race, social deviance, class and geographic location, inasmuch as the rules of the new keeping it real game meant that credibility was everything, that credibility depended on authenticity, and that authenticity was bestowed on the mean streets of the black inner city. The implication of these factors all coming together, writes Dimitriadis,
is that being (metaphorically, of course) aggressive, violent, and “bad” would make one “authentically” black. L.L. Cool J’s image is thus tied into a kind of racialized macho posturing. Indeed, he embraced these ideals in full force, often posing shirtless to show off his muscular figure and often boasting of his boxing prowess. His second album, Bigger and Deffer, sports a photo of him working out on a heavy bag, complete with thick gold chains and Kango hat. This image—the violent and aggressive young black male—would lodge itself in the collective psyche of America and its perception of rap music, drawing as it did on decades of affectively invested, dominant cultural discourses and ideologies.14
The West Coast rap group N.W.A. (Niggaz with Attitude) became the poster boys for Bad Nigger shenanigans when they kicked the 1988 album Straight Outta Compton, which set in motion a sea change in American popular music and culture that found white adolescent males fascinated by young black men weaving narratives of ghetto violence and shootouts with cops told in the most graphic of language. N.W.A. introduced a style of hardcore rap that would reintroduce into popular culture historical representations of black males as the hypermasculine brutes and hypersexual bucks turned street-hardened gangbangers and drug dealers, told in ghetto narratives involving casual black-on-black violence, drug trafficking, misogyny, and gunplay. These were bad men for sure. Bad because they were dangerous, because they had guns and were shooting up the place, but not because they were redemptive expressions of black rage. They were abhorred not only by liberal whites but by middle class blacks as well because they gleefully assaulted the values of both. N.W.A. bore no resemblance to the Badman of African American folklore but played instead to the trope of the Bad Nigger re-contextualized within inner-city street gang culture and its ethos of masculine behavior translated into performance art rendered in the register of the real. That this model of masculine performance was eventually appropriated in the construction of self by many adolescent white males was predictable given the history of such appropriations in popular culture. White consumers of this edgier style of rap music adopted models of powerful black male performance even if (especially if) those models were based on deviance and criminality. In Nobrow: The Culture of Marketing, the Market¬ing of Culture, John Seabrook acts out the seduction of the black sociopath for young middle-class white males in the 1990s. He is walking down the street in New York City listening to the Notorious B.I.G.’s 1994 song “Ready to Die,” wearing “a black nylon convict-style cap, a fashion I picked up from the homeys in the rap videos.”15 Later, riding the subway, empowered by his own bad ass imagery and Biggie’s powerful music, he imagines himself a menacing figure who lets “the gangsta style play down into my whiteboy identity, thinking to myself, ‘Man you are the illest, you are sitting here on this subway and none of these people are going to FUCK with you, and if they do FUCK with you, you are going to FUCK them up. What’s MY muthafuckin’ name?’”16
The performance of black masculinity by whites and other youth who participate in hardcore hip hop also recalibrate another recurring trope in American culture, that of the White Negro, given perhaps its most graphic explication by Norman Mailer in his 1957 essay “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster,” which celebrates the pleasures of opting out of whiteness and acting out behind the mask of blackness. Mailer’s white hipster represents “a new breed of adventurers, urban adventurers who drifted out at night looking for action with a black man’s code to fit their facts.”17 In Mailer’s hipster manifesto, the Negro male satisfies himself
in the worst of perversion, promiscuity, pimpery, drug addiction, rape, razor-slash, bottle-break, what-have-you, the Negro discovered and elaborated a morality of the bottom, an ethical differentiation between the good and the bad in every human activity from the go-getter pimp (as opposed to the lazy one) to the relatively dependable pusher or prostitute.18
The White Negro, writes historian and literary critic Louis Menand, “is built up from the proposition that American Negroes by virtue of their alienation from mainstream American society, are natural existentialists who not only have better orgasms but who also appreciate the cathartic effects of physical violence.”19 The aim of the White Negro and hipster has always been the imitation of the Bad Nigger in order to, as Mailer writes, be “with it.” What this has ultimately evolved into is a politics of racialized masculine desire in which it is no longer desirable to merely be with it but to be it, so that it is no longer necessarily the case, as Menard writes, that “the sort of gender roles central to Mailer’s imagination have disappeared from the repertoire of contemporary identity.”20 If Mailer’s writing seems to enact a panic about masculinity and its fate, as Menand suggests, then he might well be pleased with the way things have turned out, since White Negroism has become de rigueur for the performance of maleness among legions of adolescents in post-hip hop America, and the Bad Nigger has become its most defining trope.
Against this background we are able to locate Eminem and his alter ego Slim Shady, whose performance of the White Negro hellcat hipster is executed with adroit musicality and lyrical brilliance but informed by malevolent themes including murder, misogyny, homophobia, extreme cruelty and torture. Eminem nods to the notorious pimp and hustler Iceberg Slim, a man celebrated and imitated by contemporary hustlers, gangstas and many in the rap game, in constructing the moniker for his evil twin, but chooses to appropriate the last name rather than play on the well-used first name picked up on by Ice-T, Ice Cube, Vanilla Ice, Kid Frost, Ice Berg, and others. In Shady, we have a figure who is a walking synonym for everything the name implies—suspicious, shifty, suspect, devious, dodgy, dubious, fishy, underhanded, and morally ambiguous—meaning he is capable of damn near anything. But Slim Shady did not stumble upon the horrific by happenstance. He was built for it. In the Detroit-based rap collective D12, Eminem, the only white member in the group, experimented with horrific and ghoulish material that incorporated the violent realism of Hollywood slasher films and the hip-hop underground cult of horrorcore.21 Shady became his pissed off social miscreant Zip Coon with a chip on his shoulder and a sadomasochistic mean streak.
Eminem’s background growing up surrounded by family dysfunction in economically depressed neighborhoods where he forged friendships with black males allowed him to credibly negotiate discourses around blackness, masculinity, social marginalization, and inner city desolation in a way that Vanilla Ice, for example, could not. But if he grew up rough, Eminem also understood the implications of hip hop’s hardcore aesthetic and its move toward themes of aggression, pathology, deviance, criminal behavior, explicit language, and violence.
Slim Shady was his solution to the dilemma of acting out the Bad Nigger as social outlaw in a manner that was for him in some way more authentic if only because he was able to draw from his own life experiences. Consequently, Eminem did not portray himself as a gangbanger or street thug, but as a victim of childhood abuse, deprivation, and perhaps depravity, unable to cope with the emotionally damaged women in his life, self-medicating himself with prodigious amounts of booze and drugs and acting out revenge fantasies against everybody who had hurt him. Slim Shady enacts then, the victim turned perpetrator, an abused child as adult abuser capable of sadistic scenarios of cruelty, transgression, and violation because maybe this is what he knows best, or at least knows well. In taking his personal torments to egregious extremes however, Shady offers not simply a Bad Nigger, but a sociopathic composite (as the term “wigger” suggests), a simulacra based on darkly pejorative presuppositions around the black male in the American racial imagination. Like N.W.A., Eminem makes himself out to be “bad” by raising holy hell, running through the crowd pulling everybody’s britches down. He is a provocateur for sure, but there is nothing redemptive in his behavior because, other than his running cronies, he does not see himself as part of a community whose values he shares. Instead, Eminem’s Bad Wigger, bilked and ‘bused, doesn’t see that he owes anybody jack so everybody becomes a target of his sociopathic mayhem, even if it means he must humiliate, torture, rape and murder. Eminem follows the Beastie Boys, Vanilla Ice, and other white performers who have appropriated the Bad Nigger trope in the move to come off as hardcore—all “take their cues from a savage model”22 of the black male as rapist, murderer, criminal, and social deviant taken to the extreme—he is Norman Mailer’s alienated white hipster turned Alfred Hitchcock’s Norman Bates, a mentally disturbed loser gone stark raving mad. As Rux writes:
Niggaz may talk bad about bitches and they baby’s mama—Eminem brutally murders his. Niggaz may have issues regarding absent fathers or dysfunctional mothers—Eminem comically exposes their dysfunctions, and hangs his mother’s pussy high up on a wall for all the world to see. Niggaz may be misogynist, may boast of sexual superiority and sexual indiscretions with a multitude of women, may commonly relegate women to just another piece of ass prime for the taking status—but Eminem drugs the bitch, fucks the bitch, moves on to the next bitch.23
Eminem’s 1999 The Slim Shady LP brings together cartoonish representations of the brute taken past the reprehensible to the repulsive. On the album track “Just Don’t Give a Fuck” he plays with tropes of addiction and multiple personalities and a summoning up of internalized demons as Shady traverses themes of extreme violence, drug use, despair, bestiality, and derangement—he declares himself a half man, half animal whose litany of decadence includes doing acid, smack, coke, and smoking crack. The song “97 Bonnie and Clyde” depicts a macabre scene in which he has stuffed his murdered wife’s corpse into the trunk of his car and dumps it off a pier while his young daughter assists him. In “Guilty Conscience” Shady eggs on three desperate men to commit a series of heinous crimes—an underage girl is drugged and raped; a betrayed husband shotguns his cheating wife and her lover in bed. West Coast rap producer Dr. Dre, who has produced most of Eminem’s work and who appears in this song, has always brought a racial value to the music that in vernacular parlance might be expressed in terms of a “ghetto pass” that bolstered Eminem’s street credibility much the same way that Def Jam opened up the streets to the acceptance of the Beastie Boys. Dr. Dre was the perfect foil for Eminem’s transgressive shenanigans given his credentials as a member of N.W.A., the group that single-handedly took gangsta rap’s malevolent metanarrative and transformed it from a style into a genre. If Dr. Dre threw down the gauntlet, Eminem was all too eager to pick it up where N.W.A. left off and take it further—balls out lunacy, mad dog antics, and the kind of potty mouth lyricism guaranteed to get an official PMRC24 panic alert stamped on the front of every album.
On the 2000 album The Marshall Mathers LP, Eminem again plays with multiple personalities and horrific themes of rape and murder in songs such as “Kill You” (where he acts out the rape of his estranged mother) and “Kim” (in which he murders his ex-wife by slitting her throat). In live performance, he often underscored references to horror/slasher films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Psycho, Halloween and Scream by appearing with such affectations as a hockey mask and a chainsaw. During the 2000 “Up In Smoke” tour he infamously drew out a large knife and repeatedly stabbed a life-sized effigy of his baby’s mama. For his 2002 record The Eminem Show, Eminem displays a much broader diversity of thematic material that puts some distance between Eminem the entertainer and Slim Shady the monster. After the somewhat retrospective album Encore in 2004, he retired from performing for several years, during which time he underwent drug rehabilitation. It appeared that Eminem was sending a message that he was rethinking himself and the nature of his music, and that he might kill off the homicidal Shady—in a skit at the end of Encore, Shady is heard being shot. In 2009, however, Eminem came back with bloodlust and vengeance when he released Relapse, a record that contains perhaps his most horrific scenarios of drug-induced violence and schizophrenic brutality. The record opens with a nightmare in which Slim Shady is revived (in slasher films the killer is always dispatched in the end only to recover for a final bloody encore) before launching into the ghoulish “3 a.m.,” narrated by a psychopathic, drug-crazed serial killer who enjoys the slashing, slicing, and gashing he inflicts on his victims. On the song “Insane” Shady recounts being sodomized by his stepfather and describes sexual acts of astonishing lewdness. Eminem may never be able to kill off Slim Shady for good because he apparently needs this nefarious character in order to perform the ventriloquistical Zip Coonish exorcism of his inner demons, knowing that in the end he can always protest: the black guy did it.
Eminem and his success in the popular mainstream with white adolescent youth illustrates how the complexities of racial discourse and interaction in post-hip hop America are more contradictory than those of the past because they occur in a “post-racist”25 environment. By this, Richard Thompson Ford does not mean to suggest that racism is a thing of the past but that it implies a new stage of racial behavior in which certain ideas and practices remain pervasive. The post-racist consumer of hardcore hip hop unabashedly indulges the stereotypes of the black thug, the pimp, the drug dealer, the crack whore, and the hustler, “free to be explicitly and crudely bigoted because he does so with tongue planted firmly in cheek.”26 It is, as he suggests, racism without racists since there may be no racist intent per se in such representations, but the acting out of reductionist racial fantasies merely becomes “the continuation of racism by other means.”27 It is racism by other means when it perpetuates racist stereotypes in the American racial imagination around black people in much the same way as nineteenth-century minstrelsy performance framed pejorative representational practices regarding African Americans in popular culture for the next hundred years, or in the way that The Birth of A Nation was accepted at face value by many whites and gave rise to a resurgence of the Klu Klux Klan in the American South in the early 1920s. While there may have been no racist intent per se in either of these cultural projects, both had real and lasting implications on racial attitudes in American culture. This was no less true of 1950s rock ’n’ roll in that, while it certainly had a transforming affect on American culture and mainstreamed African American rhythm and blues, it nonetheless foregrounded white grown-up fears of race mixing, miscegenation, and desegregation such that contemporary rock itself can be seen as founded on a distancing racial subterfuge that continues to trouble the bifurcated ways in which Americans categorize and consume popular music.
What has shifted since 1950s rock ’n’ roll and the racial attitudes that it exposed is the ways in which the cultural and political currency of the black body has accrued in value over time so that the racial exchange rate of mainstream whiteness continues to lose interest. White hip-hop performers and consumers now aspire to an authenticity that, rather than attempting to obscure racial subtexts and the hijacking of black subjectivity, covets, foregrounds, and celebrates them. In the hip-hop generation, performing the black body, whether on the stage or in the street, has become the litmus test for a new cultural ideal of authenticity around masculinity. The “Afro-Americanization of White youth”28 has seen white kids adopt the sartorial style, language, and often the speech patterns of inner-city black youth, appropriating the affective gestures of blackness as the performance of the everyday even if it often amounts to parody and racial hooliganism. It is this territory that Eminem works through his tricked out racial trickster figure, although the irony of the carnivalesque in which he is engaged is not lost on him. On songs like “Without Me” he is able to draw a line between his own white Negroism and that of Elvis and understand why they both succeeded in expanding the white audience for music styles dominated by black males. Both Elvis and Eminem are products of their times but in many ways are inverse to each other. Where Elvis’s racial masquerade was a more implicit performance of the black male body in which he was only permitted to flirt with the idea of danger, deviance, and blackness, Eminem transverses and transgresses racial boundaries with an incendiary aplomb and a lunatic’s gleeful enthusiasm.
Eminem’s popular legacy however, will probably not be as durable as that of Elvis. Slim Shady will ultimately be his undoing if only because by largely basing his appeal on prurient voyeurism and the morality of a bottom feeder, he has painted himself into a fairly small niche that is not likely to age well over time, at least as music. The thing is, Eminem is certainly capable of more mature and challenging work , and he has already given us impressive examples of it in songs like “Stan” or like “White America,” like “Lose Yourself” or “Renegade,” and “Like Toy Soldiers.” But people who go to see Eminem aren’t going to hear him do songs like that, and he knows it. They go to see him rip a chainsaw and mutilate an anatomically correct blow-up doll of his ex-wife—sophomoric antics that put the butter on his bread and make the next day’s headlines. The price of the ticket is this: unless Eminem comes up with a final act of artistic reinvention, at the end of the day it is Slim Shady who will define his legacy (he knows that, too), and his most enduring material will remain songs like “My Name Is,” “’97 Bonnie & Clyde,” “Kim,” “Guilty Conscience,” and “Kill You.” In fifty years, nobody will be rapping his rhymes, and he will likely be looked back upon as nothing more than a passing curiosity when his time is done.
Chapter Notes
1. In Greg Tate, ed., Everything but the Burden: What White People Are Taking from Black Culture (New York: Broadway, 2003).
2. Selected sections of this essay were previously published in my book From Jim Crow to Jay-Z: Race, Rap and the Performance of Masculinity (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011).
3. James W. Messerschmidt, Flesh and Blood: Adolescent Gender Diversity and Violence (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004), 44.
4. Ibid., 43.
5. Ibid.
6. John W. Roberts, From Trickster to Bad Man: The Black Folk Hero in Slavery and Freedom (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), 176.
7. Ibid., 176.
8. Ibid., 177.
9. Ibid., 173.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid., 174.
12. Ibid.
13. Greg Dimitriadis, Performing Identity / Performing Culture: Hip Hop as Text, Pedagogy and Lived Practice (New York: Peter Lang, 2001), 24.
14. Ibid.
15. Seabrook, p. 3
16. Seabrook, p. 4.
17. Norman Mailer, Advertisements for Myself (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 341.
18. Ibid. 348.
19. Louis Menand, American Studies (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), 149.
20. Ibid., 155.
21. Horrorcore is a subgenre of hardcore hip hop that indulges macabre themes such as homicide, rape, and torture taken from horror and slasher films but that also borrows from heavy metal rock and bands such as Black Sabbath and Judas Priest, whose material often includes dark themes around death and the occult.
22. Rux, 25.
23. Ibid., 28.
24. The Parents Music Resource Center, formed in 1985, won a battle to have the Recording Industry Association of America put “Parental Advisory” labels on albums that contained content deemed objectionable or unsuitable for minors. The PMRC no longer exists.
25. Richard Thompson Ford, The Race Card: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), 335.
26. Ibid., 25.
27. Ibid., 337.
28. Cornel West, Race Matters (New York: Vintage, 1994), 121.