Yellow Rose of Texas

   As Lindsey navigated the traffic from Dallas-Fort Worth Airport to our airbnb-RV on Lewisville Lake, I broke out into song, as I often do in the car. And as I often do, I only knew, like, half a verse or less. "The stars at night, are big and bright!" clap clap clap clap, "Deep in the heart of Texas!" "Blah blah blah blah, doo doo doo doo," clap clap clap clap, "deep in the heart of Texas!" (I learned a lot of culture from Pee Wee's Big Adventure). All together now! One more time! 
   "And now for "The Yellow Rose of Texas!'"...but I couldn't remember it. Not that I ever knew any words anyway, but I thought I knew the tune.
   Two days later I woke up in the RV humming it - some fife and drum ancestor must have whistled it to me in my dreams - and I hummed it for the rest of the day. 
   That same day Lindsey and I had a good conversation about our Governor's and Attorney General's blackface admissions, and I tried to unpack my own history of "playing" Black.
   Growing up my circle of white male friends frequently used, or played with, popular black culture and stereotypes. I'm trying to work out what for...To be cool, for sure, but help me break that down...
   To create a buffer between our "youth" world and our parents' world. To enjoy transgressing, from the safety of our middle-class whiteness, into a fantasy "gangsta" style of toughness, danger, and sex. To break out of what we perceived to be a stale, unimaginative standard English. And, in the tradition of minstrelsy, to entertain ourselves by degrading others, amusing ourselves with stereotyped imitations of "improper" Black English and "over-sexualized" black styles of art or dress.
    You might think that these goings-ons were in exclusively white company, but that's not the case. I often acted my "blackest" when in predominantly black contexts, usually also sports contexts. But in those contexts I was much less experimental, much more conservative, sticking to words or gestures that I believed would fit "safely" into the flow of the situation. The dance of authenticity is intricate, I guess, in any social situation. There seemed to be levels of realness for whites using black language; that is, there were levels of "credible" or acceptable white use of popular black language in majority black social situations, based on the user's socio-economic background, relationship circles, and consistency of style. (If you know me you're probably laughing right now, because in middle and high school my "words or gestures," white or black or any style, were almost non-existent; I barely spoke and was stiff as a board).
   Black friends and friends of other races also used hip-hop and black pop-culture to explore their own identities and differentiate themselves from their parents. More recently, during my time as dorm counselor at a boarding middle school, the ethnically diverse student population - many of our students came from other countries - gravitated toward black slang, music, and professional athletes as their cultural currency.
   Nonetheless it seemed that, at least in my growing up, white boys played black with a peculiar and perverse mixture of enthusiasm, admiration, objectification, envy, freedom, and consequence-less-ness (what is a good word for that? privilege? power?); and we played especially enthusiastically in majority white male contexts. In such contexts, we often stretched or completely jettisoned any rules of credibility and acceptability that had been developed in the majority black contexts.
   Where am I going with all this? Well this morning I thought I'd write a blog post about our Texas trip, and I hoped the lyrics of "The Yellow Rose of Texas" would give me some inspiration. I looked it up...guess what! It's first recorded iteration is a minstrel song about a black man yearning for his Texas home where his "yellow," or "mulatto," sweetheart resides. Later it was transformed into a song about a soldier longing for his home and beau. Is it a coincidence that I unconsciously remembered the tune and had a conversation about blackface on the same day? Yeah probably, but it's a likely coincidence, considering how deeply playing Black (and American Indian), runs in my history.