Everything but the Burden: What White People Are Taking from Black Culture.(Book Review)

Everything but the Burden: What White People Are Taking from Black Culture. Ed. Greg Tate. New York: Harlem Moon/Broadway Books, 2003.

If the great problem of the twentieth century has been the problem of the color line, then a century later, the only color that seems to matter is green. In Everything but the Burden, Greg Tate and his team of writers take on various aspects of American popular culture, from Muhammad Ali to Pablo Picasso and imperialism, interracial sex, cornrows, pimpology, thugging, capitalistic exploitation, and racial transvestitism. As the title suggests, the underpinning thread of the text is that the only aspect of black culture that whites cannot appropriate is the burden of being black. This burden gives black culture its creative edge. This collection of essays, interviews, plays, and poetry embodies Ralph Ellison's idea that whatever the American is, he or she is always also somehow black.

Macroscopically, this book unpacks the black/white baggage of American popular culture. It engages historical criticism, semiotics, mythology, cultural studies, ethnography, psychoanalysis, and critical race theories to examine the ways in which black culture has been consumed and transformed into marketable commodities. The book opens with a brilliant, almost lyrically written introduction by its editor, Village Voice columnist Greg Tate, which situates and defines the text within contemporary conversations on race, culture, and communication. Tate explains that the text should be read as both a "Foucauldian panopticon-styled" (9) response to Rudyard Kipling's poem The White Man's Burden (1899), H. T. Johnson's The Black Man's Burden (1899), and Norman Mailer's The White Negro (1957). It is the latest installment in the African American canon begun by DuBois, Hughes, Faulkner, Gates, Morrison, Melville, Hurston, and West. The writers' mission is two-pronged. First, they fix their gazes on white America's paradoxical fascination and disgust with all things black. Second, they discuss their findings to open new avenues for conversations ...