In his infamous essay “The White Negro” (1957), novelist and essayist Norman Mailer tried to explain the appearance of the “the hipster” on to the cultural scene of the 1950s. This was a subset of young white males, American existentialists as Mailer would have it, who came of age in the post-World War II era, and primarily in American cities. Notable about these young men was that they found the style of Black men — how we talked, how we dressed and what we listened to — alluring and dangerous. If the cultural appropriation of Black life and culture could be traced, at least, to Blackface minstrels in the early 19th century, The White Negro that Mailer conjured, was a more intellectual iteration of the phenomenon.
As Mailer’s contemporary Ralph Ellison recalled in his collection, Going to the Territory (1986) about his his interactions with the shite men he served with in the Merchant Marines in the 1940s, “Something here that you are saying, a certain rhythm is your speech, I first heard in my particular community. A certain way you swing your shoulders, or your legs, when you walk (especially Southern boys), you have gotten a lot of that from us.”