Pretty in Pink Meets Gold-Toothed Crew

People don’t seem to like it when I joke about race. They have no problem when I make fun of their mothers, their deepest insecurities, Darfur, even Tom Hanks. And yet when my friends in the Council on Foreign Relations talk about how China is a growing threat and I suggest installing urine shields at our Coca-Cola factories, I’ve suddenly gone too far.

So I wasn’t entirely surprised that Albertina Rizzo and Amanda McCall hit a snag trying to sell their new book, “Hold My Gold: A White Girl’s Guide to the Hip-Hop World.”

Recent college grads from really rich Caucasian families, Rizzo and McCall figured they could sell their book at Urban Outfitters to other recent college grads from really rich Caucasian families who wanted to laugh at their own ridiculous appropriations of ghetto culture. Such as the book’s “Signs of Da Ho-Diac” chapter, with this entry for Tauruses: “You real stubborn about what rappers can pour on yo’ chest. Girl, you should jus’ relax.”

To promote the book, Rizzo and McCall have been going to radio stations and local TV news shows dressed in pastel sweater sets and kitten heel loafers, doling out advice on how to gyrate on an Escalade. And the college kids, who are incredibly earnest about hip-hop culture even as they say “pass the pad thai, biatch,” don’t like it one bit.

The book reviewer at the Syracuse University newspaper wrote, “The authors present hip-hop culture as one of gold teeth, bikini-clad gyrating hoes and pimp-cups, when it is so much more.” The authors, the reviewer said, “are the ones who are ‘wack.’ ”

The black media, however, can’t get enough of white women making fun of themselves. Shortly after appearing on a Sirius satellite radio show with rapper Tony Yayo, who was fresh out of prison and repeated to them the old publishing adage that promoting a book is just like selling crack, their Simon & Schuster publicist got a personal call from 50 Cent saying he wanted to book them on his Sirius radio show. Apparently with every case of Crystal, the champagne maker throws in your own Sirius show.

“You generally think with all the beefs that go on in rap, that if you talk about a rapper, they’re going to beat you up. We’re more afraid of the white girls beating us up,” McCall said last week over drinks at Jay-Z’s 40/40 Club in Manhattan, where the authors have been given free membership. “Apparently, white girls don’t understand irony. And Tony Yayo does.” You start to understand irony real fast when your prison Susan cuts you with the shiv you made him for his birthday.

Even though they’re not selling as many books as they hoped, Rizzo said she wouldn’t have changed any of it. “Our goal is complete: 50 Cent is aware of us,” she said. “I want to have 50 Cent as my pal. Come to my birthday parties, go shopping, grab a latte at Starbucks.” I didn’t want to seem uncool by asking, but I’m pretty sure each of those phrases was a slang term for a sex act.

McCall and Rizzo, by hiding behind their “Pretty in Pink” characters, are ducking involvement in the race conversation they’re starting. But white kids who treat hip-hop culture as sacrosanct are avoiding it even more. A fear of judging the other is a fear of engagement. And it’s patronizing.

It’s great to appropriate from other cultures: We all say “cool” now with the ease and complexity it was meant to have. And just because you didn’t live in the projects doesn’t mean Jay-Z’s stories can’t be meaningful to you. You might not be intimately familiar with the trials and tribulations of parking lot pimping, but your job certainly has its own stresses.

When white kids take every phrase and fashion and strip them of any of the winking self-awareness they have, even when it involves wearing Band-Aids on your face, it’s like going to the museum and considering every piece of Mayan pottery art, even when most of them are just cereal bowls for Quetzalcoatle-Os.

Things you’re not allowed to joke about aren’t the things we hold most dear, but the ones we’re most afraid of. That’s why after 9/11, “The Daily Show” and the Onion made us feel better. And why my sitcom pilot next year, “Oh, You Stupid Non-White Person,” is going to be huge.