The White Negro

"The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster" is a 9,000-word essay by Norman Mailer that recorded a number of young white people between the 1920s and 1950s who liked jazz and swing music, and who were so disenchanted with what they saw as a conformist culture, that they adopted black culture as their own. The essay was first published in the Summer 1957 issue of Dissent, before being published separately by City Lights. It later appeared in Advertisements for Myself in 1959.

Mailer begins the essay by stating:

Using the context of a post-World War II society, Mailer asserts that the atrocities of the war have forced humanity to recognize the possibility of a "death by 'deus ex machina' in a gas chamber or in a radioactive city." He feels as if this reality has stifled dissent and that we live in years of "conformity and depression". He observes that "a stench of fear has come out of every pore of American life, and we suffer from a collective failure of nerve," asserting that acts of courage have been isolated.

After his initial exposition, Mailer begins the second section of "The White Negro" by observing that:

The "hipster" knows that contemporary society must live under the threat of "instant death by atomic war, relatively quick death by the State as l’univers concentrationnaire, or with a slow death by conformity with every creative and rebellious instinct stifled (339)." This realization has led the hipster to accept that:

The lifestyle of the hipster, the American-existentialist, is one that operates in "the enormous present"; he must "be with it or doomed not to swing." There is a distinction between being Hip and being Square, one that draws a parallel to rebellion and conformity.

Mailer goes on to explain that "the source of Hip is the Negro for he has been living on the margin between totalitarianism and democracy for two centuries (340)." He attributes the proliferation of the hip mentality to the "knifelike entrance" of jazz into culture, explaining that the post-war generation shared a "collective disbelief in the words of men who had too much money and controlled too many things (340)." Mailer suggests that the thought processes of this generation can be traced to D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Wilhelm Reich, claiming that the philosophy of Ernest Hemingway is also applicable to the reality of the hipsters.

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