There’s a famous scene in the 2004 Wayans brothers’ comedy White Chicks: The opening bars of piano introduce Vanessa Carlton’s “A Thousand Miles” and the car full of white girls squeals in delight before launching into the cloyingly earnest lyrics. Later a black man sings the song and, that’s it, that’s the whole joke.
Like the late aughts’ “hipster,” “white girl” is a label applied either dismissively or self-consciously. The tastes, habits, and concerns of the white girl, like those of the hipster, are often punch lines used as self-evident definitions for the label. Like a hipster’s, the white girl’s class status goes without saying—there is no Twitter account for PoorWhiteGirlProblems.
Historically, white girlhood stood for the preservation of whiteness. Not just reproductively but as future missionaries, schoolteachers, moral custodians of the dark frontier—Columbia leading the way. Today the symbolic potency of white femininity is shifting.
Only outprivileged by white men, the white girl’s assumed universality lets us project onto “white girl” our attitudes about race, gender, class, and the behavior appropriate within those parameters. The girlhood implied by the label is central to understanding how it regulates not only white girls’ behavior but everyone else’s too.
The straight American “white girl” serves as the normative gender performance, the femininity from which all femininity deviates, through which all women of color are otherized. As the default, heteronormative white femininity must provide the ultimate foil to patriarchal masculinity. The “white girl” is vulnerable, trivial, and self-involved. Above all she is mainstream, either by consumer habits or design. Any resemblance to real-life white girls doesn’t matter; all exceptions are exempt from consideration. For every witchy, androgynous Rooney Mara, there’s a Taylor Swift, a Zooey Deschanel, and a Miley Cyrus. At least, there used to be a Miley Cyrus.
Her loyalty to the white girlhood she was born into via Hannah Montana is under scrutiny. No longer confined to a Disney contract, she dresses in cropped shirts, leather bras, and bondage-inspired Versace. She’s taken cues from Rihanna and hip-hop culture at large and added gold chains, even a grill. Sixteen-year-old Miley had never heard a Jay Z song (despite the name-check in her hit single “Party in the USA”). Twenty-year-old Miley tweets screengrabs of her iPhone, boasting songs from Gucci Mane, French Montana, and Juicy J. She’s recorded with the latter two.
It would be unfair to demand Miley remain faithful to her teenage aesthetic when no self-aware person does. And it would take a dull palette to assume she couldn’t sincerely recognize the appeal of rap music and gold accessories. Her sincerity, however, is irrelevant. Charges of cultural appropriation and the rampant slut shaming she now faces draw a narrow lens to her actions. In truth, Miley exemplifies the white impulse to shake the stigma its mainstream status affords while simultaneously exercising the power of whiteness to define blackness.
She ties a bandana across her forehead like Tupac, or struggle-twerks—her ever-present tongue lolling out in challenge as she looks back at us. Each time it’s a statement declaring this is cool because it’s atypical, and it’s atypical because according to her, it’s black. Miley’s look exists because racial drag carries cachet in cultures that commodify difference.
For all its black performers, the rap industry has been run by the white establishment and caters to the white consumer. The commercial success of gangsta rap wouldn’t be possible without North America’s largest demographic buying in. The commercial demand for sexually aggressive and violent rap is appreciably shaped by white teens in the suburbs looking to live out their fantasies via imagined black bodies. And in guiding the market, white consumers dictate the available imagery of blackness.
Like the late aughts’ “hipster,” “white girl” is a label applied either dismissively or self-consciously. The tastes, habits, and concerns of the white girl, like those of the hipster, are often punch lines used as self-evident definitions for the label. Like a hipster’s, the white girl’s class status goes without saying—there is no Twitter account for PoorWhiteGirlProblems.Historically, white girlhood stood for the preservation of whiteness. Not just reproductively but as future missionaries, schoolteachers, moral custodians of the dark frontier—Columbia leading the way. Today the symbolic potency of white femininity is shifting.
Only outprivileged by white men, the white girl’s assumed universality lets us project onto “white girl” our attitudes about race, gender, class, and the behavior appropriate within those parameters. The girlhood implied by the label is central to understanding how it regulates not only white girls’ behavior but everyone else’s too.
The straight American “white girl” serves as the normative gender performance, the femininity from which all femininity deviates, through which all women of color are otherized. As the default, heteronormative white femininity must provide the ultimate foil to patriarchal masculinity. The “white girl” is vulnerable, trivial, and self-involved. Above all she is mainstream, either by consumer habits or design. Any resemblance to real-life white girls doesn’t matter; all exceptions are exempt from consideration. For every witchy, androgynous Rooney Mara, there’s a Taylor Swift, a Zooey Deschanel, and a Miley Cyrus. At least, there used to be a Miley Cyrus.
Her loyalty to the white girlhood she was born into via Hannah Montana is under scrutiny. No longer confined to a Disney contract, she dresses in cropped shirts, leather bras, and bondage-inspired Versace. She’s taken cues from Rihanna and hip-hop culture at large and added gold chains, even a grill. Sixteen-year-old Miley had never heard a Jay Z song (despite the name-check in her hit single “Party in the USA”). Twenty-year-old Miley tweets screengrabs of her iPhone, boasting songs from Gucci Mane, French Montana, and Juicy J. She’s recorded with the latter two.
It would be unfair to demand Miley remain faithful to her teenage aesthetic when no self-aware person does. And it would take a dull palette to assume she couldn’t sincerely recognize the appeal of rap music and gold accessories. Her sincerity, however, is irrelevant. Charges of cultural appropriation and the rampant slut shaming she now faces draw a narrow lens to her actions. In truth, Miley exemplifies the white impulse to shake the stigma its mainstream status affords while simultaneously exercising the power of whiteness to define blackness.
She ties a bandana across her forehead like Tupac, or struggle-twerks—her ever-present tongue lolling out in challenge as she looks back at us. Each time it’s a statement declaring this is cool because it’s atypical, and it’s atypical because according to her, it’s black. Miley’s look exists because racial drag carries cachet in cultures that commodify difference.
For all its black performers, the rap industry has been run by the white establishment and caters to the white consumer. The commercial success of gangsta rap wouldn’t be possible without North America’s largest demographic buying in. The commercial demand for sexually aggressive and violent rap is appreciably shaped by white teens in the suburbs looking to live out their fantasies via imagined black bodies. And in guiding the market, white consumers dictate the available imagery of blackness.
by Ayesha Saddiqui, TNI | Read more:
