Sylvie Laurent
Who, really, is the person who goes by the name of Eminem? The willingness to multiply personae (Marshall Mathers, Slim Shady, Rabbit, and above all Eminem) and thus emanate “mythicized versions” of himself1 makes this a puzzling question. His identities, self-narrated and fictionalized, are multiple, de-centered, unsettled, and undergoing constant reinvention. Yet there is a common thread to his narratives that lies in his denouncing of the intractability of American racism and classism. A singer of rhapsodies as well as a rapper, Eminem is indeed the contemporary and popular bard of the “Poor White Trash,” a racial representation used in his music as an allegory for class.2
From the former slave Frederick Douglass, who exchanged bread for literacy with the poor white kids, to Harlem writer Ralph Ellison, who escaped the South because of mean whites, poor white trash is, to the black eye, the embodiment of white degeneracy. Zora Neale Hurston illustrates this process magnificently in her novel Mules and Men. In chapter V, the character Joe Wiley’s storytelling of slave John includes this exposition: “Bout’ this time John seen a white couple come in but they looked so trashy he figgered they was piney woods crackers, so he told’em to g’wan out in the kitchen and git some barbecue and likker and to stay out there where they belong. So he went to callin figgers agin.”3 But if blacks have despised this nemesis, the derogatory label was used and popularized by the white southern elite who expressed their assumptions about poor whites’ unworthiness and degeneracy and sought to conjure their fear that such degradation would jeopardize white supremacy. But, as Annalee Newitz and Matt Wray put it in their book White Trash, Race and Class in America, “it is not just a classist slur, it’s also a racial epithet that marks out certain kind of whites as a breed apart, a dysgenic race unto themselves.”4
Bufoonery, abjection, shamelessness, and racial in-betweenness characterize those poor whites labeled as such. Denigrated, the poor white trash live on the margins—culturally and socially. It is also because they are perceived as garish parodies of whites who reclaim their whiteness that white trash stereotypes are often considered dangerous to social order. By their filthy destitution and their sometime noisy discourse of social demands, they force “whiteness” to emerge from its invisibility. Eminem plays regularly with these notions in his work, complicating them through his mixture of parody and representation. A social Frankenstein, he disrupts the white middle class, but also encapsulates their anxiety over the threat of social and racial pollution. Precisely, Eminem is a social hybrid and wishes to be a cultural threat.
Arguably, as do other artists, he incarnates the resentful poor white male and represents the American proletariat so often absent from popular discourse. He appears to be following in the footsteps of Elvis Presley or Bruce Springsteen in this respect: the universal voice of those whites who, as he raps himself in “The Real Slim Shady,” act like him, talk like him, and are like him. Neither his nihilism nor his anger are new, but he is unique insofar as is the discursive mode he chooses to express his frustration and rage. A white man, he chooses rap over rock, Kurt Cobain’s wails and Springsteen’s resigned melodies. Interestingly enough, the white-trash characters, in response to the accusation of social and racial breeding with black people have sometimes interiorized this idea and invent themselves as symbolic mulattos. Eminem embraces the suspicion bred by the white-trash mixed identity. By speaking hip hop, he refuses assimilation into a culture of white power and privilege. His irony is meant as social subversion; his voice exists “through a mask darkly.”5
In this essay I will argue that as a stigmatized figure of the poor white trash, Eminem transgresses the racial boundaries and uses the middle class’s social prejudice as a means to debunk American taxonomies. Creolized by class hatred, Eminem embraces the stigma to return it. His self-proclaimed white-trash identity has been constructed on the premises that white trash is a naming practice that thrives on picturesque racial and social stereotypes. Thereupon, he has dramatized his “tainted blood” and “racial unworthiness” through parodic self-portraiture. Furthermore, by displaying an odd, clownish, inappropriate, unsettling whiteness, his public persona allows him to redefine the concept of authenticity in the highly dramatized racial theater of hip hop. Thus, if blackface minstrelsy is seen as one of hip hop’s intertexts the “white trash” figure transcends this middle-class inspired representation by giving it a sense of transitiveness. With Eminem, blacks can laugh at the white-trash pantomime. The grotesque of the poor white trash is somehow the inversion of the racial process sustaining the minstrelsy.
The audacity of this rapper from Detroit is that he dares to heroize this transgression, his “darkened whiteness”6 being fully embraced. With a self-proclaimed white-trash identity, a vaudevillian grotesqueness, and the black voice of hip hop, he stands for and embodies interracial camaraderie. His is therefore a subversive wake-up call for an America stuck in a Civil War-era racial ideology where poor whites are inherently closer to rich whites than to poor blacks. In 1935, W. E. B Du Bois calls their racial privilege a “symbolic wage”7 that poor whites racially earn for not being blacks. In 1964, Bob Dylan puts it beautifully in his song “Only a Pawn in Their Game” when he has a southern politician foment racial antagonism among poor whites.
Eminem’s American epic (we can hardly isolate his life from his work) takes us into the universe of trailer parks, social frontiers, into the imaginary “wilderness” and the brutal reality of drug addiction and broken families. His work illustrates a brutal realism. The stages of his chaotic existence are transmitted to us through his music and film with the obvious intention of negating the distance between artist and object. Eminem’s life and art are raw, alienating to him and to some extent to his spectators. This “V-Effect”8 is accentuated by the naturalist dramatization of the environment, oppressive and inspiring all at once. Eminem thus breaks down the fourth wall by mythologizing the urban universe. Detroit is described as a run-down, crime-filled city, stained by graffiti and decay that give it the appearance of a war zone. In such a desolate place, no poor white trash can escape their destiny.
The symbolic spatial organization of Detroit is essential to the self-identity forged by Eminem, that of an individual on the margins. The poorest neighborhoods of Detroit inhabited by the poor whites (one of whom was Eminem) and the nearby black communities, are locations marked by a certain sense of insecurity, not only material but temporal as well. Like exiles’ provisional encampments, these neighborhoods give the impression of being no more than stopovers on the path of an interrupted migration. If the black families come from the old South, the poor white trash also evoke an American “elsewhere.” Paul Clemens, a writer from Detroit, describes in his autobiography, Made in Detroit: A South of 8 Mile Memoir, the neighborhood of his childhood friend Kurt, an area populated by hillbillies who arrived from Appalachia wearing traditional overalls and speaking with mountain accents. These poor white neighborhoods of Detroit and the faces of their inhabitants extemporaneously evoke for Clemens the sharecroppers of James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.
The final stage of this cultural and spatial marginalization is reached when houses are no longer stone or wood but rather substitute accommodations, mere semblances of neighborhoods. The trailer thus remains the emblem of social exclusion. It is the universe of Eminem’s origins, that which he wishes to escape but defines him interminably; in the song “Lose Yourself,” the trailer is presented as the place of creation as well as damnation: despite his talent, the rapper is broke and he’s got to get out of the trailer park.9 It is part of Eminem’s daily life, the earliest symbolic space of confinement and imprisonment. The trailer is in some ways the matrix from which he developed. But even more than that, it is the metaphor for the social inferno of the poor whites who have no hope of social ascension.
Eminem grew up between his mother’s trailer and the refuge of his grandmother’s shack, rarely leaving the scorned area of the trailer park. The singer evokes his childhood in the despised neighborhood of Warren: “Across 8 Mile back over there is Warren, which is the low-income white families. We lived over there in a park; people think there’re all trailers, but some of ‘em are just low-income housing parks.… Some redneck lived over there.… They were the only other white people.”10
It is noteworthy that Eminem describes “rednecks” as other whites distinct from himself; he is absolutely white trash, but not exactly an ordinary poor white. The territory is still sectioned in this way—gorges of black ghettos that incarnate the terrifying terra incognita imagined by the urban middle class. The working-class areas of Detroit still separate blacks and whites, but the spatial segregation is more profound than the racial frontier; poor children, black and white, roam around together in malls reserved for the upper crust.
The symbolic spatial organization of Detroit is essential to the identity that is forged by the individual on the margins, as Eminem narrates on, for example, “Yellow Brick Road.” This song calls up several other authors’ ideas and imagery. On the one hand, one finds the theme of the perpetual displacement of a poor white who belongs neither with the whites nor the blacks and who must settle on an intermediate space. Excluded from the wealthy neighborhoods and the center of social conformity—the Bel-Air Shopping Centre—he is sent back to the “bad side”; his lyrics (especially in the first verse) express the daily life of a poor white excluded from a society of consumption that rejects him a priori. The use of the present indicative tense nicely shows the permanence of the stigmatizing regard given the artist, even now that he has found fame and fortune. The irony of this discrepancy between Eminem’s success and his irreducible image of a “bad poor” person is emphasized in the final verse by the image of the “good old notorious oh well known tracks.” Detroit’s no-longer-used railroad tracks are very well known by Detroiters. Furthermore, they symbolize the fantasy of escape to one’s destiny. The train tracks and its hobo mythology, made famous by Woody Guthrie’s “This Train Is Bound for Glory”11 during the 1940s, are known by the educated rich as well as by Eminem.
They are also linked with a sad urban reality: they got the better of the Mississippi steamboats of Mark Twain’s era and later got the better of exhausted cities: since 1950, Detroit has lost half of its population. Eminem’s mother herself left Detroit to return to the South. In Eminem’s Detroit, the South is a reference to elsewhere. Like Huck Finn and T. S. Eliot, all of his mother’s family comes from Missouri. Born in Kansas City, he still retains the imagination of a southerner. This imagination has given poor whites and all those who are socially maladjusted the desire to depart for the dreamed of “elsewhere” represented by the North. And the train tracks, the modern version of Huck’s and Jim’s small boat, permit one to reach the fantastical promised liberty of the large, fascinating city. Before being abandoned, Detroit attracted the fringes of society. Eminem carries the double burden of the frustration of stifled flight and the painful culture of the exiled. For Eminem, migrating means crossing not the Mason-Dixon line but rather 8 Mile Road.
Paul Clemens reports that the poor whites living along the terrible arterial feel like the last of the Mohicans or General Custer, isolated and threatened. For them, it is an impassible fortification that isolates them from the rest of the world: “8 mile Road was the wall and they lived with their back against it.”12 The allusion to James Fenimore Cooper’s novel is useful.13 It reveals the force of community confrontation, even in the unlikely mixed neighborhoods. The black ghettos are the new “wilderness,” the somber forest in which Eminem/Hawkeye finds his true identity. Central Detroit’s population is nearly eighty percent poor blacks,14 and is also home to the most visible American social plagues, such as daily crime and race riots, on incomparable scale. For Eminem, belonging to this side of the frontier is therefore a sign of his “mixing” or an initial “passing.” If we rely on the representation given in the film 8 Mile, the road of the same name holds Rabbit/Eminem on the side of African American marginality. He must thus reinvent this axis, regenerating it in order to make a bridge between these areas that permit him to cross over to the ideal of white masculinity while at the same time dramatizing his “black” roots.15
In reclaiming the frontier, Eminem chooses to remain between the black world and the white world that he rejects because of its social hostility. Indeed, the greatest discomfort here is that which emerges from the confrontation with the middle class. The “they” that traditionally designates the well off takes in this case the audacious form of “you,” as Eminem directly addresses those who both disparage him and (as his performative tone attests) listen to his songs. He thus presents himself as the bad social conscience of America: given how poor he was just a couple of year ago, he never knew he’d have the new houses and cars we aspire to.16
The film recounting a fictionalized version of the artist’s life takes the name 8 Mile because the artist was born on the poor, therefore black, side, and traversing the street acts as a metonym of his existence, as he describes in the third verse of the song “8 Mile,” wherein he’s walking Detroit’s border, which is the certificate of authenticity he must have.
Crossing 8 Mile ultimately signifies the emergence from poverty and from marginality in order to find success and potentially finally become rich. Yet, what is most remarkable is the permanence of the white-trash conscience, despite fame and fortune. Eminem never ceases to think like Marshall Mathers and speak as if he still lives in a trailer: he remains tired of being poor and white trash, tired of returning pop bottles for money.17
Detroit plays a critical role in Eminem’s working-class narrative, particularly with regard to racial resentment and rhetorical boundary constructions such as poor white trash. As John Hartigan points out in Toward a Cultural Analysis of White People, whiteness in deindustrialized Detroit is less a normative condition than a sense of being an endangered minority in a black metropolis that “remains charged mythic ground, symbolizing for whites in the nation at large both the unsalvageable refuse of the underclass left in the wake of … post-industrial economy, and the shambles wrought by black civic self-rule.”18 The singer brings about a symbolic, social shift that consists of slipping from the white-trash identity to one that is more general, that of the angry white working man. Lyrics addressing his biographical encounter with dead-end jobs and social resentment are to be understood in that regard. Examples appear in “Rock Bottom” and other songs on The Slim Shady LP in particular.
In 8 Mile, playing an automobile factory worker, Eminem identifies (like Bruce Springsteen) with the white working class. The automobile factories of Detroit were theaters of racial competition between workers. The bitterness of white workers confronted with the slow death of their industry created not only a reemergence of class-consciousness but also a realization of racial “inculpability,” what Michael Eric Dyson calls “negative culpability.”19 Because of this, fired white workers were seen as victims themselves. Eminem belonged to the modern working class, that of the precarious service sector and unskilled labor; he worked, temporarily, as a dishwasher and kitchen assistant at the restaurant Gilbert’s Lodge,20 as he recounts on “If I Had.”
In 2002, in a still infamous appearance at the MTV Video Music Awards, Eminem was accompanied on stage by several dozen young men dressed like him. He illustrated and modernized in this appearance Michael Novak’s well-known concept of “unmeltable ethnics” with great social relevance.21 As Anthony Bozza summarizes in his biography, “Eminem spoke of situations many of his fans shared—broken homes, dead-end jobs, drug overindulgence—while exploring taboo emotions many could not face—parental hate, gender hate, self loathing.”22 Eminem also sings to bring to light the social paradox of poor whites: they are simultaneously marginalized outcasts, excluded from official society, and representative of the real America, massive in number and muzzled by bourgeois conventions.
Taking Slim Shady as his nom de guerre, Eminem seems to be bringing this America out of the darkness. He thus asserts the demographic force of this aggravated nation, resurrecting the subject of the silenced minority from the Nixon era. The nation has discovered those resentful whites of the post-civil right era, some of them being named “white Ethnics,” who wish they could go back to the good old days of their supremacy. This trope of the “white backlash” of the angry white male took a sanitized yet relevant form in the 1990s youth. Mathers grasped it, understanding the dialectics of—as president Obama would put it in Philadephia in 2007—“back anger” and “white resentment”.23 The bitterness was passed on from one generation to another. Eminem thus claims to be the spokesperson for a white disaffected youth: he leaves it to himself in “Fight Music” to first internalize a generation’s rage and then save kids from parents who could not raise them. He claims that those who speak like him, dress like him, and swear and curse at society like him number at least one million.24 His clones form a rebellious army who rise up against a detested white America, an image once again articulated on “White America.”
He conveys, on songs like this, without hesitation the homophobic insecurities of the bitter white man. The traditional hierarchy in which the poor white affirms his power is founded on race and masculine power. Feminism and homosexuality contradict this semblance of social harmony. The sexual and racial norms are what remain when class is voluntarily silenced.25 Eminem develops a homophobic rhetoric that aims to ridicule effeminate men who try to seduce him (e.g., “My Name Is”) or who are imaginary interlocutors. He repeats the insult “faggot” while sarcastically calling attention to the “queer” world of disguise, clowning, and makeup (e.g., “Marshall Mathers”). He emphasizes here his recovered virility and his sudden social conformity. This condemnation of the painted mask and the bizarre is made more illogical considering that the singer is evolving in this very same universe. Moreover, he responds to the supposed eccentricities of homosexuals with his own verbal peculiarity in songs such as “Criminal” and “My Dad’s Gone Crazy.”
Hatred of liberals appears in the ambiguous relationship between Eminem and Bill Clinton during the former’s first successful years. One cannot help but be amused by the confrontation of two contemporary icons of white trash. Toni Morrison set up the Democratic president as the first “black president,” his “black skin” symbolized by his being a poor white. The analogy of black/white trash is complete with Morrison’s description of Bill Clinton: “single-parent household, born poor, working class, saxophone-playing, McDonald-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas.”26 Others, particularly John Shelton Reed, have previously analyzed the form of this poor white, southern identity that goes by the name “Bubba.” 27 Some have challenged this identity construction that they see as false and meant only to create “intraethnic demonization.”28 The rapper also seems to perceive the limits of this type of media-friendly figure and the contradictions of the educated man who currently belongs to the elite and the general order. In his music video for “The Real Slim Shady,” Eminem dresses up as a crude double of Clinton in a scene that parodies the president’s affair with Monica Lewinsky. Eminem does this to remind Clinton of who he really is and to empathize with him, while laughing at him at the same time for the public disgrace of which he is the object. The rapper thus does not treat his other white trash gently, reproaching him for his hypocritical preaching of the moral order—of the bourgeois—when his true nature, that of poor white trash, predisposes him to bodily excess and rule breaking. These transgressions are symbolized by fellatio, a hidden act that the two men have both made public. The occurrences of “suck” and “dick” are innumerable and the allusions to Clinton are recurrent (e.g., “Marshall Mathers”29). He criticizes the hypocrisy of those, like Hillary Clinton, who condemn the rapper for his verbal obscenities (e.g., “Role Model”30).
Having embodied the average American, Eminem readopts white-trash characteristics: a marginalized person who rejects order and conventions, a victim of the self-righteous majority who consider him to be the ideal scapegoat for social issues, notions he dramatizes on songs like “Cleaning Out My Closet.” Like blacks, those for whom Eminem speaks are spatially regulated to the margins. They are no longer accused of menacing society as a whole, as many consider them a disorganized group (and as the black community now supposedly has a monopoly on being a threat to society). Rather, they are accused of taking pleasure in embarrassing society. “These people” shame “good people” by the plagues they inflict upon themselves. Eminem exposes his scars, in particular that of a “wounded whiteness.”31 They damage America’s reputation with their scars.
The construction of a biological white underclass by early century eugenicists as an ideological symptom of white deviance and interracial breeding is key to the “white trash myth.”32 Eminem obviously gives credence to the theory of genetic inferiority and appropriates the intraracial class hatred felt by the middle class through those they accuse of being social parasites. His social degeneration is thus inherited, not only through the trailer and the city that “trashes,” but through blood as well. In reading Eminem’s lyrics, one immediately notices that the “genealogization” of the white-trash fate is carried to the end by the singer who accuses his own mother of every wrong, in particular of having transmitted to him this doubled social identity of an all-consuming loathing.
His use of the biological terminology (“bad seeds”) complies with the stigmatizing and “trashing” vernacular of the poor whites from their southern roots. In this sense, his appropriation of the hatred of a class displaced from its homeland permits him to shift his self-hatred and its suicidal consequences toward that which is seen as a social enigma by the well-to-do (just as they see Eminem as an enigma himself). His personal sufferance is a heritage, a burden. To the question “Who is to blame?”—Eminem responds without hesitation that his mother is responsible for this biological condemnation to the white-trash condition: it is her drug use that resulted in his disfigurement and insanity.33
Eminem’s attacks on his mother and on his girlfriend/wife/ex-wife Kim are in line with the fear of the white race degeneration, for which women were blamed.34 Indeed, the fear of the white middle class—like that of the “trash” patriarchs—is that “their” women cross the “color line” and mix with the riffraff of the black side.In 1930s-era Chicago, a “trashy” woman was exactly that. In Detroit in the 1970s, the analogy remains the same. “Bitch” can be read as the combination of female and “trash.” Paul Clemens illustrates the fate of the word in the poor neighborhoods of Detroit where it appears as a declension of social, slanderous remarks: “’You know what follows white trash, don’t you?’ you could hear people asking each other across front porches. We did. Bitch.”35
The acting out of Eminem’s white-trash identity sustains a fierce derisive discourse. He appropriates the conventions of the minstrel aesthetics to reverse them: as for a cakewalk, he pokes fun at the whites who act like blacks while comforting them by displaying his whiteness. His minstrelish performances of whiteness is exemplified in his interpretation of the song “Jimmy Crack Corn,” a blackface song thought to have been composed in 1846 by Daniel Decatur Emmet, who may have borrowed it from a black musician.36 G. Taylor sets up a very stimulating comparison between this racial incertitude of the speaker/Eminem and the character of Jim Crow, as performed by the comedian Daddy Rice, as both men possess a “double identity.” Eminem is white, but he addresses white America in the same way that Jim Crow had addressed “O white folks, white folks” … the popular art form addresses a more larger (and socially more diverse) audience than academic monographs on the subject; ill all … cases, the vocatives defines that audience is white, but simultaneously defines the speaker as non-white.”37 Of course, poor whites were historically frequently bigoted and racist, masking their own racial indetermination. But authors like Eminem created a reversal of racial stigmatization, reflecting it onto themselves and breaking with the discourse on white privilege. If the rapper made the southern discourse of “good blood” his own, he did not use it to separate “black blood” from “white blood” as do white supremacists.38 He proclaims his tainted whiteness and transposes racial anxieties onto himself by fashioning himself as the “bad white” or “white beast” willing to kill and terrorize “white America.” Metaphorically, creolizing whiteness is indeed killing it.
The rapper is the grotesque fusion of these two constructs (oneself and the other) in the respect that he openly curses his biology—and in doing so declares himself a poor white—while simultaneously adopting black cultural codes, blurring the cultural and pigmentary frontier. The poor white trash is more than ever an agent of subversion.
But the name is still insufficient to signify the strange creature of mixed identity. A term that stems from the impromptu encounter of two defamatory qualifications—“nigger” and “white trash”—is used in by the middle class: “wigger” or “wigga.” This modern form of “white nigger” appeared at the end of the ’70s and carried a less insulting connotation, designating whites who were keen on black culture.39 But for the most part, its use was aimed to denigrate the identity confusion of these whites. It is important to specify that, in the same way that the first occurrences of the term “white trash” around 1830 were among black speakers, the word “wigger” was also probably born from “black speech.”40 The semantic reversal of the term as well as its generalization in the public sphere are exactly coincident with Eminem’s success. The rapper so personifies this concept that for some he is even an uber-wigger. Just as he did with the term “trash,” Eminem criticizes those who use the term “wigger” while salvaging his own threatened identity: he does speak with an accent, but whites cannot thereby dismiss him and what he’s saying.41
The wigger who celebrates the blacks’ splinter culture expresses his hate of his own culture, that of the white middle class and its conventions that he claims are profoundly “foreign”: “At the center of the wigger’s role is a critique of white culture.… They are trying to remake themselves into aliens in that atmosphere, and hence showing its power to alienate.”42
Eminem is therefore, like the most humble black families of his neighborhood, subject to the shame of poverty. He voluntarily integrates himself into the gestures of the blacks with whom he shares the misery and denigration of “good people.” Thus his songs tend to erase the racial differential in the name of a common history. He is in a way a comparable figure to George Johnson in Alex Haley’s Roots.
This poor white comes to live on a plantation, with the slaves, becoming their brother while also using the white masters by acting as the supremacist and the foreman. To the blacks, he initially appears to be a miserable, pitiful lout, “some scrawny po’ white boy,” drawn out of the woods by hunger. Then, it is to the powerful whites that he appears to be “trash” when asking the landowner to let him work in the fields: “I was born and raised in the fields. I’ll work harder’n your niggers.” His goal is, in reality, to relieve the black workers. It is because this equivalence is inconceivable to the “plantocracy” that he is hired as a (supposedly racist) foreman, and that this deception manages to work.
George Johnson, friend of the destitute, is from then on called “Ol’ George.” His adoption by the slaves, unlikely and subversive, finds its origins in the common will to laugh at the powerful, to play the trickster with the master. This African American folkloric practical joker uses laughter to reverse the order of servitude. After having taught George how to be the foreman, how to mimic his viciousness and violence—“You got to learn how to growl an’ cuss’ an’ soun’ real mean, to make massa feel like you ain’t too easy an’ got us goin’”—the blacks and the poor white fraternize in this pretence of a supremacist society, sharing meals and daily work, language and above all social revolt against an order that holds them in comparable contempt: “But Ol’ George, too, was treated as one of ‘them’—shunned socially, kept waiting in stores till all the other white customers had been taken care of.”
Eminem tells a similar story, in which he is judged like his black friends by concerned salespeople in the stores of Detroit’s commercial center. One such tale is related on “Yellow Brick Road.” He is from the black side, dark and damned by the America of the powerful. It is this aspect that fundamentally distinguishes Eminem from other white rappers such as the Beastie Boys, the imposter Vanilla Ice,43 or more recently Macklemore, all of whom were middle class. He subverts the equation; he is perceived as and describes himself as black although his skin is white. In a scene from 8 Mile Eminem’s mother is in her trailer watching the film Imitation of Life when Rabbit returns from a rap battle. This very film recounts a story of “passing,” emphasizing that the discursive identity of the battler forces him to “pass” from the other side of the racial frontier, enforcing his social singularity.44
Eminem, poor demeaned white and “mercurial man,”45 roams the streets thinking of himself as a black, “white-washed negro” as was said about Ishmael in Moby-Dick46 identifying with rather than imitating his “others” and his black doubles, idols idealized by adolescents but always in a mocking way. He does not “act black,” attempting to usurp an identity and social codes that the color of his skin does not allow. He never forgets that he is implacably white. He thus refuses to utter the word “nigger,” widely used by other rappers.47 Eminem’s unique talent is to recreate a chain of signifiers in the tradition of African American folklore in order to deliver on top of his demanding tone a series of topoi of his condition that are evocative in terms of the denigrations themselves as well as representing those who always saw themselves as distanced “others” and guarding them from this social and cultural damnation.
The ambiguous mutually identified relationship that bonds the part-black white-trash character to the black “other” does not exactly correspond to the definition of genuine friendship. I would classify it as companionship (in French, a “companion de route” is one with whom one shares ideological and political views). There is a common undesired destiny between blacks and white-trash characters that goes further than spontaneous distrust, the romantic minstrel-like wish to be the other, or the fallacious negation of racial tensions.
Like the populist Tom Watson in his time, Eminem designates the white middle-class person as someone who condemns poor whites and blacks to the same social and cultural marginality. “Them” thus designates the guilty whites whose hands and words have forged the racism referenced by the African American poet Robert Hayden in “speach.”48
The figure of the double, simultaneously black brother and mirror, is thus central to Eminem’s dramatic identity. His best friend Proof, killed in March 2006 in Detroit, was the rapper’s first black double. But it is with Dr. Dre that the concept of a pair came into being in terms of rhetoric. Marshall Mathers and Dr. Dre (who produces much of Eminem’s work) are both presented in a quite unique manner: if the poor white is the ill one, the fallen and the savage, then his black double is the practitioner, the wise and the middle class. There are numerous examples of the patient and the doctor (Dre), the psychotic and the therapist (e.g., “If I Get Locked Up Tonight”).
Generally speaking, Dre is the moderator, the one who calms and tames the enraged poor white. It is he who attempts to calm Slim when he explodes on “Guilty Conscience.” The relationship between the two men is characterized by the moral influence of the reasonable Dr. Dre, acceptable figure of the middle class (he is a “doctor”), over savage Eminem. Eminem is the white savage speaking and acting like poor white trash from the South; Dre the civilized one who calls for moderation and level headedness.
The urge to immerse oneself in the world of the “black other” is not new. We can identify the rapper with the hipsters of the Beat Generation, for example, specifically regarding the question of social identity. The Beats wanted to abandon their white skin and middle-class origins and swap them for black identity. But their “cultural capital” is irreducible and their voluntary degradation is contrary to the aspirations of the black community.49 They therefore do not have the “common vocation” shared by the poor white trash and the black social climber.
This subtle hierarchy between the two men is expressed by Eminem’s reverence of his mentor’s environment and the gratitude he shows him. This pushes even the rapper to reveal the theme of the usurper, the white who, as Elvis was once accused, had unduly profited from black talent. He concedes that if he were black he wouldn’t have sold nearly as many records,50 and that like Elvis he’s using black music for personal gain.51
Eminem’s ambition is two-sided: to sing the “common vocation” of the “deromanticized” blacks and the white trash without denying the existence of the privilege that America has accorded to whites. The use of dialogue with a black partner enables this dialectic. It allows the exchange of racial masks in order to prove the equivalence between the black and the fallen white. In a duet with the black rapper Sticky Fingaz titled “If I Was White,” Eminem asks what his black friend would be if he were white. Sticky Fingaz also has the chance to question the possible “tonality” of his white skin, clear as that of a member of high society or ambiguous like that of a “redneck.” He is interrupted in the middle of his inquiry by a sarcastic and teasing Eminem, who knows what the conversion from black to white produces: Sticky Fingaz wonders whether he would be a redneck, a skinhead, a prep, or high class—Eminem answers for him: white trash. More than just a provocative quip, this phrase once more reveals the fundamental racial impurity of the “trash” figure who cannot be considered fully white as well as showing that Eminem himself knows that he is not really a member of the dominant race.
Eminem thus occupies a delicate racial position in the sense that he refuses to present himself as privileged; he is “trash,” but he must recognize that the color of his skin has historically conferred a symbolic influence over those he considers his brothers. His absolute refusal to use the word “nigger” reflects this uneasiness. To utter this word as blacks do would be to reveal himself as racist since no one can forget that his skin is the same as that of the former persecutors. He thus does not say the “N-word,” rather proclaiming himself “trash.” In this way, he presents himself as a marginalized white who carries the weight of his visible membership to the dominant group while blurring the identifications by exiling himself from his race of origin. He is thus akin to one of the albinos who used to be put on display at county fairs: “a freak and a demon.”52
Eminem, the trickster who acts as a double of the villain, certainly takes after both the white tall tale53 extravagances and the imaginary “black” discursive.54 His language reveals this hybrid identity. His predilection for pastiche, irony, derision, costume, and farcical undressing situates him in a black–American tradition, evoking vaudeville and more generally the African American “voice.” This taste for “making fun” is even for the linguist Hermese E. Roberts one of the essential dimensions of “black speech.” Eminem defines his musical and discursive mixing in these terms: “ Talking black, brainwashed from rock and rap.”55
In Eminem’s works, the word “motherfucker” is a keyword. However, he turns the insult against himself. He publically and furiously insults his own mother, unheard of in any African American tradition but common enough to the white-trash identity. But his high color eloquence does not correspond in any way to poor whites’ taste for silent rumination. He thus re-invents a “po’ white speech.” The question of the existence of a “poor white speech” is a difficult one. It is clear that Eminem uses “black speech” to tip the themes of the black claim of identity toward the expression of the white-trash conscience. This admixture is found in the language of southern whites, whether it be Erskine Caldwell or Faulkner using a mixed southern dialect or in the country music of the novelist Dorothy Allison. Mark Twain gave in his day a brilliant version of such a vernacular, particularly through his Tall Tale telling characters:
Whoo-oop ! I’m the old original iron-jawed, brass-mounted, copper-bellied corpse maker from the wilds of Arkansaw!- Look at me! I’m the man they call Sudden Death and General Desolation! Sired by a hurricane, dam’d by an earthquake, half brother of the cholera, nearly related to the small pox on the mother’s side! Look at me!56
But it is without a doubt Huck Finn’s speech that corresponds most closely to the discursive mixing of Eminem’s oeuvre. Although materially enriched by treasure, Huck is a poor white, subjected to the tyranny of a violent, racist, alcoholic father who even deliriously attempts one night to murder his son with a knife. The body of this father who incarnates the odious decline of whites, is in miserable shape, not only because, as a corpse, it floats on the river’s surface but also since when Huck is confronted with the body he describes its skin as “not like another man’s white, but a white to make a body sick, a white to make a body flesh crawl-a tree-toad-white, a fish belly white”57
Two “interracial” readings emphasizing the theme of the mask allow us to read the linked rhetoric between the white and the black in Huck Finn. Eric Lott highlights the influence “blackface” shows in Twain’s works and particularly the moment in which Huck claims to know that in reality Jim is “white inside.”58 But the influence of the racial role-playing in Twain’s work seems to go in a direction pertinent to our study. The other hypothesis claims that in effect Huck, the poor white, speaks a dialect directly influenced by “black speech,” which would then make him Eminem’s indirect ancestor. Shelley Fisher Fishkin, in his analysis Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African-American Voices59 suggests that Huck’s verbal cadences, syntax, and dialectical diction as well as his role as an explorer make him a figure of the black “voice,” for which Jimmy, Twain’s young black friend of his youth, would be the model. She identifies the linguistic structure and language60 register of the poor white as stemming from the speech of the poor blacks. Above all, she identifies Huck’s African American “signifying” that is also found in the work of the Detroit rapper, marked by irreverent laughter.61 She defines Huck as the “trickster” who must survive in a world dominated by whites. In this sense as well, Huck and Eminem mirror each other. Where the first shouts, “They’re after us!” the second sings that he could be one of America’s kids.62 Poor whites and blacks are thus together, at the very least for a moment of common contestation of the world order.
Between asserting his existential unease and his impassioned social conscience, Eminem reveals his explicit racial hybridization. His “black speech” that is applied to social stereotypes that vilify the “bad poor person,” and the integration of his brutal view of his circumstances together succeed in the articulation of the racializing of poor white trash. It is the monster that America does not want to see but can laugh at and claim to fear. Eminem often claims to be “brainwashed” like a degraded creature. A “generation Frankenstein,” born of modern racial “mixing,” led by Eminem, frightens conservative America.
His pursuit of recognition reveals the weight of the social taboo in the United States that ignores class and favors a racial interpretation of society. If Eminem can be understood as “a walking spectacle” and if his personal theater is so extravagant, it is perhaps because it is necessary in order to reveal the class structure and subvert racial univocity. Like other authors who have succeeded financially but remain prisoners of their roots, Eminem is obsessed with his formative years that were racked by hunger to succeed and self-hatred. He still searches the streets of Detroit for the source of this anger that acted as his driving force. The “black other” serves his companion throughout this perpetual and inevitable distancing from and return to his roots. As an “underserving poor,” a not-quite-white villain, he grasps the pain, frustration, anger, and self-doubt many blacks have felt. America’s youth identifies with him. Eminem’s whiteface is clearly intended as a self-parody: a divided self allows him to mock the white in him as the trickster used to poke fun at the white man; he performs a work of racial self-recognition and self-consciousness as though the doubtful color of his skin stands paradoxically as a token of legitimacy, enabling him to “accompany” blacks in their cultural voicing.
Far from unrestrained romanticism, the poor white invents in this case a new relationship with the double—a relationship, as I have attempted to show in this analysis, marked by the commonalities of destiny and amity: Eminem doesn’t make black or white music, he makes fight music.63
Chapter Notes
1. Eric King Watts writes, “The Detroit native is so fixated on his image that he has manufactured a handful of personae, including a ‘mythicized version’ of Marshall Mathers, subjecting each to a spectacular performance for public derision and adulation,” in “Border Patrolling and Passing in Eminem’s 8 Mile” in Critical Studies in Media Communication 22.3 (August 2005): 187.
2. Annalee Newitz and Matt Wray, White Trash, Race and Class in America (New York: Routledge, 1996).
3. Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men (New York: Harper Perennial, 1990), 82.
4. Annalee Newitz and Matt Wray, White Trash, Race and Class in America (New York: Routledge, 1996). http://www.amazon.fr/dp/0415916925/ref=rdr_ext_tmb
5. Richard Middleton, Voicing the Popular: On the Subjects of Popular Music (New York: Routledge, 2006), 37.
6. In “Border Patrolling and Passing in Eminem’s 8 Mile” Eric King Watts writes, “The complex relationship between race and class allows white folks to be represented as ‘discursively black’ and potentially white.… Following the logic, if characterized as poor white trash, whiteness is darkened; it can be whitened by characterizing as heroic its passing over his race/class boundary.”
7. Analyzing the outcome of the Reconstruction, Du Bois underscores the “political success of the doctrine of racial separation, which overthrew Reconstruction by uniting the planter and the poor white…. It must be remembered, that the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage,” Black Reconstruction in America 1860–1880 (New York: Atheneum, 1992), 700.
8. ”V” signifies verfremsdungeffekt and is generally used to qualify the dramatic conventions corresponding to the theater of Berthold Brecht.
9. It hardly makes sense to have lyrics analyzed without a single reference to the lyrics themselves. Please see the third verse in “Lose Yourself.” Eminem’s lyrics are freely available and easily accessible online.
10. Quoted in Anthony Bozza, Whatever You Say I Am: The Life and Times of Eminem (New York: Crown, 2003), 119.
11. As a figure of the “Okie” fleeing the misery of the West by train for the promised success in the cities, Guthrie addressed a popular and industrial population, condemning worker exploitation and the brutal, racist society.
12. Paul Clemens, Made in Detroit: A South of 8 Mile Memoir (New York: Doubleday, 2005), 14, my emphasis.
13. Recounting his childhood in the ’80s, he explains that the white children of his elementary school dressed like Indians, with ponchos and war paint, in order to signal their “racial existence.”
14. Bozza specifies: “Of the 76 percent in the city, nearly half of those African American are under the age of eighteen, living in impoverished homes, compared to just 10 percent of kids in the same straits in the suburbs. The degree of racial and economic division is as close as a major American city gets to the kind of class imbalance found in Third World countries,” 213.
15. Jackson Katts, “Advertising and the Construction of Violent White Masculinity: From BMWs to Bud Light,” in Gail Dines & Jean M. Humez, eds., Gender, Race, and Class in Media: A Critical Reader (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2003).
16. “Who Knew,” The Marshall Mathers LP.
17. “If I Had …,” The Slim Shady LP.
18. John Hartigan, Jr., Odd Tribes: Toward a Cultural Analysis of White People (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 229.
19. “Many poor workers invested their surplus-valued whiteness into a fund of psychic protection against the perverse, impure meaning of whiteness. They drew from their value-added whiteness to not only boost their self-esteem but to assert their relative racial superiority by means oh what may be termed a negative inculpability: poor whites derived pleasure and some cultural benefit by not being the nigger.” Michael Eric Dyson, “Giving Whiteness a Black Eye: Excavating White Identities, Ideologies and Institutions,” Open Mike: Reflections on Philosophy, Race, Sex, Culture and Religion (New York: Basic Civitas, 2003), 105.
20. Anthony Bozza, Whatever You Say I Am: The Life and Times of Eminem (New York: Three Rivers, 2004).
21. Michael Novak, The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics: Politics and Culture in the Seventies (New York: Macmillan, 1975).
22. Bozza, 31.
23. “Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze …” in Barack Obama, “A More Perfect Union,” March 18, 2008.
24. “The Real Slim Shady,” The Marshall Mathers LP.
25. Richard Goldstein, music critic of Village Voice adds: “When Eminem says he is indifferent to women and hates them (Homosexuals, SIC), and ejects any sign of femininity from his personality and projects everything he hates about himself about women, that is a macho value, which makes him an alpha male,” cited in Bozza, 247.
26. Toni Morrison, “Talk of the Town: Comment,” The New Yorker, October 5, 1998.
27. John Shelton Reed, 1001 Things Everyone Should Know About the South (New York: Doublday, 1996).
28. Dyson writes: “Interestingly enough, Bill Clinton figures as a key subject and subtext of such conversations. For many, Clinton is our first nation’s “Bubba,” our country Trailer trash executive, our nation’s Poor White President. It tells on our bigoted cultural beliefs and social prejudices that Clinton … an Oxford University and Yale University Law School Graduate and president of the U.S.—could be construed as a poor white trash, cracker citizen. The study of whiteness prods us to examine the means by which a highly intelligent man and gifted politician is transmuted into “Bubba” for the purpose of intraethnic demonization,” Open Mike, 111.
29. “Marshall Mathers,” The Marshall Mathers LP.
30. “Role Model,” The Slim Shady LP.
31. Eric King Watts, “Border Patrolling and Passing in Eminem’s 8 Mile,” 193.
32. Nicole Hahn Rafter, White Trash: The Eugenic Family Studies, 1877–1919 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988).
33. “Criminal,” The Marshall Mathers LP.
34. Anna Stubblefield, “’Beyond the Pale’: Tainted Whiteness, Cognitive Disability, and Eugenic Sterilization,” Hypatia, Vol. 22, No. 2 (Spring 2007): 162–181.
35. Clemens, Made in Detroit, 181.
36. William E. Studwell, The Americana Song Reader (New York: Haworth Press, Inc, 1997), 53.
37. Ibid., 346.
38. Roebuck and Hickson claim: “Being white is not sufficient for being somebody, but it is a necessary first attribute to such a status. Fearful, insecure, narrow-minded, dependant, hostile, rigid, and envious, the redneck adopts the racial dimension as a master identity in his self-concept, that is, he is a white man. In line with the Southern emphasis on blood (“good seed,” “bad seed,” “weak seed,” “good stock”) the redneck perceives the cultural differences between himself and blacks (in music, dancing preferences, speech patterns, body language, body tonus, style of walking, sexual and marital patterns, and alleged black indifference to achievement goals) as biologically based.” Julian B. Roebuck & Mark Hickson, The Southern Redneck: A Phenomenological Class Study (New York: Praeger, 1982), 90.
39. Geneva Smitherman, Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1986), 298.
40. “The word ‘whigger,’ a contraction of ‘white nigger’ probably originated in the early 1970s in urban African American speech; it resembles other ironic black compounds- like witch (white bitch) and whitianity (white christianity)—that whittle down white to a prefix,” Gary Taylor, Buying Whiteness: Race, Culture, and Identity from Columbus to Hip-Hop (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 342.
41. “The Way I Am,” The Marshall Mathers LP.
42. Crispin Sartwell, Act Like You Know: African-American Autobiography and White Identity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 149.
43. Vanilla Ice invented a hoodlum childhood for himself. Perceived as an impostor, he nonetheless appealed to a white audience seduced by his impersonation of the “cool white guy.” See Harris Daniel “Coolness: The Psychology of Coolness,” American Scholar September 22, 1999.
44. “White passing narratives center the individual passer as social maverick” Gayle Wald, Crossing the Line: Racial Passing in Twentieth Century U.S. Literature and Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000),196.
45. Watts, 196.
46. Non only is Ishmael being called a whitewashed Negro but Melville attempts, through Queekeg and Ishmael’s friendship, to deconstruct the very notion of race. “Posing a mixed race marriage between himself and Queekeg, Ishmael upsets epidermal expectations immediately with the claim that a white man is not anything more dignified than a white washed Negro.” Bridget T. Heneghan, Whitewashing America: Material Culture and Race in the Antebellum Imagination (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2003), 145.
47. Randall Kennedy emphasizes the significance of this forbidden discourse in the definition of the rapper’s distance regarding identity and race: “Eminem has assumed many of the distinctive mannerisms of his black rap colleagues, making himself into a ‘brother’ in many ways—in his music, his diction, his gait, his clothes, his associations. He refuses to say, however, any version of a word that his black hip-hop colleagues employ constantly as a matter of course; the nonchalance with which he tosses around epithets such as bitch and faggot does not extend to nigger. ‘That word,’ he insists, ‘is not even in my vocabulary.’” Randall Kennedy, Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word (New York: Pantheon, 2002), 40–41.
48. Robert Hayden, “Speech,” Heart-Shape in the Dust (Detroit Falcon, 1940).
49. Gary T. Marx makes this analysis: “Both are initially identified with the values they reject- Negroes as a result of their skin color and frequently lower-class background and Beats as a result of their skin color rand middle class background. In their attempt to avoid identification with their presumed past, both may go out of their way to show that they are in fact opposite. Negroes will show how middle class they are and Beats what white Negroes they are. What Negroes embrace wholeheartedly beats reject just as furiously. The hipster behavior patterns which Beats embrace and go out of their way to be identified with are the very behavior patterns that middle class Negroes strongly reject. They have switched drummers and in so doing both may be hearing the beat not quite right, resulting the misconception by Beats of what it really means to be Negro.” Gary T. Marx, “The White Negro and the Negro White,” Phylon, Summer 1967, vol. 28, no. 2; cited on mit.edu.
50. “White America,” The Eminem Show.
51. “Without Me,” The Eminem Show.
52. Charles D. Martin, The White African American Body: A Cultural and Literary Exploration (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 4.
53. Davy Crockett struts about in these terms in his 1834 autobiography: ”I’m that same Davy Crockett, fresh from the backwoods, half horse, half alligator, a little touched with the snapping turtle; can wade the Mississippi, leap the Ohio, ride a streak of lightning, slip without a scratch down a honey locust, can whip my weight in wildcats.” “Tall Tale,” Columbia Encyclopedia 2004, Encyclopedia.com.
54. Black is written here between quotation marks because it is used in the contexts of African American folklore as well as the racial stereotypes of white society.
55. “Sing for the Moment,” The Eminem Show.
56. Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi River.
57. Mark Twain, Thomas Cooley, ed., The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (New York, London: Norton Critical Edition, 1999), 31.
58. “Despite Twain’s self-consciousness, though, the evidence suggest we take Huck’s admiring remark about Jim in chapter 40 … that he ‘knowed’ Jim was ‘white inside’—as the crowning statement on the centrality of blackface’s contradictions to Twain’s imagination. The remark is a perfect specimen of the imperial psychological orientation Homi Bhabha calls ‘ambivalence’ … Twain … returned over and over to the actual practice and literary trope of blackface, which hedges by imagining the Other as black only in exterior, still white inside.” Eric Lott,“Mr Clemens and Jim Crow: Twain, Race, and Blackface,” in The Cambridge Companion to Mark Twain, Forrest G. Robinson, ed., (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
59. Fisher Fishkin, Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African-American Voices (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
60. She particularly emphasizes the notion of “colloquial style.”
61. Fisher Fisckin stresses that “The ‘text’ on which Twain is signifying is the subtext of these character remarks: it is the familiar assumption that their kind alone are superior beings with special claims to empathy and privilege as embodiment of ‘civilization.’ Twain acidic treatment of bigoted white folks in Huckleberry Finn may well reflect some of his early exposure to African American satirical social critic, to the practice Lawrence Levine calls ‘laughing at the man.’” Fisckin, 62–64.
62. “White America,” The Eminem Show.
63. “Who Knew,” The Marshall Mathers LP.