Book Review: Everything But the Burden: What White People Are Taking from Black Culture
by Greg Tate
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Publication Date: Jan 14, 2003
List Price: Unavailable
Format: Hardcover, 272 pages
Classification: Nonfiction
ISBN13: 9780767908085
Imprint: Broadway Books
Publisher: Penguin Random House
Parent Company: Bertelsmann
Read a Description of Everything But the Burden: What White People Are Taking from Black Culture
Book Reviewed by Rondall Brasher
"Of all of our studies, history is best qualified to reward ourresearch."
—El Hajj Malik El Shabazz (Malcolm X)
This quote could very well accent the depth of what "Everything but the
Burden: What White People Are Taking From Black Culture" attempts to fulfill.
"Everything but the Burden" is an anthology of cultural essays
edited by Greg Tate, a cultural critic and writer for the Village Voice. The
book sets out to examine the osmosis of Black culture into White society. It
also focuses on the realization that no matter how prevalent this osmosis may be
the result is still a filtered and homogenized version of what it really means
to be Black. In other words, whites get to act black, talk black, dress black,
and assume the elements of a black life without having the stress of being black
or, for that matter, staying black.
The essays are built on the central theme of Whites pillaging blacks of their
culture, but leaving the burdens and stresses of racism, poverty, social stigma,
etc. Tate and the other essayists seem to expand upon the controversial essay,
"The White Negro" written by Norman Mailer in 1957. Forty-five years later white
America’s tendency to view blacks as objects rather than people are even more
pronounced. Greg Tate, in his riveting essay, "Nigs R Us, or How Black folk
Became Fetish Objects," wrestles with the observation that blacks are perceived
as stereotypical hypersexual and/or near super-men/women physically. While this
warped idolization may inspire backhanded imitation, it continues the
degeneration of blacks to objects.
Tate’s work is just the beginning of a goody bag of essays that feed upon and
support one another. While Everything but the Burden is written on an elevated
intellectual level it does not come off as pompous. The authors used
metaphorical examples from subjects ranging from Greek mythology to the near
deification of some Black music icons. Everything but the Burden not only
required an extensive of research on the part of many of the essayists, but also
displayed a cross section of historic, cultural, and economic knowledge on
blacks’ experiences in America. Tate’s editing has ensured that the book not
only examines the "Hip Hop" era (e.g. his seething lambaste of Eminem and his
pimp Dr. Dre), but also delves into cultural phenomena in the roots of soul and
rock and roll, and its effects in Africa.
In the essay, "The 1960s in Bamako: Malick Sidibe and James Brown," author
Manthia Diawara writes about the music of James Brown and its influence on the
(social and political) consciousness in Mali in the 1960s. Another striking and
brilliant essay is Meri Nana-Ama Danquah’s "Afro-Kinky Human Hair". Danquah
discusses her recent return to Ghana, only to find that the people of her native
land had acquired an overt fascination with all that is White/European. The
infestation of European culture had become so rife among Ghanaians that they had
formed themselves into European caricatures. Whoa…
Everything but the Burden will set a new standard for intellectual discussion
about Black culture. Everything but the Burden is a masterful collection of
thoughts by Black ’culturalists’. The catechization works throughout the book,
but offers no solutions to the continued co-opting of black American culture.
Perhaps Greg Tate has amassed essays that are meant to cause Blacks and Whites
to think about what is going on? Maybe it is up to us as a society to provide
the answers to our own problems? Everything but the Burden does an excellent job
of bringing us closer to self-examination. The book is a must have for those who
"continue to carry the burden."