The lighter side of racism

For four years, Ego Trip -- a collective of five guys -- put out an eponymous humor zine that Spin called “the world’s rawest, stinkiest, funniest magazine.”

The magazine is now defunct, but the boys are back with nearly 300 pages of racial lists (like “10 Blacks That Blacks Should Be Ashamed Of” and essays (like “What I Learned About Nonwhite People From Watching Saturday Morning Cartoons”).

Brent Rollins, an art director based in Brooklyn, is a member of the Ego Trip crew and one of the authors of “Ego Trip’s Big Book of Racism!”

“That’s all white folks” is how you end the book. Do you think the market for things self-consciously black or race-oriented is mainly a white one?

We’re pretty conscious that lot of our audience happens to be of the lighter-skinned persuasion -- most of the world who will buy a book like this is going to be white. When we used to do this magazine, people just sort of automatically assumed because of the particular style of our humor that we were white, as if people of color can’t do anything beyond black-people-this, white-people-that kind of jokes.

Discussion of race and racism is usually such a humorless endeavor. Your book turns that notion on its head.

I think basically the whole book is sort of a smart-alecky kind of hate mail. It’s done tongue-in-cheek, but all this aggregate information indicts pop culture. Ultimately, it’s sort of bitter entertainment that illustrates why people of color get frustrated and angry. People are always saying racism doesn’t exist -- and, sure, maybe your neighbor isn’t walking around in a Klan suit, but when you add it up, there it is.

Well, it certainly isn’t your typical ivory-tower treatment of race.

The whole part about everybody in their ivory towers -- they should be called ebony towers! Everybody in their ebony towers is postulating about race, but you’re ultimately not affecting anything. This is where it’s consumed, at the pop culture level. Who has more influence: Cornel West or the Rock? If you want to make some changes, you gotta learn how to put your message out there in a way that people want to consume it. That’s the whole point of this book.

The book is the antithesis of political correctness. Are we over PC?

Just because Justin Timberlake is doing a song with Timbaland doesn’t mean we’re over anything. People want to oversimplify things. This is my particular point of view: Race isn’t race -- it’s culture. We have to acknowledge that one culture is different from another. And then we need to respect that.

Why is this the “Big Book of Racism”? Are you trying to reclaim the whole notion of racism?

You mean, why not the “Big Book of ‘Race’ ”? Because “racism” is a much sexier title. Hey, we’re playing into racist notions throughout the whole book. Racism is synonymous with hate; this is just a racially aware book. We’ve gotta redefine “racism.”

And how has that been received?

I feel encouraged by the reception of the book, if it allows people to talk about things in a more honest way, not in a more “We Are the World” sort of way. I’ve been intrigued by where I’ve seen great reviews of the book -- in Canada, in Minnesota. It hasn’t been as widely embraced as our last book, which was like a love letter to hip-hop. Whereas this one is how love really is -- a little twisted, a lot more gut-wrenching, a lot more exciting -- but when you see it, you have to be a little more tentative about it. I’ve been encouraged by how many people understood it and got it. And we had a couple of guys talking about it on O’Reilly, and he took total exception to it, which is always good. In fact, we were hoping he’d condemn us even more.

-- Lauren Sandler