authenticity fetish

So many young Americans today are disillusioned with being American. There is a pervasive and indiscriminate belief that things are getting worse. If we perceive our primary identity (in this case, nationhood) to be in decline, we must make sense of it. A conservative response might see the national community as in need of purification, a return to a previous state of prosperity. A leftist might abandon the nation as an illegitimate identity altogether and find alternative community in local and other disempowered voices. Many simply drift into malaise and apathy. All reject or become alienated from mainstream culture. We, fleeing the crumbling center, instead seek refuge in the rural, plural, peripheral, and parochial. We shore up our own flailing identities by commodifying and cannibalizing the 'ethnic.'

In decolonization-era Britain, nostalgia erupted for medieval simplicity and white yeomanry. Facing collapse, the metropole invades and siphons legitimacy from its rural spaces, colonies, and minorities. The white West has always had a romantic fantasy of the "primitive" and "noble savage." As Marianna Torgovnick writes in Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives, the "West's fascination with the primitive has to do with its own crises in identity." In other words, whites fetishize the authenticity of minorities without relinquishing their privilege.

In "Eating the Other," bell hooks casts Otherness as seasoning on the dull dish of the dominant culture. With "no sense of grounding, no redemptive identity," white youths crave the "life-sustaining alternatives" of Others. We search for Eden, the primitive paradise, "whether that location be a country or a body, a dark continent or dark flesh." hooks argues that rap constructs the Black male body as a "site of pleasure and power," arguing the vibrancy and decadence on display is inseparable from proximity to death. Living "on the edge" of possible extermination intensifies the capacity to feel pleasure at all. She diagnoses the white audience with anhedonia—the inability to feel pleasure. America is so numbed by daily bombardment that we can only feel intensely "on the edge." The result, in her account, is a culture that finds young Black men simultaneously dangerous and desirable.

The capitalist world of existential insecurity and relentless monotony not only represses fun and pleasure, but our very ability to feel fun and pleasure without guilt. No wonder we are obsessed with hip-hop, rap, 'ghetto' music, and the associated hedonistic lifestyles. It makes us feel alive. We cosplay the edge of extermination and erasure. We consume it and spit it out.

Truly, I am not in a position to comment further beyond this. I am undoubtedly guilty. All I can say is that the taste for the authentic periphery walks the tightrope between appreciation and appropriation.