The Night of a White Female Thug - Lil Jov

A thug – someone who kills people. Someone who fights, does drugs and drinks excessively. Someone who has tattoos and wears a due-rag. Someone black.

Or maybe Latino but definitely not white, right? Guess what? I decided to break the mold one night – Halloween night. Many girls on the streets were the “sexy convicts”, with almost butt-revealing shorts accompanied by a striped bra. After a lot of thought, I decided Sharpie was going to be my best friend in constructing “thug/gangsta Jovana.” With the re-designed-way-too-big-costume, and as mentioned in my previous entry with tattoos saying things as “thug life”, “free Weezy” and “respect” – “Lil Jov” went out hunting for the public’s reaction.

Yes, it was Halloween and there is not much one cannot get away that particular night. However, some people apparently had a problem with my costume. According to a black woman around my age I was a “white girl [that] be chasin’ after [their] men”. Why would a convict woman be appealing to black men? Is a criminal record a source of attraction? I do not think so. Even if it were, what is the problem with a biracial relationship?

My friends overheard a conversation amid a white couple sitting on a bench at Union Square engaged in some serious people watching. My friends and I decided that I would pass with my white friend dressed as a “sexy cop,” while they would listen to the couple's reaction. The man expressed his concern with today’s youth saying, “[t]hey just don’t know where the limits are nor where their place is do they?” The woman sighed and responded that she did not understand the ongoing “black-mania” or the excitement in dressing up as something “inferior”. I was the reference point of these statements.

It needs to be acknowledged that these were some of the most serious and stereotypical reactions I got that night. Some people just laughed. However, people placed these pre-constructed opinions about me because of my costume and that bothered me. Why would the target of attention of my costume have to be black men? Why was I suffering from "black-mania" (whatever that means) simply because I was dressed up as a convict? Statistics show that many more convicts in our jails today are black (Mauer and King), but how does a costume change the color of my skin to black? Can I not be a white convict? I mean, they do exist.

Thus, the abovementioned people's view of me was that of a typical white girl or a superior girl, using the possible words of the latter woman. Media has most likely taught her to separate the "black inferior" from the "white superior." More precisely, television has. Through the “stylization” and “othering” of people of color, she was probably taught to have an image of what a “black convict” was, in this case seeing a “white girl” trying to impersonate that challenged her beliefs (Caldwell 302). In her eyes, a thug or gangsta was probably someone black, heavily tattooed and with prison-history. Why? Television said so. I believe that this “othering” is more pervasive than we might think. It was Halloween and I wanted to have fun and do something that did not involve the adjective sexy. I played around with what I could resulting in the creation of “Lil Jov”. No one commented on how disturbing it was that a young woman would dress up as a convict, hey it was Halloween. The “thug life” on my knuckles however, was disturbing. Remember, it is not appropriate for certain people to dress up in certain costumes. Not even on Halloween…


 

Work Cited

Caldwell, John Thornton. "Chapter 11." Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Television. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1995. 302-35. Print.

Mauer, Marc, and Ryan S. King. Uneven Justice: State Rates of Incarceration by Race and Ethnicity. Publication. Washington D.C.: Senencing Project, 2007. Print.