I find it deeply ironic that you now accuse me of being an “internet asshole” when it was your own internet assholery and offbase attack on Sasha — far more mean and ad-hominem than my joshing comments above — that inspired my engagement here in the first place, even if your incoherent objections hardly warranted my time and effort. Sure, I got a little snarky in that last comment, but — what can I say? — I grew frustrated at what I perceive to be your stubbornness and, to be quite frank (at least on this topic), stupidness.

This is not about credentials or academic bona fides (which I could care less about). But it is, as you say, about “bullshit.” Not my bullshit, however (which you fail to specify), but your own bullshit theories of race and ethnicity. Your discussion and defense of “white” ethnicity and culture strikes me as quite out-of-step with recent work in anthropology and critical race studies / cultural studies. (And when I say recent, I mean from the last two decades or so — not exactly cutting edge scholarship or anything.) You seem to want to uphold an idea of a “white” ethnicity or a “white” culture, which is, in my opinion, a pernicious fallacy to uphold. When I talk about “cultural notions of whiteness” that is precisely my way of avoiding implying the kind of fixity around race/culture that you seem to suggest with your ideas about “ethnicity” and which Sasha has also noted is well worth avoiding, for it slides into an easy essentialism and ends up propping up (outmoded, disproven) ideas about racial difference rather than dismantling or writing against them. If you don’t feel me on that, I don’t know what to tell you. (Actually, I’ll tell you to read Ron Radano’s _Lying Up a Nation_, among other things. Try the introduction to _Out of Whiteness_ as well.)

I don’t expect you to change your ideas immediately, but I would have expected you to be more open and less defensive given what I perceive to be your otherwise progressive tendencies (i.e, self-identifying as “girlie” as a form of anti-macho transgression in a masculinist, patriarchal blogosphere and music scene). But in the end, I don’t really care what Chrissy Muderbot thinks. I do, however, as a friend of Jake and an artist on the label, care about Mashit, and what Mashit represents. And I think you have not put a good foot forward with this post. So that’s why I have been inclined to spend so much time and energy arguing with you here.

At this point, though, I have to agree with Sasha’s appropriately terse, original response to your incoherent attack: “i couldn’t care less.”

I suppose you might derive some sort of perverse pleasure from that (and I quote, “bwaahaahaahaahaaha”). Well, in that case, enjoy!

PEACE~~~~~~

Peace –

What I like about the word retreat — and you could explain why you don’t like it — is that it calls attention to whiteness as a cultural thing, as something created by signifiers that have an inherent relation to (similarly slippery) ideas about blackness. In that sense, it’s hardly racist, or “reverse racist,” or even racialist to use the term: on the contrary, it’s anti-rac(ial)ist. Let’s not forget, please, that this is not about who’s “actually” black or white, because, as we all know, black and white are really just imaginary social categories which, nevertheless, a lot of us live by and are affected by no matter how much we might want to escape the pernicious system of racial classification and hierarchy.

But when you talk about “racial origins” (even if you could care less) or “white influence” you belie an understanding of race which is still, it would seem, rather committed to some sense of real difference between “us” and “them.” You’re implying that there is a “there” there. That race is real not because some of us believe it is and thus act accordingly, but because there are real underlying differences between “blacks” and “whites” (which was proven fallacious by DNA science long ago).

It may seem like some subtle semantics, but the difference between talking about “white influence” on hip-hop vs. — for example — black hip-hop producers’ embrace of musical signifiers more typically associated with so-called “white” genres like techno (which has itself, of course, been “whitened” in mainstream representations), is — aside from an issue of unfortunately clunkier language — actually a rather significant difference to express. I think that being more careful about how we draw these lines and how we talk about these lines is paramount, and, frankly, I think you and Sasha both play a little too fast and loose with these big, weighted words.

Though one could — and perhaps should — raise any number of objections to certain details of Sasha’s piece, your response here is shrill, overblown, and largely offbase.

As I note in my own response to Sasha’s piece (trackbacked above see below), I think we should go easy on him and applaud him for painting in bold, broad strokes. You take him to task for leaving certain things out of his narrative, but I suspect that you are actually in agreement with him w/r/t indie rock whiteness. Sasha is hardly claiming that musical miscegenation is not happening today, but that it is not happening — for the most part — in indie rock. He may not discuss the party/remix/”trad”-”hipster” scene which you (and, sure, I) inhabit, but that’s ok. His article was not meant to be a comprehensive overview, but a focused critique of a particular musical-cultural phenomenon.

Although I don’t want to go through and debunk all of your points, Sasha actually does cover the Kanye West angle (he can afford to sample), and let’s not forget that Kraftwerk owe a lot of their machinic funkiness to James Brown.

Perhaps color shouldn’t matter, as one commenter above says, but the fact is that it still does. Arcade Fire don’t sound white to Sasha b/c they are white; they sound white because they retreat into cultural/musical signifiers of whiteness — which is not only problematic for Sasha, but is prolly problematic to all the Mashit heads here who love their beats big, bassy, and bouncy. Dude’s on our side, folks. So let’s weigh our words a little more carefully.