God, I’m not even a Juggalo. But this is alienating. I get that fuckin’ magnets is funny! That’s universal, that’s sacred. Jokes about fuckin’ magnets are not offensive to me.
But . I am not a Juggalo, but that is very real to me. It makes me feel like I’m in a fishbowl. Because the jokes that you make at Juggalos’ expense (other than, you know, Magnets) are really jokes about the material and geographic conditions of my own life. And it makes me feel like I’m in a fishbowl, and it reminds me that some people (me) can’t participate in a lot of art culture and subculture.
Given the choice between Making A Spectacle Of Poor White People For An Audience That Doesn’t Understand The Context and Not Making Poor White People And People Of Color Feel Really Uncomfortable, people like this will always choose the former. Why?
I know it’s just Juggalos, but, like, God, white girls, shut the fuck up. Shut the fuck up all of you.
You can only make jokes about Juggalos if you are from Michigan. You can never make performance pieces inspired by Juggalos.
I IMMEDIATELY thought about this performance piece when I saw RGR’s post about not being able to make fun of Juggalos unless you are from Michigan (re: that terrible “Juggalo Drake” drawing) but didn’t want to bring it up because I am trying to cut down on the volume of tumblr fuckery I think about on the regular. And of course the person putting this performance piece on wrote one of those awful pieces on the Gathering that has somehow managed to become a summertime blog journalism tradition (I seriously think that voyeuristic subcultural tourism pieces about the Gathering are the #2 thing I hate about music journalism, right behind my blanket hatred of the coverage of “female musicians.”)
When I was growing up my uncle worked for an artist management company that handled distribution for Psychopathic Records which made me like a minor (less than minor, really) celebrity among some of the fringe weirdos at my school because this meant that my uncle sometimes went up to Michigan to meet with Violent J & others to talk about shit like revenue streams. I don’t live in Michigan, but there are a lot of Juggalos in northeastern and northwestern Ohio (enough that I was shocked when I went to visit April many years ago and she had never heard of them as like a subcultural thing, but not enough that we get more than a couple of flavors of Faygo). Driving to work I am regularly cut off by a van that has a homespun Psychopathic Records mural painted on it & the hatchet man definitely crops up when I think about the various iconographies of middle school fashion present when I was a pre-teen.
I think that RGR could not be anymore on point when she says “bullshit like this is just lampooning a subculture that arose from poverty and some of the most fraught race relations in the country.” I mean, come on. When I think about the actual IRL people I know who identified as Juggalos, most of them were/are just kids that I grew up with that already took enough shit from people/the world without having to deal with the subculture they call their home/family being mined for a tongue in cheek performance art piece that supposed “hip” people will go to so they can feel a self-congratulatory sense of subcultural superiority (which is, without a doubt, also a classed superiority). And like is that so much to even ask for? That people not pantomine your identity to a paying audience so that people can feel good about how they are not you? Because I really don’t think that is so much to ask for in the grand scheme of things you could be asking for.
[bold mine]
I feel like there’s at least—at LEAST—a dozen other Tumblrers out there who could formulate a better response than any I’d give to this right now, because this brings up so. Much. Awkward and complicated SHIT for me.
So I’m going to do that pathetic, defensive maneuver of hiding behind a joke here, and just call this That Awkward Moment When a Conversation About Juggalos Has You Feeling All Your Feelings.
The post nobody expects from me I assume.
Being a poor white kid in an abandoned economy …..
I can’t even imagine the fakery you must deal with
It doesn’t stop folks from being racist, it doesn’t stop folks from be appropriative douchebags but it SUCKS.
Your schools and resources are bing quartered and halved at every turn and the machinery of whiteness LOVES giving you someone to blame but no WAY OF IMPROVING YOUR LOT.
And I talk massive shit about black elitism at times .
MASSIVE SHIT LIKE LARGE AMOUNTS
but they pay lip service to poverty.
It BOGGLES my black mind that the only time for serious I hear about white poverty is when POC are pointing out they are NOT the majority of services.
I can not imagine living in a world that advertises your races supremely divine right to ALL THE THINGS
while giving you NONE OF THEM and taking them from you as a way of hosing the folks over there who through the magic of racist hegemonic media
ARE TEH REASON FOR YOUR LOT IN LIFE!
and are changing up your culture TOOO!!!
and where do you fit in?
So you make a subculture and the POC mock you cause well you’re still a hegemonic force in their lives and often thinly appropriating their culture so it looks comfortable for you
but WITHOUT GODDAMN FAIL
there will show up some asshole with a profiteering sense ( LIMP BIZKIT I REST ALL CASES)
followed by
some ironic ASSHOLE with an hermes bag and black rim glasses to MOCK YOU
or put you in museum as the decay of civilization ( read whiteness)
or the ancient exhibit of white trashiness that proves who far we coastal elites are ahead and in charge by spending twice what you have EVER spent to find joy to make an expensive purposely cheap looking mock up of you
these twatwaffles will never say boo about the closed plants the decaying hospital or the cancer from the asbestos but they have installation and performance pieces
like the interclass politics of whiteness are horrific to me
Well… I’m from Michigan. I detest ICP and Juggalos. Detest with all that is in me. But yeah, they stem from a place of serious economic disparity & lack of access to what most whites take for granted, with little to no chance of change. I mean, I am one of those POC who does point out that white people actually do get the most state aid. But yes, could we talk about WHY it is that so many white people need that aid? Because I don’t think there is anything shameful about needing it. I don’t think white people who are poor should feel guilty for needing it and getting it. It’s still generation after generation of not being able to get ahead, never having basic needs really met, never knowing how your kids are going to have a different life.
Like when I was writing the last couple of days about dental access disparities. There is a ton of disparity around race because race and class intersect. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t a shit ton of white people in this state who are falling under that same disparity and have never had access to a dentist.
And yeah, Hanna is engaging in poverty porn and class mockery that is really disgusting. There has to be a better way to talk about the shittyness of the racism/misogyny/heterosexism/etc that is typical for Juggalos without engaging in shitty classism and poverty-culture jokery. (NOT THAT I’M SURPRISED, but) for someone who is credited as a leader of girl power and feminism (albeit a pretty alienating to non-white girls movement), Hanna should be
a littlemore sensitive. It’s extremely thoughtless, except that I don’t think she is really doing this without thought. It’s just gross as hell, and she’s just buying into an oppressive narrative.I don’t like Juggalos at all and they need some serious critique, but damn, this is not a critique at all it’s just hateful privileged bullshit on her part. Just because they are white doesn’t mean I’m okay with them being economically oppressed and then turned into a money/name-making joke for some outsider who isn’t in the least bit invested in addressing the actual reasons their culture exists.
(Source: pitchfork.com, via poemsofthedead)
