The White Negro

by Norman Mailer

An essay that packed an enormous wallop at the time may make some of us cringe today with its hyperbolic dialectics and hyperventilated metaphysics. But Mailer’s attempt to define the “hipster”–in what reads in part like a prose version of Ginsberg’s “Howl”–is suddenly relevant again, as new essays keep appearing with a similar definitional purpose, though no one would mistake Mailer’s hipster (“a philosophical psychopath”) for the ones we now find in Mailer’s old Brooklyn neighborhoods. Odd, how terms can bounce back into life with an entirely different set of connotations.

Genres: Nonfiction, Essays, American, Philosophy, The United States Of America, Literature, Sociology

Paperback

First published January 1, 1959

About the author

Norman Kingsley Mailer was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, poet, playwright, screenwriter, and film director.

Along with Truman Capote, Joan Didion, and Tom Wolfe, Mailer is considered an innovator of creative nonfiction, a genre sometimes called New Journalism, but which covers the essay to the nonfiction novel. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize twice and the National Book Award once. In 1955, Mailer, together with Ed Fancher and Dan Wolf, first published The Village Voice, which began as an arts- and politics-oriented weekly newspaper initially distributed in Greenwich Village. In 2005, he won the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from The National Book Foundation.

Reviews

[Cwn_annwn_13 · Rating 1 out of 5]

This has to be the stupidest book I have read in a long time. I thought it might be a colorful look into the world of whites who immersed themselves into the black jazz scene in the 1940s and 50s. What I got was Norman Mailer doing some very weird and typically Jewish projecting psychoanalysis of these whites. Everything revolves around sex, tearing down society, criminal behaviour and psychopathology to these people in Mailers mind. While more often than not the white Jazz hipsters were complete misfits or just engaging in misguided rebellion Mailers reflections are so bizarre and perverse its almost humorous. The White Negro is totally uselss mental masterbation.

[Aggrey Odera · Rating 1 out of 5]

Astounded by Mailer’s ability to write so well about such a stupid idea. What a fucking, as he would say, square! I’m not counting this as a book I read this year because 1. it is an essay, not a book, so very short, and 2. I wanted to gouge my eyes out at the end of it, and I’d much much rather forget the experience. I’m only writing this review in the hopes that some of my friends will read it and spare themselves the experience. Zero stars.

Edit: I just finished reading James Baldwin's incredible essay "The black boy looks at the White Boy Norman Mailer" and though I didn't even think it possible, I hate Mailer's essay even more. Baldwin depicts Mailer as a writer of astounding talent, one who had all the potential to become one of the all-time greats. And yet, in this work as well as in Youtube videos of him I've seen (there's one with Gore Vidal that is especially cringe-worthy), Mailer, despite his obvious literary talents, displays a fierce bellicosity and an insecurity that is truly unattractive. He thinks of himself as the smartest person alive (well, he's dead now, but he did so then) and will fight you if you dare impugn this claim; thinks it is his sworn duty to insult, malign, and otherwise be an arsehole to other writers; holds himself as explainer in chief of other people's experiences and lives.

The topic of this essay - black male masculinity and sexuality (as he views it, a rebellious, violent, and emancipated form of maleness) as something to aspire to, as opposed to the supposed wispy effeteness and conformism that came with liberalism and its turn to psychoanalysis; one that he saw as associated with hippies, is a tough terrain to walk, and Mailer crawls and slobbers all over it. It is difficult to disentangle this vision of black masculinity (assuming it is a correct or total one in the first place, which it most certainly is not) from the pernicious underbelly of this stereotype: the black man as aggressive and violent; the black man as hypersexual and a sexual predator.

But perhaps since black men like Eldridge Cleaver, a prominent black panther and an intellectual, liked the essay, there could be something to be said for it? I'm no psychoanalyst (in the professional sense; I'm certainly one in Mailer's sense) but I see Cleaver's liking of the essay as characteristic of another trope I have seen within many of the black male communities I have been in or around: that the black man, oppressed in every other way by the white man, will assert his own purported sexual and/or physical superiority over the white man. At least he can win in this one sphere - you should have listened to many of my contemporaries speak about the size of their dicks and their sexual prowess when compared to white men. Cleaver liking it neither makes the essay accurate nor good.

Still, in this regard (and assuming we extend the utmost good faith to Cleaver's reasons for liking the essay), we may say that Mailer is thankfully not as tone-deaf - or as silly- as Jack Kerouac (though that bar is so low as to be on the ground), whose stupid line about desiring to not be a white man, "wishing I were a Negro, feeling that the best the white world had offered was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night. I wished I were a Denver Mexican, or even a poor overworked Jap, anything but what I so drearily was, a ‘white man’ disillusioned", is truly the height of white outrageousness and fetishization).

[Carol Storm · Rating 5 out of 5]

Norman Mailer's writing is so powerful that more than fifty years later this prophetic, provocative essay still frightens certain types of people. Mailer is hotter than ever. He's been dead for over ten years but if you pick up a copy of National Review in the summer of 2020 you get the impression that he's still very much alive. He's the one causing all the trouble! He's the secret leader of Black Lives Matter. He's the one getting those people stirred up. He's the college kids who spit on cops. He's the Anti-fascist underground that hates America. He's the sole cause of all the unrest this summer. In the summer of George Floyd, National Review needs Norman Mailer more than ever before.

Now the principled conservative thinkers at National Review are all much too smart to lie. There really is an unfortunate tendency in this essay to sentimentalize a certain kind of urban street criminal. But somehow, young Kyle Smith and old Victor Davis Hanson have convinced themselves that if they discredit Mailer they discredit all of Black Lives Matter, all black protest, and ultimately, all black people. They don't want George Floyd as the face of their enemies. They want Mailer!

But the thing is, Norman Mailer didn't start the trouble this summer. A white cop did that. Young Kyle and old Victor have nothing to say about the state of mind of that white cop when he murdered George Floyd for no reason. They're innocent as hell. They know nothing, nothing! Victor can sneer at young college kids spitting on cops all he wants, but that doesn't explain the look in that American cop's cold blue eyes when he had his knee on that man's neck. THAT is real evil. And the National Review boys just can't tap-dance away from it fast enough.

Norman Mailer once wrote a book called THE NAKED AND THE DEAD which was a huge best seller, and it was about combat in the Pacific. And there's a brief, jarring scene where tough Sgt. Croft from Texas takes a Japanese soldier prisoner. At first he's nice to the Jap, but then, without warning, he shoots him in the head at point-blank range. That moment reveals more about the death of George Floyd and everything that followed than anything Kyle Smith or Victor Davis Hanson have ever said or will ever say.

Norman Mailer is back -- and he's hotter than ever!

[Alexandru Jr. · Rating 5 out of 5]

the fragments from this essay which had the biggest impact on me. i can do nothing but quote them :)
the whole text is very sharply and masterfully written.
if only philosophers could write like that - not just writers who like philosophy (with a few exceptions).


"To be an existentialist, one must be able to feel oneself—one must know one’s desires, one’s rages, one’s anguish, one must be aware of the character of one’s frustration and know what would satisfy it. The over-civilized man can be an existentialist only if it is chic, and deserts it quickly for the next chic. To be a real existentialist (Sartre admittedly to the contrary) one must be religious, one must have one’s sense of the “purpose”—whatever the purpose may be—but a life which is directed by one’s faith in the necessity of action is a life committed to the notion that the substratum of existence is the search, the end meaningful but mysterious; it is impossible to live such a life unless one’s emotions provide their profound conviction. Only the French, alienated beyond alienation from their unconscious could welcome an existential philosophy without ever feeling it at all; indeed only a Frenchman by declaring that the unconscious did not exist could then proceed to explore the delicate involutions of consciousness, the microscopically sensuous and all but ineffable frissons of mental becoming, in order finally to create the theology of atheism and so submit that in a world of absurdities the existential absurdity is most coherent.

In the dialogue between the atheist and the mystic, the atheist is on the side of life, rational life, undialectical life—since he conceives of death as emptiness, he can, no matter how weary or despairing, wish for nothing but more life; his pride is that he does not transpose his weakness and spiritual fatigue into a romantic longing for death, for such appreciation of death is then all too capable of being elaborated by his imagination into a universe of meaningful structure and moral orchestration.

Yet this masculine argument can mean very little for the mystic. The mystic can accept the atheist’s description of his weakness, he can agree that his mysticism was a response to despair. And yet…and yet his argument is that he, the mystic, is the one finally who has chosen to live with death, and so death is his experience and not the atheist’s, and the atheist by eschewing the limitless dimensions of profound despair has rendered himself incapable to judge the experience. The real argument which the mystic must always advance is the very intensity of his private vision—his argument depends from the vision precisely because what was felt in the vision is so extraordinary that no rational argument, no hypotheses of ‘oceanic feelings” and certainly no skeptical reductions can explain away what has become for him the reality more real than the reality of closely reasoned logic. His inner experience of the possibilities within death is his logic. So, too, for the existentialist. And the psychopath. And the saint and the bullfighter •and the lover. The common denominator for all of them is their burning consciousness of the present, exactly :that incandescent consciousness which the possibilities within death has opened for them. There is a depth of desperation to the condition which enables one to remain in life only by engaging death, but the reward is their knowledge that what is happening at each instant of the electric present is good or bad for them, good or bad for their cause, their love, their action, their need.

It is this knowledge which provides the curious community of feeling in the world of the hipster, a muted cool religious revival to be sure, but the element which is exciting, disturbing, nightmarish perhaps, is that incompatibles have come to bed, the inner life and the violent life, the orgy and the dream of love, the desire to murder and the desire to create, a dialectical conception of existence with a lust for power, a dark, romantic, and yet undeniably dynamic view of existence for it sees every man and woman as moving individually through each moment of life forward into growth or backward into death."

and

"The only Hip morality (but of course it is an ever-present morality) is to do what one feels whenever and wherever it is possible, and—this is how the war of the Hip and the Square begins—to be engaged in one primal battle: to open the limits of the possible for oneself, for oneself alone because that is one’s need. Yet in widening the arena of the possible, one widens it reciprocally for others as well, so that the nihilistic fulfillment of each man’s desire contains its antithesis of human cooperation.

If the ethic reduces to Know Thyself and Be Thyself, what makes it radically different from Socratic moderation with its stern conservative respect for the experience of the past, is that the Hip ethic is immoderation, child-like in its adoration of the present (and indeed to respect the past means that one must also respect such ugly consequences of the past as the collective murders of the State) . It is this adoration of the present which contains the affirmation of Hip, because its ultimate logic surpasses even the unforgettable solution of the Marquis de Sade to sex, private property, and the family, that all men and women have absolute but temporary rights over the bodies of all other men and women—the nihilism of Hip proposes as its final tendency that every social restraint and category be removed, and the affirmation implicit in the proposal is that man would then prove to be more creative than murderous and so would not destroy himself. Which is exactly what separates Hip from the authoritarian philosophies which now appeal to the conservative and liberal temper—what haunts the middle of the Twentieth Century is that faith in man has been lost, and the appeal of authority has been that it would restrain us from ourselves. Hip, which would return us to ourselves, at no matter what price in individual violence, is the affirmation of the barbarian for it requires a primitive passion about human nature to believe that individual acts of violence are always to be preferred to the collective violence of the State; it takes literal faith in the creative possibilities of the human being to envisage acts of violence as the catharsis which prepares growth.

Whether the hipster’s desire for absolute sexual freedom contains any genuinely radical conception of a different world is of course another matter, and it is possible, since the hipster lives with his hatred, that many of them are the material for an elite of storm troopers ready to follow the first truly magnetic leader whose view of mass murder is phrased in a language which reaches their emotions. But given the desperation of his condition as a psychic outlaw, the hipster is equally a candidate for the most reactionary and most radical of movements, and so it is just as possible that many hipsters will come—if the crisis deepens—to a radical comprehension of the horror of society, for even as the radical has had his incommunicable dissent confirmed in his experience by precisely the frustration, the denied opportunities, and the bitter years which his ideas have cost him, so the sexual adventurer deflected from his goal by the implacable animosity of a society constructed to deny the sexual radical as well, may yet come to an equally bitter comprehension of the slow relentless inhumanity of the conservative power which controls him from without and from within. And in being so controlled, denied, and starved into the attrition of conformity, indeed the hipster may come to see that his condition is no more than an exaggeration of the human condition, and if he would be free, then everyone must be free. Yes, this is possible too, for the heart of Hip is its emphasis upon courage at the moment of crisis, and it is pleasant to think that courage contains within itself (as the explanation of its existence) some glimpse of the necessity of life to become more than it has been."

[Thor Garcia · Rating 1 out of 5]

See the full review here

Ultra-bad writer/huckster/intel-agency henchman Norman Mailer’s “The White Negro,” from 1957, was a key work that kick-started the modern incarnation of despicable cultural attacks on black people.

For at least a generation, Mailer’s terribly written essay of around 9,200 words was promoted far and wide in mainstream and “indie” media and college classrooms. Mailer unleashed a series of ugly racist clichés as he used the timeworn, deceptive technique of insulting with “praise” to humiliate and shame blacks and promote white cultural supremacy.

Arriving exactly in the middle of America’s Civil Rights struggle, Mailer’s essay did blacks no favors by reducing them to moaning, groaning, reprobate fiends who rejected “the sophisticated inhibitions of civilization” and instead lived to boogie down, get “Saturday night kicks” and the “scream and despair of his orgasm.”

Yes, Norman—how much, much more truly and tremendously human and “orgasmic” are the Negroes than the rest of us, LOL. One wonders: What the hell is Mailer talking about when he says jazz is “the music of orgasm”? Had he ever even heard jazz? Louis Armstrong’s intricate pop swing? Duke Ellington’s big bands? Charlie Parker's interior monologues? The “cool” of Miles Davis? The “blues” of John Coltrane? The freeform clownery of Charles Mingus? Chrissakes, the 1950s was the era of Dizzy Gillespie and Clifford Brown and be-bop. How, precisely, is jazz more “orgasmic” than any other kind of music? Why did Mailer expend so much energy attempting to cut down and trivialize jazz?

How did it happen that this know-nothing court jester Mailer was wildly promoted for decades on every possible media platform in the U.S.A.? Well—Mailer’s mission from the overlords was to promote sensationalist discordianism—and the allegedly shell-shocked WWII soldier was very much ready to accomplish the assignment.

Mailer, writing at his moronic, nonsensical, racist worst in “The White Negro”: Knowing in the cells of his existence that life was war, nothing but war, the Negro (all exceptions admitted) could rarely afford the sophisticated inhibitions of civilization, and so he kept for his survival the art of the primitive, he lived in the enormous present, he subsisted for his Saturday night kicks, relinquishing the pleasures of the mind for the more obligatory pleasures of the body, and in his music he gave voice to the character and quality of his existence, to his rage and the infinite variations of joy, lust, languor, growl, cramp, pinch, scream and despair of his orgasm. For jazz is orgasm, it is the music of orgasm, good orgasm and bad, and so it spoke across a nation. . . .

Mailer, again writing extremely badly (no exceptions admitted), suggests that white “hipsters” can break out of the alleged stifling conformity of the 1950s and become “white Negroes” by absorbing the Negro’s “existentialist synapses”: So there was 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. The hipster had absorbed the existentialist synapses of the Negro, and for practical purposes could be considered a white Negro.

And this is all before Mailer goes on to “celebrate” Negroes—and no, I am not making this up—as literal psychopaths and violent criminal bottom-feeders: It is therefore no accident that psychopathy is most prevalent with the Negro. Hated from outside and therefore hating himself, the Negro was forced into the position of exploring all those moral wildernesses of civilized life which the Square automatically condemns as delinquent or evil or immature or morbid or self-destructive or corrupt. . . . But the Negro, not being privileged to gratify his self-esteem with the heady satisfactions of categorical condemnation, chose to move instead in that other direction where all situations are equally valid, and 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.

Near the close of his incoherent, hateful screed, Mailer sets out the battle lines that his intel-agency handlers were planning to exploit in the coming decades of divide-and-conquer art and politics: No matter what its horrors the Twentieth Century is a vastly exciting century for its tendency is to reduce all of life to its ultimate alternatives. One can well wonder if the last war of them all will be between the blacks and the whites, or between the women and the men, or between the beautiful and ugly, the pillagers and managers, or the rebels and the regulators.

Mailer, of course, performed his role well, providing decades worth of confusion and bad writing and marketing for some of the grandest psy-ops of his time—Marilyn Monroe, the moon “landings,” hippies, the death penalty, the CIA, Hitler, Lee Harvey Oswald, Monica Lewinsky—he even allegedly stabbed his own wife and mounted a jackass candidacy for mayor of New York—mind-controlling the masses and making people of all colors feel hopeless and lackluster and ashamed by his buffonery.[1]

Wiki reports that Ralph Ellison denounced Mailer’s “White Negro” claptrap as “the same old primitivism crap in a new package.” James Baldwin blasted Mailer for perpetuating the “myth of the sexuality of Negros.”

----------------------------------------------
[1] Mailer truly overwhelms with his godawful writing. Here he is at the conclusion of “The White Negro,” twice—twice—citing what he calls the “epic grandeur of Das Kapital” in a particularly putrid burst of confusion and mangled thought: It is almost beyond the imagination to conceive of a work in which the drama of human energy is engaged, and a theory of its social currents and dissipations, its imprisonments, expressions, and tragic wastes are fitted into some gigantic synthesis of human action where the body of Marxist thought, and particularly the epic grandeur of Das Kapital (that first of the major psychologies to approach the mystery of social cruelty so simply and practically as to say that we are a collective body of humans whose life-energy is wasted, displaced, and procedurally stolen as it passes from one of us to another)—where particularly the epic grandeur of Das Kapital would find its place in an even more Godlike view of human justice and injustice, in some more excruciating vision of those intimate and institutional processes which lead to our creations and disasters, our growth, our attrition, and our rebellion.

See the full review here

[Tim Weemhoff · Rating 1 out of 5]

Norman Mailer is voor mij vooral de auteur van de WO II-klassieker The naked and the dead (1948) waar ik dit jaar aan toe hoop te komen. Tussendoor dit roemruchte essay uit 1957 waar laatst nog even aan werd gerefereerd bij een muziekvoorstelling van Her Majesty.

Het is Mailers theatrale, hoogdravende poging om de “hipster-stroming” uit de jaren vijftig te duiden. Over witte jongvolwassenen, echte jazz cats, die fan zijn van de dan populaire (hoofdzakelijk zwarte) bebop. Het is een generatie die na de oorlog geen geloof meer heeft in de mensheid. Het zijn non-conformisten op zoek naar “kicks” op de zaterdagavond. Drugs, alcohol, sex en revolutionaire, vernieuwende muziek in de vorm van snelle, dansbare jazz. Ze houden er vaak een nihilistische en hedonistische levensstijl op na. Memorabel voorbeeld is de romanfiguur Dean Moriarty (naar Neal Cassady) in Kerouacs On the road dat ook uitkwam in ‘57.

Het essay schiet z’n doel in alle opzichten voorbij met onnavolgbare filosofische referenties (Freud en Reich) en vergelijkingen met onder meer de koude oorlog, Marx, (muzikale) orgasmes, seksuele vrijheid en gesublimeerde psychopathie. Fascinerend als tijdsdocument dat met veel verve gierend uit de bocht vliegt met hopeloze stereotyperingen.

Of zoals Mailer hipsters beschrijft, als "individuals with a middle-class background (who) attempt to put down their whiteness and adopt what they believe is the carefree, spontaneous, cool lifestyle of Negro hipsters: their manner of speaking and language, their use of milder narcotics, their appreciation of jazz and the blues.”

Destijds al bekritiseerd door onder meer tijdgenoten als Allen Ginsberg en James Baldwin.

[Jess Portchmouth · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Jazz is orgasm…it spoke in no matter what laundered popular way of instantaneous existential states to which some whites could respond, it was indeed a communication by art because it said, “I feel this, and now you do too.”

Mailer, quite intricately for so few pages, analyses the growth (at its time of publication, 1957) in the assimilation of white Hip youths with the black experience through existentialist ideology; detailing the psychological fibre and moral engine of the hipster and its deviance from the squares and conformists. Whilst I found the likening of hipsters to psychopaths extreme and nonsensical for the most part, Mailer draws some interesting comparisons between social groups as he dissects the relationship between black culture, focusing on jazz more specifically, and the hipster.

[Jason · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mostly a lot of bopster jive about ineffable frissons and apocalyptic orgasms, "The White Negro" occasionally displays Mailer's gift for crystalline syntheses: the fear of negro superiority as "the underground drama of domestic politics [circa 1957:];" Marxism as psychology for "a collective body of humans whose life-energy is wasted, displaced, and procedurally stolen as it passes from one of us to another;" materialism as "scientific narcissism," "the rational mania that consciousness could stifle instinct and marshall it into productive formations."

[Benjamin Kerstein · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's a bit dated, in that it contains some material that today would be considered offensive and borderline racist; but it's thesis is stunningly prescient, and Mailer's analysis of the discontents of middle-class life in the US is absolutely dead-on.

[Sakshi · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first third of the essay, particularly when talking about the atheist and mystic, talks about some of the most intriguing ideas on conformity and the desire for rebellion. If it was just for this I'd rate the essay a full five stars.
The middle section about psychopaths and psychotic is absolute garbage. The later mention of it being a mere hypothesis does not help; if it is a hypothesis, it had the potential of being a damn good one rather than some retarded psychoanalysis and strange categorisation. The latter is, regrettably, what it read as.
The last third does get better with the increased talk of the economic and psychological correlations. There are a few references to popular literary and philosophical works, some of which I wasn't well acquainted with, of which I would not be the best critic.
The writing of course is what ensured I read it in one go. It's great, makes the mid section somewhat tolerable, though I'd still suggest skipping it to preserve braincells.

[Chris Roberts · Rating 1 out of 5]

"The White Negro" 1957
Bodily-fluids-splash-rut-fuck
The next orgasm more powerful
And "ravenous" black sexual display
"Co-opted" by white hipsters
A ridiculous parallel
Norman Mailer's wrongheaded coda
Rape and violence as existential-glorious-independence
Mailer is as faraway from the beatnik ethos
As he is in accepting that he was a wife stabbing coward.

#poem #review #Essay

Chris Roberts, Patron Saint of Norman Mailer Bashers

[Jessica Diesta · Rating 4 out of 5]

Damn. Mailer creates a prophetic link between economic systems and psychological imbalances as an unconscious adaptation to the environment at hand in the twenty-first century. Where Mark Fisher draws this relationship between late stage capitalism and depression/mental illness, Mailer discusses this relationship with psychopathy and capitalism.

[The Half-blood Reader]

College Reads

[Sergey Tomson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Норман Мейлер, блестящий журналист, лауреат и титан политической мысли, обремененный идеей нового романа, как раз отходил от наркотической зависимости вдали от городской суеты, когда его навестил старый приятель. А приятель - издатель, говорит Мейлеру, мол, могу напечатать что угодно и мне за это ничего не будет! Спорим? Вот напиши что-нибудь общественно-резонансное, а я опубликую, мне никто не указ! Мейлер в ту же ночь пишет, мол, Белый человек на уровне подсознания чувствует, что его расовое превосходство уравновешивается сексуальным превосходством негра. 💥 Трам пам пам! Приятель всё это дело печатает и рассылает всем социально и политически активным персонам США в том числе Фолкнеру и Элеанор Рузвельт. Фолкнер обзывает Мейлера сорокалетней дамочкой и рекомендует обратиться к психиатру, но, тем не менее, между ними завязывается душевная переписка. А вот Рузвельт отреагировала остро: Я нахожу заявление мистера Мейлера отвратительным и неуместным. Из чего Мейлер, руководствуясь логикой Верочки из Служебного романа, делает вывод - значит хорошее эссе выйдет, надо писать. И написал, о чём свидетельствую! Но я вам его читать не советую, потому что к завсегдатаем шоурумов хипстерское движение в США не имеет, конечно же, никакого отношения (но я надеялся😆). Более того, текст тяжелый, как мешок с булыжниками, каждую выпуклость которого ты ощутишь на собственной спине. Очень специализированное чтиво. И не смешно.

[Anthony · Rating 3 out of 5]

Only 17 pages. The introduction was beautiful, such wonderful quotes "the always insoluble contradictions of injustice", "our collective condition is to live with instant death by atomic war", "his mysticism was a response to despair". And then he tried to say something meaningful, something about how we're all psychopaths in need of sex and how Negroes are like animals, this was meant to be a compliment. Apparently, America must be desegregated because Negroes have a right to "mate with" whites. Anyone could be a leftwing radical in the late 50's — say nothing conventional. This writer is what I imagine conservatives thought of, the "Jewish American Communist Subversive", corrupting the young - it's almost satire. The House Committee on Un-American Activities would find this man guilty, and they'd be right for once. Still, I quite enjoyed reading it.

[Joseph Waugh · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting essay ranging from discussion of postmodernism and deconstruction to race, psychology, hipsters and the beat generation. A truly strange but remarkable synthesis of topics.

[Rafael Suleiman · Rating 4 out of 5]

A classic on White consciousness and the hipster movement.

[Maura · Rating 1 out of 5]

literal entitled, racist trash

[RK Byers · Rating 2 out of 5]

lucky for this incarnation of Mailer that "the Negro" is one great big monolith that he could travel forward in his time machine and listen (once) to Wu-Tang's C.R.E.A.M. to fully comprehend!

[Julio The Fox · Rating 5 out of 5]

"If you put ten White guys in a closed room with ten Black guys, the Whites are always going to imitate the manners and language of the Blacks, never the other way around".---George Carlin, OCCUPATION: FOOLE

Norman Mailer's manifesto on the roots of "Beat" in American life gives truth to George's philosophical genius while strutting his own. What Mailer lacked in humility he made for in acuity. "Can't we have some truth about what's going on in the South?" he pleaded with his editor, and proceeded to answer his own query with these notes on the birth of the Beatniks, sex and race in American culture and the all-pervasive sense of the Absurd that engulfed America following the Second World War. (No one ever accused Mailer of lack of ambition.) His ambitious project begins with a survey of how the double calamity of the Nazi death camps and the atomic bombing of Japan had made the Absurd, if not normal, at least normalized. Fear eats the soul. You make friends with death or you die. "Humor is mating the apocalyptic with the absurd". But, that was for the Whites, particularly the young. Mailer goes on to affirm that Black people in America have had to live with the Absurd ever since they were forcibly brought here as slaves and then granted pseudo-freedom. As a Black man you either get lynched, ignored (Ralph Ellison's INVISIBLE MAN) or internalize Whiteness. In the Land of the Free Whites the color line is also the sex line. The worst crime a Black man can commit is sexual integration or "pollution" as the Nazis and the Klan called it. This terrible triad was bound to produce a stance towards life that combined courage, defiance, outrageous behavior, and a sardonic sense of humor---all the qualities we find in the Beatnik. He is an outlaw, a polluter of sex, raises morality above the law and knows he may die at any moment, if not physical death then social; the roaring silence of indifference on the part of the outside world and despair on the inside. Yet, out of that absurd matrix comes comedy, poetry and most of the great art of modern America, from Miles Davis to Allen Ginsberg, Billy Holliday to Lenny Bruce. Although, with his genius for improvisation, "Bird", Charlie Parker, became the patron saint of the Beats. Black reaction to Mailer's act of provocation was explosive and predictable. In one of his prison letters, later re-published in SOUL ON ICE Eldridge Cleaver called THE WHITE NEGRO a masterpiece, especially for tackling the sexual angle of racism in America: "I think any race made to feel inferior is going to show greater sexual prowess than the so-called superior race". James Baldwin, on the other hand, labeled Mailer condescending for pretending to know what it is like to be Black in America. Tis precisely for having aroused such a fierce backlash that THE WHITE NEGRO is still great art and political debate starter.

[Emanuele Patrocco · Rating 3 out of 5]

Oddity from the 1950s, only interesting as an excursion in ike's era counterculture writings (which matter to me and probably five other people on the planet). Mailer's aim is, as usual, causing controversy in a politically correct audience and from that standpoint I guess this book has been and still is a success: regarded as immoral at the time and racist nowadays. Nice, bigots are mad and that's always good but other than that... this is a completely useless read for the general public.

[Sam Seliger · Rating 2 out of 5]

Under the phrase "so wrong its right" in the encyclopedia, it should just say "see 'The White Negro' by Norman Mailer." It should be obvious that he understands very little about bebop, but the ways that he misunderstands it are deeply revealing. Not a good book, but an important read.

[Joseph · Rating 3 out of 5]

read this for source material on an essay I’m writing for class.

[John Cates · Rating 2 out of 5]

Review? - I'm confused - should reread but probably won't - covers to huge a territory - psychotherapy, existentialism, politics, race to name a few......

[Antonio Sinatra · Rating 2 out of 5]

Incomprensibile. Non comprendo neanche come ho deciso di leggerlo o chi me l'ha consigliato

[Marcus · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mailer takes us round the houses in this sprawling essay. Reading the wikipedia entry offers some much needed historical context.

[Mallory Peterson · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 ★

[Camden Drash · Rating 3 out of 5]

What a joke. This book was saved for the end letters from people commenting on how wrong mailer was in writing this essay. I could see some truth in some of his comments, but overall not to be taken seriously. Or maybe it is very true and don't understand it.

[Chiara Yaar · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mr mailer is an excellent writer, and the point here is interesting, however IMO he should’ve polished the writing a bit, and maybe softened his language in certain places, as his need for shock wasn’t always justified- no need to use the word

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

After years of my fascination with Sartre's philosophy, Mailer really makes me wonder...does existence precede essence after all?