The Problem with White Hipness: Race, Gender, and Cultural Conceptions in Jazz Historical Discourse

This essay situates hipness within a broader range of African American history and moral debate than is generally presented in accounts of jazz history. The perspectives of Amiri Baraka, Mezz Mezzrow, Norman Mailer, and Dizzy Gillespie are used to develop the thesis that there is a problem with white presumptions about how hipness relates to African American cultural life and history. This problem requires addressing interrelationships between race and gender, as well as the legacy of primitivism embedded in common assumptions about how jazz since World War II relates to social consciousness, sexual liberation, and dignity.