Thursday, February 20, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Books: Racism is a laughing matter

By Mike Prevatt

Titling your book Big Book of Racism probably requires a disclaimer. So, before you even hit the table of contents, the former editors and scribes of Ego Trip--the now-defunct paean to hip-hop and urban culture that brought you the most-irreverent Book of Rap Lists--aim to quell any P.C. Police concerns with the following proclamation: "Due to our strong personal convictions, we wish to stress that this book in no way endorses a belief in racism." Which is followed up by the one sentence that sets the tone for the entire book: "We just hate everybody."

Preaching racial harmony by disrupting it--via equal-opportunity mockery among its many timelines, lists, quizzes, biographies, cartoons, institutional parodies and other structured segments--is the novelty of this exhaustively envisioned and brutally hilarious work. While Sacha Jenkins and company stack the yucks up like an episode of "The Simpsons"--so many that rereading a page reveals jabs and puns missed on the first scan--there is an undercurrent of unabashed honesty and damn-straight seriousness to the book. Jaded and cynical the authors may be, but never once do they appear complacent. I mean, how could you be, when you've covered your ground as thoroughly as the Ego Trip cats?

The bigger picture in Big Book of Racism is the way prejudices, inner conflicts and bigotry have infiltrated every nook and cranny of civilization. From the arts and sex to sports and politics, there isn't an aspect to humanity that hasn't been plagued by racial injustice of some kind. It should follow that no group or cultural fixture is safe, according to the writers, whether it's albinos or black women who partake in the great art of neck-rolling. When there's no racism to report, there's racism to dredge up, and generally that's when shit gets really funny.

Given the colored backgrounds of the authors, there's an unacknowledged but certainly implied permission to launch digs at the biggest perpetrator of racial harassment--whitey himself--getting as specific as dissecting Caucasian recreation (see cow tipping and phone booth packing) and tradition (Ego Trip is gloriously to the point with baseball fans doing The Wave: "Sit down and watch the fuckin' game"). A few moments are arguably offensive--Jesus Christ is the butt of countless jokes, and you can imagine how those ribs would go over in certain parts of the country--but the authors temper every cracker insult with an it's-all-good wink. They don't hate everybody as much as they enjoy sending up the inanity of racial cognizance.

You see, the authors seek that coveted gray area between the politically correct obsessives that have perfected the art of insincere sincerity, and the emboldened (enter color or ethnicity here)-power nationalists who often speak before they think. Neither is spouting with much logic or reason, and their zeal tends to be dry and humorless. The authors of Big Book recognize this, given the smart, unpartisan and well-researched nature of their satire. It would not be reaching to say this is as good a textbook on race relations as anything you'll find on, say, varsitybooks.com.

Big Book is not without its weaknesses, its biggest one being the daunting amount of text packed into just 292 pages. To digest each and every joke, list and fun fact on one page sometimes requires a chunk of time bigger than your average bathroom break; not since The Canterbury Tales has turning the page become a once-a-day event. (To the authors' credit, such poring-over is bred from the engrossing nature of the content, but I digress.) To fill a book this densely, references must span from the very mainstream to the very obscure, which leads some of us not in the know to scratch our heads in bewilderment. When two guest writers analyze hip-hop duos where one band member is lighter-skinned than the other, it's a diehards-only paradise not totally unexpected from scribes of this pedigree. This also provokes in-jokes among the Ego Trip brotherhood, as evidenced in the foreword by the magazine's svengali, Ted Bawno, who employs excessive amounts of tangential thoughts, peer/homey shout-outs, self-ingratiating trademarks, career-dating nostalgia and elitist overtones--basically becoming hip hop's answer to veteran rock critic Richard Meltzer. Just what we needed.

But like any masterful satire or parody, it's when light is shone on the frailty of human affectation that the book transcends its position on the humor shelf. In Big Book, the revelation of a common humanity trumps any one-liner or Letterman-esque enumeration. Photographer Ricky Powell says it best when he tells it like it is on being a Mexican Jew, ending his entry as he should: "In conclusion, being a Mexican Jew doesn't mean a thing to me. It's trivial."