selected John Herrman posts from The Awl
The New White Ethnic Media
These outlets [Paula Deen’s, Sarah Palin’s, Glenn Beck’s] share a basic form—online video network—and depend on relatively steep subscription fees (the comparison that always gets used is “more than Netflix”). They are fundamentally oppositional: to the mainstream media; to political correctness; to godlessness but also a very particular formulation of uptightness. They are nostalgic for a time when certain people could say certain things without worrying about controversy or shame—they feel like public speech is a minefield, so they’ve made theirs a little more private. Among friends, almost. They long for a wholesome past that they feel has been lost. They are not especially cynical. They are, in effect, a white ethnic media, writing and publishing and broadcasting and performing about the experience of American whiteness as understood by people who genuinely feel that whites are becoming a marginalized minority. Race is not addressed directly in these networks’ contents or containers—identity establishment is left to “urban”-style euphemisms and the projection of a sensibility that is neither explicitly nor assertively white, just inherently white, familiar to whites, deemed important or compelling or novel because it is no longer the norm elsewhere.
The New Identity Media Manifesto
[On the same, also Roosh’s Reaxxion:]
you could imagine Roosh-like mission statements for all of them: I aim to protect the interests of white Christian families, a category I’m in…
A gaming site for men is absurd and its potential is small; a culture empire for whiteness preservation is absurd and its potential is huge. But both behave in the same way: they respond to criticism by reflecting back victimhood, and adopting a received language of oppression. This was not their idea, they would suggest. It is what they believe the other people have been doing for years.
Everything Except Rap and Country
[On Taylor Swift’s 1989:]
[Swift’s] idea of pop music harks back to a period — themid-1980s — when pop was less overtly hybrid.
And, in the same quarters, more overtly white!
That choice allows her to stake out popular turf without having
to keep up with the latest microtrends, and without being accused
of cultural appropriation.
Avoiding non-white “microtrends” isolates Taylor Swift from
charges of appropriation, because they have no specific and recent
non-white influence to refer to.
[In “Shake It Off”] she surrounds herself with all sorts of
hip-hop dancers and bumbles all the moves. Later in the video, she
surrounds herself with regular folks, and they all shimmy
un-self-consciously, not trying to be cool.
Who, exactly, would interpret those signals as not “cool” but
instead “regular?” Not everybody; specifically, somebody.
The singer most likely to sell the most copies of any album this
year has written herself a narrative in which she’s still the
outsider.
You know who else suddenly
feels culturally outside of the mainstream? (Besides, as
always, anyone over the age of 30?) People who are skeptical of
America’s demographic progress! Or who, at least, don’t feel
comfortable thinking or talking about it. If Jon Caramanica is
right, the promotional theory and marketing conversations around
1989, and an overarching influence on its music, can be
summed up as: Intentional, Performed Whiteness. It’s an
artistic manifestation of the old adolescent conversation:
“What kind of music do you like?”
“Everything. Except rap and country.”
relevant: 1, 2
