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In "The White Negro," Norman Mailer valorizes an emergent hipster subculture that emulates the urban black periphery in order to evade the cultural sterility of the 1950s. According to Mailer, the hipster is an existential hero who recognizes the need to "live with instant death," whether in the form of instant annihilation through nuclear warfare or a more gradual demise through social conformity (339). Mailer directs aspiring hipsters to model themselves after "the Negro" who, because of his social marginality, must also live with the constant threat of death: "Any Negro who wishes to live must live with danger from his first day. . . . The cameos of security for the average white . . . are not even a mockery to millions of Negroes; they are impossible" (340). In Mailer's account, African Americans have flourished despite their social marginality by tending first and foremost to the "obligatory pleasures of the body" (341). More precisely, in his view, they respond to the prospect of living with the imminent threat of death by cultivating sensual pleasures and searching for "an orgasm more apocalyptic than the one that preceded it" (347). Mailer encourages hipsters to adopt this quest for ever more apocalyptic orgasms and suggests that by doing so hipsters will somehow assimilate African Americans' sexual potency and sensuality. Mailer hopes that by absorbing the "existentialist synapses of the Negro" (341), the hipster will undergo an affective transformation that effectively replaces his old, white habits of feeling with new, black habits of feeling.
In "The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy" James Baldwin takes Mailer to task for the essay's reliance on a number of well-worn stereotypes of black hypersexuality and violence. He argues that "The White Negro" presents a primitivist fantasy of African American life and despairs that "so antique a vision of the blacks should, at this late hour, and in so many borrowed heirlooms, be stepping off the A train" (277). Baldwin characterizes Mailer's essay as symptomatic of a broader tendency for whites to invoke fantasies of black sexual potency as a salve for their own sexual insecurities, claiming that "to be an American Negro male is also to be a kind of walking phallic symbol: which means that one pays, in...