Oreo, Topdeck and Eminem: Hybrid identities and global media flows

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2011 14: 153International Journal of Cultural StudiesJane Stadler

Oreo, Topdeck and Eminem: Hybrid identities and global media flows

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Volume 14(2): 153–172DOI: 10.1177/1367877910387971

Oreo, Topdeck and EminemHybrid identities and global media flows

● Jane StadlerUniversity of Queensland, Australia

A B S T R A C T ● The slang terms Oreo (someone who looks black but acts white) and Topdeck (someone who looks white but acts black) draw on the language of popular culture to signify racial hybridity, superseding slurs such as ‘black honkie’ and ‘wigger’. Using the terms Oreo and Topdeck to frame the analysis, this article investigates how identity politics finds expression in language, youth media and popular culture. It questions how global media flows affect conceptions of black masculinity by contrasting cinematic representations of African-Americans and black Africans in Shaft and the South African film Hijack Stories, and by examining class, ethnicity and rap culture in 8 Mile. I argue that, as South African media culture reflexively reworks messages about black identities, it produces terminology and texts that neither simply reinforce nor resist racial stereotypes, but legitimate the diversification of blackness by making cultural transition and difference visible. ●

K E Y W O R D S ● globalization ● hybridity ● identity ● masculinity ● media ● race ● South African culture ● stereotypes

This research springs from an interest in international responses to Hollywood stereotypes of black masculinity, and it questions how such stereotypes circulate in African-made media.1 It is to be expected that trends in mainstream American media will be influential since the US dominates the global market and provides the formula and the benchmark for popular, profitable textual production. In order to investigate the relationship between North American and South African representations of black masculinity, this article begins by discussing the emergence of two

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154 INTERNATIONAL journal of CULTURAL studies 14(2)

hybrid identities known as Oreos and Topdecks, which expose assumptions about race, class and culture. These terms emerge from black economic empowerment and the financial and cultural appeal of black music genres in global popular culture. Oreo is an American brand of cookie and a slang term for a person who is black on the outside, but white on the inside.2 The white hydrocream filling of the chocolate Oreo is a metaphor for a black person who has internalized ‘white culture’ or ‘white values’, Topdeck, a Cadbury chocolate bar that has a layer of white chocolate on top, has become a popular synonym for ‘wigger’ (a ‘wannabe negro’ or ‘white nigger’), a white person who is black underneath due to the appropriation or internalization of black culture.

This article uses intertextual analysis to explore the emergence of these hybrid identities within South African popular culture, considering street slang, advertisements, music and three feature films. I contrast the construction of black masculinity in John Singleton’s (2000) remake of Gordon Parks’ 1971 blaxploitation film Shaft with the South African film Hijack Stories (dir. Oliver Schmitz, 2001), which has an analogous setting and significant parallels regarding the performance of black masculine

Figure 1 Oreo, Topdeck and Eminem: Branded identities and metaphors of hybridity



Stadler ● Oreo, Topdeck and Eminem 155

identity in the context of the criminal underworld. The characterization of rap artist Eminem (Marshal Mathers) as a Topdeck in 8 Mile (dir. Curtis Hanson, 2002) enables deeper analysis of race, class and the incorporation of black culture. Eminem is a prominent international example of a Topdeck, and the way his identity is negotiated in relation to that of a black character who engages in ‘class passing’ in 8 Mile provides a crucial point of comparison with Hijack Stories.

In this article, race is understood as a social designation, and ‘black’ and ‘white’ are not considered essentialist or mutually exclusive categories. While I am concerned with the representation of heterogeneous black identities within African-American and black African cultures, I do not mean to suggest that notions of ‘race,’ ‘black culture’ or ‘white culture’ are unproblematic. There are, for instance, significant cultural differences between white Afrikaaners and white English-speakers in South Africa. Just as the term ‘person of colour’ can refer to African-Americans, Hispanics, Asians and people of mixed heritage, ‘black’ is not a homogeneous identity or category any more than ‘white’ is (see Dyer, 1997; Rasmussen et al., 2001). In South Africa ‘black’ is a political term that encompasses black Africans such as Zulu and Xhosa people, as well as Indians and so-called ‘coloureds’. Reflecting on hybrid racial identities and the use of the term ‘coloured’, cultural scholar Zimitri Erasmus writes:

Attempts to define these identities in terms of mixture buy into notions of ‘race purity’ that can be traced to nineteenth century European eugenicists. Since cultural formations involve borrowing from various cultural forms, and thus all identities could be seen as culturally hybrid, it should not be difficult to conceive of coloured identities as such, rather than in terms of ‘race mixture’ or ‘miscegenation.’ They are cultural formations born of appropriation, dispossession and translation in the colonial encounter. (2001: 18)

In the context of this debate, postcolonial theorist Homi K. Bhabha’s con-cepts of stereotyping and hybridity are pertinent to an analysis of the cultural production and reception of identity. In The Location of Culture (1994: 95), Bhabha understands stereotypes as an ambivalent, complex mode of knowl-edge and power, neither wholly good nor bad, but founded on a categorizing impulse that makes subjectification possible and plausible (1994: 95). It is from this perspective that I explore established stereotypes of black masculin-ity and newer, hybrid characterizations of identity. Hybridity itself, however, remains a contested concept.

Erasmus uses hybridity as a positive alternative to essentialist notions of identity, but its origin as a biological term for interbreeding different species keeps it in uncomfortable proximity to the very notions of ‘race mixture’ and ‘miscegenation’ that Erasmus decries. Bhabha’s more nuanced understanding of hybridity as a liminal identity or cultural form acknowledges its potential to destabilize or disavow the conceptions of




difference that underpin colonial and racist thought by negotiating cultural difference through innovative, performative interplay. Yet Bhabha also notes the way in which the cultural adaptiveness of hybridity to some degree involves incorporating and reproducing the dominant culture. This negotiation of difference, and even the relative meanings of terms such as dominant and subordinate, mainstream and marginal, centre and periphery are further tangled when a predominantly black audience in Africa consumes and responds to cultural images produced by Hollywood but featuring black people who are, in America, a cultural minority.

Cocacolonization

As John Gabriel points out in his book Whitewash (1998), the globalization of communication has effects that impact directly on understandings and experiences of racial identity. Globalization has the potential to break down perceptions that national identity is homogeneous, and it can create opportunities for expression by and recognition of diasporic communities and marginalized ethnic groups (Gabriel, 1998: 3). However, media technologies and texts can also perpetuate stereotypes, widen the digital divide, or be used for exploitation and control in ways that discriminate along racial lines (Gabriel, 1998: 12–13).

Many Africans are painfully aware of the impact of globalization and colonization on traditional cultures. Two conflicting discourses of globalization have infiltrated popular culture and mainstream advertising in South Africa. One, associated with the work of Marshall McLuhan (1987) and Benedict Anderson (1991), is the concept of the global village as an imagined multicultural community in which everyone is interconnected by the media. A ‘common sense’ interpretation of this perspective links globalization to a utopian vision of shared understanding and the transcendence of difference, as global citizens use the media to find unity in diversity. The other, more dystopian discourse is linked to inequities in the global network society identified in the work of Manuel Castells (2000) and Herbert Schiller (1998). Schiller (1998: 5) argues that global media flows and monopolies of ownership bring the threat of cultural imperialism (also popularly termed cocacolonization) and the loss of cultural diversity. The process of globalization, according to Schiller, has contributed to the destruction of traditional cultures via the intrusion of and dependence on Western value systems.

In her more complex appraisal of intersections between global and local cinema in Loving and Hating Hollywood, Jane Mills writes:

Hybridisation, the production of things composed of elements of different kinds, offers a powerful challenge to the way in which Hollywood and its relationship to other cinemas is traditionally imagined. It means first it is a creative process and second, that borders are permeable. (2009: 36)




Notwithstanding such understandings of global media flows as cultural mixing and reciprocal cultural interplay, the nation’s history of colonization means the cultural imperialism thesis has become the dominant concept of globalization circulating in South African media. It has not, however, been adopted uncritically or without good humour.

Chocolate centered

Instead of seeing a dichotomy in which whites are pitted against blacks, an idealized version of assimilation, or a vision of racial harmony in the ‘rainbow nation’, as might be expected in a country with a history of troubled race relations, we see the South African film, television and music industries awash with images of identities that are not wholly black or white.3 What is emerging in advertising, lyrics, movies and the everyday vernacular of young people are ways of naming and labelling that both acknowledge and resist racial integration and assimilation to white commercial culture. Notions of authenticity, cultural purity and entrenched perceptions of the alignment between race and class are being challenged in contemporary cultural texts.

Channel ‘O’, a Digital Satellite Television (DSTV) channel offered by MultiChoice (a pay-tv company serving southern Africa), has incorporated popular terminology that references black identity and the impact of globalization in its marketing campaigns. This channel addresses a young, upwardly mobile, predominantly black audience and its brand identity shows an awareness of the concept of cultural imperialism. A series of print and TV advertisements use the tag lines ‘uncolonized’, ‘get back to black’ and ‘get back to your roots’. Channel O, which mainly screens content about black music and celebrities, is sending the message that it actively resists domination by foreign media products that feature and address whites.

Channel O’s Oreo advertisement (Figure 2) features a cookie that does not have a white centre: it is chocolate all the way through. Because MultiChoice is an expensive subscription service, it is likely that its wealthy audience members are in danger of being labeled Oreos, hence the black viewers are being encouraged to enjoy the wealth and privilege typically associated with whites while avoiding the internalization of white culture by watching black-oriented programming. What is interesting here is the double-edged function of the Oreo: its visibility and use in channel branding indicates both awareness and acceptance of the changing socio-economic profile of black Africans, yet there is also an implicit resistance to conflating middle-class identity with white culture. I will return to this point in relation to Hijack Stories and 8 Mile.

Channel O also recognizes the widespread appeal of black music and acknowledges that white audience members internalize black culture when, in two television ads, it affectionately sends up North American musicians widely thought of as Topdecks. ‘Jack Michaelson’ charts the career of a




musician with hit albums ‘Chiller’ and ‘Good’ who ‘changed the face of pop music’ due to a skin condition that gradually turned him from white to black. ‘Gangsta’ references Eminem’s well-known stand on racial nomenclature by showing a group of black rap artists joking around and affectionately calling each other ‘nigger’. When the lone white member of the gang uses the word, the gang leader makes it clear that ‘nigger’ is offensive when spoken by a white person. Both these ads represent whites seeking acceptance within black music cultures that are seen to be superior, desirable and lucrative. This is intended to turn discrimination on its head and celebrate black culture. The Oreo is tolerated as a flattering ‘wannabe’ until he fails to recognize his place with respect to the dominant black culture by raising the spectres of racism or economic exploitation.

These advertisements respond to representations of black identity and culture in North America and show a sophisticated awareness that the exchange of culture through the media is not one-way, nor is it entirely positive or negative, as the following analysis of cinematic representations of race, class and gender indicates.

Dark chocolate

Shot mainly on location in rough urban environments and scored with African-American music, the blaxploitation films of the 1970s addressed

Figure 2 Channel O Oreo advertisement: Uncolonized




a black audience and showcased badass black protagonists. According to popular music scholar Amanda Howell, blaxploitation films such as Parks’ Shaft:

[H]ighlighted a performative image of blackness, worlds away from the sartorially and verbally restrained, clean-cut Negro of civil rights protests and integrationist cinema. Deliberately setting its protagonists in contrast to this and other images of blackness – such as the political commitment and intellectualism of cultural nationalists – blaxploitation popularised the street glamour of pimps and hustlers, with a focus on visual excess in construction of its male – and female – heroes. (Howell, 2005: n.p.)

In ‘He is a “Bad Mother*$%@!#”: Shaft and Contemporary Black Masculinity’, Matthew Henry argues that Singleton’s remake of Shaft reinstates the problematic fantasy of empowerment embodied by the blaxploitation hero and typifies a particular trend in representations of blackness that he terms the ‘tough guise’ of masculinity.4 This trend sees black men in mainstream American media linked to crime, violence and ‘gangsta’ rap:

A particular type of black masculinity – one defined mainly by an urban aesthetic, a nihilistic attitude, and an aggressive posturing – has made its way into the cultural mainstream.… This image of masculinity has developed mainly as a result of the commodification of hip-hop culture and the ubiquity of rap music … it is the result of the popularity of the urban ‘gangsta.’ (Henry, 2002: 114)

Henry contends that one way for black men to compensate for perceptions of emasculation and the disempowering experiences of poverty and racism is to define their identity in terms of materialism and the use of violence to command respect (2002: 116).5

The stereotype that Henry discusses is just one of many representations of black masculinity, but the prevalence and popularity of the ‘tough guise’ has given it heightened significance. Much of the research into black stereotypes has focused attention on African-Americans. The relevance of such research to African cultures where demographics, history, socio-political contexts and patterns of media production and consumption differ substantially has not been ascertained.

A scene from Shaft offers a clear example of the dark, violent stereotype of black masculinity that Henry describes. As John Shaft (Samuel L. Jackson) attempts to obtain information to convict a racist murderer, his informant Terry (Lanette Ware) asks him to ‘take care of’ Malik (Bonz Malone), a black drug dealer who is recruiting her young son. While Terry looks on approvingly, Shaft brutalizes Malik in front of his gang and extracts a promise to leave her son alone. Several things stand out in this vicious scene as Shaft repeatedly smashes his gun against Malik’s bloodied mouth. The sound of rap music fills the street, and in Malik we recognize the ‘urban




gangsta’ that Henry critiques. Shaft is positioned as an ambiguous hero, straddling both sides of the law. This ambiguity is reflected in graffiti behind Shaft and Malik, which depicts a peace sign made of black fists clasped together in a symbol of empowerment and solidarity. The raised fist in the middle of the sign suggests that attaining peace requires aggression. Shaft himself is presented as a man who does the ‘right thing’ (protecting black youths from drugs and gangs) in the ‘wrong way’ (using force instead of legal measures). The desire to stamp out elements of black youth culture is displaced onto Terry, the black mother who tasks Shaft with controlling Malik. To an extent, this makes both Shaft and Terry complicit with white hegemony in controlling ‘unsociable’ black masculinity.

Shaft’s actions are endorsed as a white policeman drives by, sees what is going on, and gives Shaft the nod. Viewers are positioned to vicariously participate in the violence by being aligned with Shaft, and to perceive it as justified when the police sanction it. Despite the fact that Shaft is paying homage to the hyperbole of the blaxploitation genre and is not intended to be interpreted as a model of social conduct, spectators are not cued to question Shaft’s actions or consider alternatives. The assumption legitimating Shaft’s use of brutality is that young black men are only capable of respecting and understanding violence. This underlying racist ‘logic’ makes violence inevitable.

The ‘tough guise’ stereotype is problematic if it is the prevailing image of masculinity that black youths identify with: ‘Given the fact that the media provides only minimal and stereotypical representations of black males, many minority youth exaggerate these hyper-masculine characteristics in their public personae; in order to prove themselves and be respected by their peers’ (Iwamoto, 2006: 145). Underpinning this argument is the idea that black audience members are being taught to adopt the ‘tough guise’ that is so frequently projected on screen, ultimately harming themselves and one another.

Topdeck and Oreos

By comparison with Shaft, Hijack Stories self-consciously borrows from the ‘tough guise’ stereotype Hollywood projects, but it also questions and reworks it. Hijack Stories is set in Soweto, a black township that is the South African equivalent of the ghetto or the hood. While the black protagonist Sox (Tony Kgoroge) is an outsider in Soweto and can be characterized as an Oreo, the white director Oliver Schmitz could be described as something of a Topdeck due to his affinity with black culture. According to film critic Derek Malcolm (2001), Schmitz is ‘one of the few Africaans [sic] directors who has the trust of the black community in South Africa’.

As a youngster, Sox lived in Soweto and Zama (Rapulana Seiphemo) was his childhood friend. Sox’s family left the township and made the transition




to the middle class, while Zama became a gangster. Sox is representative of the changing cultural composition of South Africa in which:

[black] African professionals, skilled workers and entrepreneurs benefited from the collapse of apartheid, making them the most upwardly mobile ‘race’ group. As a result, South Africa is currently witnessing the emergence of differentiated class structure among the African population, which includes a strong middle class and professional stratum and a tiny economic elite. (Strelitz, 2004: 630)

When we meet Sox at the beginning of the film, he has evidently received a good education and is at home in the affluent suburb of Rosebank, where he has a pretty white girlfriend and a career as a television presenter. He speaks English by preference and has been assimilated into white culture. He wants to play a gangsta in a television series, but he acts ‘too white’ in the audition and is advised to head to the township to learn to act like a real gangster. In the process he gets drawn into a world of violence and crime, but he also reconnects with his roots.

A key scene from Hijack Stories shows Sox hanging around Zama’s gang, hoping participant observation will improve his chances of landing the role of gangster. The beat of hip-hop music is persistent in the background, thumping from car stereos and curbside radios. We witness Zama bribe the police to ignore his gang’s criminal activities, securing the same kind of endorsement that we saw when Shaft ‘got the nod’ from the force. Again, the police are willing to overlook crime and violence as long as it is contained in black neighbourhoods.

Police tolerance of ‘black-on-black’ violence is significant in both Shaft and Hijack Stories, films in which, by contrast, interracial violence has serious legal ramifications. Speaking of the representation of black-on-black violence in ‘hood movies’, Denzin writes that ‘pitting dark skin against dark skin’ posits ‘acculturation to white goals’ (2002: 6). According to Denzin, hood movies glorify violence, represent it as a black problem, lead to stigma and stereotyping, and reinforce perceptions amongst middle-class audiences that their attitude towards blacks is correct (2002: 115–16). This function of the representation of black-on-black violence is not restricted to cinematic fictions – it also pervades the news in South Africa and North America. As media anthropologists Jo-Ellen Fair and Robert Astroff (1991) have pointed out, the representation of black-on-black violence in the South African media (and subsequently abroad) was used to shift responsibility for apartheid-era violence from the white government onto the black population, concealing the government’s complicity in the violence while justifying its own use of force. Blacks were represented as ungovernable savages who fought among themselves. This eroded the credibility of the anti-apartheid struggle. The cinematic representation of violence among black gangs fulfils a similar function, deflecting attention from the social problems that give rise to gangs and drugs. In a self-reflexive




media moment, Hijack Stories examines how such violence is learned and perpetuated.

In a confrontational scene when Sox is with Zama’s gang listening to music, Zama abruptly drags him from the car, throws him to the ground and threatens him with a gun. Zama looms large in the frame, his eyes masked by dark glasses that guard his expression. He looks down on Sox, who cowers in the dirt at his feet, and asks: ‘After it is over, what do you remember?’ Sox’s terrified submission and incoherence mirrors the scene in which Shaft intimidates Malik. Sox replies, ‘I see the gun, just the gun.’ ‘Exactly,’ says Zama. Moments later, Sox asks Zama where he and his gang learned to hijack cars. They joke that they learned in ‘boarding school’, a slang term for jail that plays on class assumptions about criminality. Then Zama admits, ‘Nah, from the movies. Mostly action stuff, Sylvester Stallone.’ ‘Movies! You guys are shitting me,’ Sox retorts, ‘you learned from white actors? What about black actors? I’m talking about Wesley Snipes. You have to use nigger psychology. I thought you brothers were radical.’ Having challenged their claim to authenticity, Sox demonstrates his own skill as a method actor, intimidating Zama by thrusting a gun at his temple as the camera moves into menacing slow motion. Despite the ‘aggressive posturing’ in the scene, it is sending up the concept of the ‘acquisition of respect through violence’ (Henry, 2002: 116) that characterizes representations of gang subculture. The film is launching a critique of ‘cultural colonization’ that both acknowledges and challenges Hollywood’s influence on black culture and identity.

In ‘Colonialism, Racism and Representation’ (1983) Robert Stam and Louise Spence consider how the mechanisms of cinematic identification amount to political tools that can subtly articulate discourses of race and colonialism. Films can invite us to see the world from a patriarchal or racist perspective by telling the story from a certain point of view. In Hijack Stories we are initially positioned to identify with Sox, but by the end we are also in sympathy with Zama and any clear distinction between hero and villain has been undermined. This is a political move, for which Schmitz has been criticized. Critics claim that the film glorifies gangsterism, reinforcing the stereotype that black townships are populated with ‘career criminals whose lives revolve around drink, sex and crime’ (Majola, 2003). However, it is not only through visual images that the audience is positioned and the tendency to engage with or judge screen characters is manipulated. This also occurs through the use of language and music.

Hijack Stories reflects the linguistic diversity of South Africa, a land with 11 national languages, where switching from one language to another is commonplace. Hijack Stories’ characters communicate in fluent English, mixed liberally with Zulu and Afrikaans. This suggests that the audience is or should be multilingual (as most South Africans are) and places the onus of understanding on the listener, giving Hijack Stories an aura of authenticity that undermines the assumption of English dominance. However, there is a residue of what Stam and Spence term ‘linguistic colonialism’ beneath this multilingual veneer. The characters in Hijack Stories often speak English in




locations and situations where black people would normally communicate in their home language. For instance, tsotsis (thugs or gangsters) would usually only speak English if whites were present and would not be likely to address gang members in English. In Hijack Stories, the implied spectator is therefore positioned as a white observer of black culture.6 While this mode of address is not intentionally Eurocentric, it arises from our alignment with the storytellers: Sox, the Oreo, and Schmitz, the Topdeck.

The use of music in Hijack Stories also expresses a sense of cultural identity and sends a political message. Gibson Boloka writes that music ‘is a vehicle for identity construction’ (2003: 103–4), while other researchers contend that ‘hip-hop has become the nexus from which youth (particularly lower income Black youngsters) can create their values, define their selfhood, and express their heightened consciousness of violence and its implications’ (Richardson and Scott, 2002: 16). Black African youths report that they listen to rap and hip-hop music because it reflects their experience and connects with their sense of identity, whether it is performed by local or foreign musicians; for instance, the violence in American gangsta rap relates to violence in poor townships like Soweto (Strelitz, 2004: 633–4).7

Rap music is tightly linked to the stereotype of the tough African-American male identified in Shaft. Although the association between such music and the urban gangsta is also evident in African cinema, in Hijack Stories, one can discern distinctive local variations on the ‘global’ or American stereotype. The soundtrack of Hijack Stories features South African hip-hop artists such as Prophets of da City along with a rap style called kwaito performed by popular musicians such as Mandoza. Kwaito is a generic hybrid that incorporates hip-hop with African rhythms, instruments and language.8 Writing of how ‘glocal’ subcultures derived from the transnational musical idiom of rap emerge from global media flows, Tony Mitchell states that:

The assertion of the local in hip hop cultures outside the United States also represents a form of contestation of the importance of the local and regional dialect as a ‘resistance vernacular’ in opposition to a perceived U.S. cultural imperialism in rap and hip hop. (2000: 41)

With regard to the use of local dialects in Hijack Stories and its soundtrack, the use of local and indigenous languages can be understood to be ‘an act of cultural resistance and preservation of ethnic autonomy’ (Mitchell, 2000: 52–3). Musicians act as modern versions of the African griot (bard), providing ‘a way for youth to voice their dissatisfaction with society employing the heritage of the Black oral tradition’ (Richardson and Scott, 2002: 178). Thus, through its soundscape as much as through its storyline, Hijack Stories articulates a challenge to the dominant media culture and responds to global media flows with its own form of hybridization and ‘glocalization’, reclaiming elements of the African oral tradition that have been commercialized in gangsta rap.




White chocolate

Beyond considering Oreos and Topdecks as representations of hybrid identities, it is also important to evaluate the extent to which screen characters who look black but act white may signify assimilation to white culture. In the original Shaft films of the 1970s, John Shaft uses the term ‘black honkie’ to denigrate blacks he perceives to be serving the interests of white culture, such as black policemen.9 That ‘honkie’ is a racial slur used to disparage poor ‘white trash’ makes this doubly insulting. In more recent films, some actors such as Danny Glover play roles like Murtaugh in Lethal Weapon, in which skin colour is irrelevant to the character’s identity, culture, or circumstance. Actors of any colour could play such characters without altering the narrative of the film because the roles are not about the specificity of black experience. Avoiding casting blacks in negatively stereotyped roles gives the appearance that mainstream films are becoming more inclusive and progressive; however, ‘colour blind casting’ may serve an assimilationist agenda and render blackness unnoticeable, celebrating only the characteristics that support white middle-class values (Denzin, 2002: 6). In the process of assimilation, black culture and identity merges with white, shedding distinctive markers of culture, religion, language and clothing (see Stam and Spence, 1983: 9, 16).

Denzin argues that black actors playing ‘neutral’ or white roles devalue racial and ethnic difference and privilege assimilation (2002: 6). When Denzin says, ‘Glover as Murtaugh is a black man who is not black. He is a black man who is white. Like Michael Jordan, he enacts a racially neutered identity […] a black version of a white cultural model’ (2002: 100), he could equally well be referring to Kgoroge’s character, Sox, at the beginning of Hijack Stories. While Denzin is not wrong to suggest that ‘the dream of integration’ such characters embody may be a form of ‘ideological whitewash’ (2002: 60), I am not convinced he is right to pose such a strong criticism. His critique picks up on the negative connotations that the term Oreo carries, but risks reinforcing an oppositional form of thought in which the working class ‘tough guise’ exemplified by Zama and Shaft represents authentic black identity and anything else entails selling out and assimilating into white culture. Labelling black men who don’t conform to the stereotype ‘white’ or ‘neutered’, or ‘sell-outs’ suggests an essentialist approach in which identity is defined by skin colour alone. Making upwardly mobile blacks (and versatile black actors) feel guilty about ‘betraying their roots’ may conceal an agenda that ‘keeps them in their place’. Oreo characters such as Sox necessitate an understanding of identity that is more than ‘skin deep,’ and is influenced by culture.

The terms Oreo and Topdeck signal that ethnic identity does not correspond directly to skin colour, but they also suggest a contested relationship between race and class. Philippa Gates claims that positioning a black character in a white role or context in order to make them easier for white audiences to




identify with reframes the issue of race as one of class: ‘identification on the level of values, profession, or lifestyle is bound up in the discourse of class and becomes an important issue in the representation of black masculinity’ (2004: 26). Hollywood, Gates argues, predominantly represents middle-class, consumerist, American characters, thereby exoticizing and ‘othering’ the working class:

By placing black characters within white mainstream definitions of middle-class values, lifestyle, and profession, they are made more familiar, identifiable, and ‘unthreatening.’ … White hegemonic power, thus, occupies the middle class and defines it as the ideal to which to aspire. The middle class then becomes a space that cannot be redefined with specificity for black culture and meaning for the ‘other’; instead it can align the ‘other’ with the mainstream. (Gates, 2004: 27)

The relationship between class and race gets to the heart of the rift in identity that labels like Oreo and Topdeck have come to fill. Indeed, such figures in contemporary cultural texts participate in ‘the global commodification of cultural difference’ through what postcolonial scholar Graham Huggan terms ‘strategic exoticism’ (2001: vii, 32). In other words, Oreos and Topdecks inhabit cultural codes in a way that critiques or redeploys them to reveal constitutive power relations. I will develop this point below, in a discussion of the rap star Eminem who has indeed managed to define his identity as ‘exotic’ by ‘strategically’ taking up a place in the black working class in order to reap the commercial benefits of rap music.10

Eminem

The rap artist Eminem and Jimmy ‘Rabbit’ Smith, the character he plays in the semi-biographical film 8 Mile, can be described as Topdecks. Like Sox in Hijack Stories, Eminem’s character is an outsider in black culture who seeks to become an insider in order to attain fame and fortune via a career in the media. Where Sox’s class status marks him as an outsider despite his black skin, Rabbit has the ‘right’ class but the ‘wrong’ race. Both movies ultimately suggest that identity is located in culture and context, not skin colour. Hijack Stories and 8 Mile both problematize the link between race and class, blackness and poverty, but the films display different attitudes to social mobility for Oreo and Topdeck characters.

Eminem’s heterogeneous fan base is a testament to his cross-cultural appeal. His working-class background functions as an authenticating strategy that facilitates success in a black musical genre (Grundmann, 2003; Hess, 2005). In the process of a white man appropriating or, more positively, engaging with black music and culture, the central conflict in 8 Mile gets displaced from the ‘other race’ to the ‘other class’ and middle-class characters are vilified. Initially Eminem’s character encounters a kind of ‘reverse racism’




in 8 Mile, when bouncers refuse him entry to a black-dominated rap venue called The Shelter. When he finally finds acceptance in black subculture, he wins respect not through adopting the violent ‘tough guise’ of black masculinity, but in a battle of words that makes his own identity highly visible. Rabbit says ‘I am a piece of fuckin’ white trash, I say it proudly,’ silencing his middle-class opponent Papa Doc (Anthony Mackie) with what Grundmann terms ‘reverse classism’ (2003: 35). In the final rap battle Rabbit claims that Papa Doc is not a real gangsta because his real name is Clarence, he went to a private school and he lives at home with his parents. Here Papa Doc, the Oreo, is cast in a negative light but Rabbit, the Topdeck, is accepted as racial stereotypes are denaturalized and shared anger at the experience of poverty and oppression is validated. Grundmann argues that ultimately: ‘8 Mile depicts whites and blacks as part of the same underclass, as victims sharing the same fate rather than enemies constantly at each other’s throat’ (2003: 33). However, the different treatment of two characters that both breach presupposed categories of identity suggests more complex and asymmetrical power relations underpin the narrative resolution.

Another ambiguous or hybrid type of identity boundary crossing, ‘passing’, provides a degree of insight into how Oreos and Topdecks are placed in popular culture as well as in the diegetic worlds of the films in this study. A chief difference between Papa Doc and Rabbit is that one seeks to pass as something he is not, and the other strategically foregrounds his culturally complex identity, seeking (and achieving) acceptance for its authenticity.

Cultural theorist Sara Ahmed defines passing in relation to ‘a system of racial classification which assumes that racial identity marks the subject in the form of the absence or presence of colour’ (1999: 88). Passing also takes place across identity categories such as class or gender. While the concept rests on ‘the conviction that we can tell or see the difference’ (Ahmed, 1999: 88), each mode of passing has different power dynamics. The different socio-economic status of blacks and whites leads to different repercussions if one’s hidden identity revealed, which means that a black person passing as white potentially has more to lose than a white passing as black. Rather than viewing passing ‘as a radical and transgressive practice that serves to destabilize and traverse the system of knowledge and vision upon which subjectivity and identity precariously rests’ (1999: 89), Ahmed argues that passing recuperates difference by reinforcing essentialist categories of identity and designating ambiguous identities as inauthentic, incomplete, insecure and ‘other.’ Distinct from passing (which deliberately deflects attention from a hidden identity), the racially and culturally ambivalent figures of the Oreo and the Topdeck invite a deeper look beyond surface signifiers of race. In moving into black culture, the Topdeck gives up his or her unlabelled position as a normative white subject and is exposed as a racial entity. This does not necessarily ‘divest whiteness of its power’




(Watts 2005: 192), as the analysis of 8 Mile and Eminem’s commercial success shows, but it does explicitly revalue blackness. The highly visible transgression of cultural boundaries enacted by Oreos and Topdecks asks for acknowledgement and acceptance of cultural difference and social mobility, allowing that experiences of cultural affiliation and immersion can go well beyond ‘tourism’ or ‘poaching’ to affect identity on a deep level.

Brand identity

Stereotypes brand identity, organizing expectations about the roles, characteristics and abilities of people in various social categories. Denzin (2002: 5) notes that one of the effects of the global reach of the film industry is its ability to disseminate negative and inaccurate stereotypes of various ethnic identities to audiences around the world. This is not to suggest that the media should only represent positive images. ‘Positive’ images, as we have seen in the discussion of tough blaxploitation heroes, gangstas and black actors playing middle-class characters, are relative to individual and cultural value systems.

Both Shaft and Hijack Stories have attracted criticism from reviewers because they employ stereotyped representations of the tough guise of black masculinity, contributing to the perception that black neighbourhoods are populated with gun toting, dope dealing, car thieving criminals. The film 8 Mile opts for an emphasis on personal determination and an anti-violence message, but it still reinforces the stereotypical link between black culture and the working class by vilifying the brutal black rap gang that threatens Rabbit, and vilifying its leader Papa Doc, who attempts to pass as a gangsta by concealing his middle-class ‘Oreo’ identity.

Hijack Stories critiques the idea that authentic black identity is embodied by the ‘tough guise’ projected in Hollywood movies. The film specifically comments on the process of role modelling and ‘acting a part’ based on media representations and the stereotypes that pervade popular culture. The final scene complicates notions of identity and authenticity, essentialism and performativity, inviting spectators to engage with these issues in the process of identifying with the screen characters. In the film’s denouement, Sox, having entered the criminal underworld, takes a bullet escaping from the police. Zama pays to have him transferred from the inadequate township clinic to a good ‘white’ hospital, then he takes Sox’s place and successfully auditions for the role of TV gangster. On one level the narrative punishes Sox and rewards Zama because he is better able to play the ‘tough guy’ role. It seems that passing, dissembling and wearing masks is core to black identity, and the ‘tough guise’ stereotype is the ultimate performance signifying ‘successful’ black masculinity, as suggested by Denzin (2002: 81), Henry (2002: 114) and Iwamoto (2006). However,




the resolution of Hijack Stories points to the underlying bond of solidarity that the protagonists discover. Hijack Stories leaves us with an emerging sense of brotherhood and altruism that transcends class, ethnicity and culture, legitimating social diversity and mobility. When Sox is accepted by Zama’s gang and Zama strategically capitalizes on the exoticism of his ‘tough guise’ identity in order to leave the township for a job in the media, both protagonists accept each other’s differences and cross boundaries of class and culture in ways that validate the Oreo subject position without endorsing assimilation.

Oreos and Topdecks, as represented in films like Hijack Stories and 8 Mile, and in advertisements targeting black consumers, are alternatives to the ‘tough guise’ stereotype. They are polysemic middle terms that represent an uneasy synthesis of black and white. The reference to global brands of junk food signals a sophisticated awareness of the commodification of identity and the commercialization of black subcultures, making a snide swipe at globalization and cultural imperialism. While the Topdeck comes under fire for ‘buying into’ black culture through the processes of appro-priation and exploitation, the Oreo is accused of ‘selling out’ and assimilat-ing. This suggests that there is no neutral space between black and white. However, the terms also imply that skin colour does not define identity. The terms Oreo and Topdeck need not necessarily be read as figures of assimilation and appropriation. The dark and light layers in Oreo cookies and Topdeck chocolate bars, and the coloured candy surface and chocolate centres of Eminems, function as metaphors for hybrid multicultural identities in which the surface signifiers of race form one part of identity while cultural affiliations, in each case a deeper and more central component, form another. Sympathetic, playful representations of Oreos and Topdecks may indicate increasing acceptance of complex multilayered identities that traverse race and class barriers. While there is still a need to represent positive black role models without sacrificing realism, reproducing conservative ideologies or promoting an assimilationist agenda, images of Oreos and Topdecks, however problematic, do represent a move towards the recognition of diversity and social mobility.

As this article has shown, much research into black stereotypes takes African-Americans as its implicit focus. While the ‘tough guise’ characterization of aggressive black masculinity does have cultural currency in African texts and within African youth culture, such images are consumed by knowing audiences and have come to share media space with more complex, reflexive, hybrid expressions of identity. John Shaft’s desire to use his ‘tough guise’ image to distance himself from ‘black honkies’ may become a relic of the past. Representations of Topdecks and Oreos legitimate the diversification of blackness by making visible and acknowledging its many cultural forms, its ‘changing face’ and its shifting power dynamics, revealing that black and white are not mutually exclusive.




Notes

1 I am grateful to IJCS referees for their helpful feedback on this article and to the editors of the proceedings of the Stellenbosch conference ‘Power, Politics and Identity in South African Media’ for input on an earlier version, analysing Tsotsi (dir. Gavin Hood, 2005) and Sprite advertisements.

2 The terms coconut, buppie (black yuppie) or black honkie can be used interchangeably with Oreo in some contexts.

3 For example, see Steyn (2001), Badsha (2003), Battersby (2003), and Haupt (2001).

4 Henry’s article (2002) offers an insightful analysis of the relationship between Parks’ Shaft and Singleton’s remake. To avoid repeating this material, this article does not analyse the earlier film and its sequels, though it acknowledges that influences on style, characterization and tone are evident in the remake.

5 The prevalence of the ‘tough guise’ of black masculinity in the media has also been noted by Tricia Rose (1994), Norman Denzin (2002) and Derek Iwamoto (2006), among others.

6 I am grateful to Steve Werner for raising this point. 7 Gangsta rap is notorious for being misinterpreted or understood differently

in different cultural situations due to its strong ties to an urban, working-class African American context. As Henry Louis Gates suggests in The Signifying Monkey (1988), the goading and profanity used to affirm cultural identity in black subcultural forms, including gangsta rap, can be understood as a distinctive African-American signifyin(g) practice.

8 Kwaito developed:

in response to the political, social and economic transition South Africa undertook since 1990. Kwaito represented the coming together of a number of South African musical genres (bubblegum, mbaqanga, township jazz, Afro-pop, among others) and Western genres (e.g. rhythm and blues, house, hip-hop, jungle, and drum’n’bass). The word ‘kwaito’ was Afrikaans slang derived from the word ‘kwaai’, meaning wild. (Boloka, 2003: 99)

9 For example, Shaft delivers the insult ‘black honkie’ to a black policeman in Shaft’s Big Score (Gordon Parks, 1972).

10 Eric King Watts claims Eminem tries to ‘bridge the racial credibility gap’ by casting himself as a darker, dirtier shade of white in order to claim class-based legitimacy and avoid being seen as a ‘culture thief’: ‘In terms of hip-hop credibility and marketability, rappers benefit from representing some meaningful aspect of the subaltern, the marginalized ‘‘others,’’ or by being associated with what has come to be known as ‘‘thug life’’ or ‘‘pimping.’’ As a white artist, Mathers has had to contend with the racial bias associated with performing in a traditionally urban African American musical genre’ (Watts, 2005: 188).




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Films

8 Mile (2002) dir. Curtis Hanson, Universal Pictures.Hijack Stories (2001) dir. Oliver Schmitz, BSkyB, British Screen, Deutsche

Bank.




Tsotsi (2006) dir. Gavin Hood, The UK Film & TV Production Company PLC, Industrial Development Corporation of South Africa.

Shaft (2000) dir. John Singleton, Paramount Pictures.

● JANE STADLER is Senior Lecturer in Film and Media Studies at the University of Queensland. Recent publications include Pulling Focus: Intersubjective Experience, Narrative Film and Ethics; Screen Media (with Kelly McWilliam); Media and Society (with Michael O’Shaughnessy); and articles in journals such as Studies in Australasian Cinema, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Continuum and Metro. Address: School of English, Media Studies and Art History, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland, 4072 Australia. [email: [email protected]] ●



Documents

Oreo, Topdeck and Eminem: Hybrid identities and global media flows