Bakari Kitwana, "a culture critic who's been tracking American hip hop for years", has written "Why White Kids Love Hip Hop: Wangstas, Wiggers, Wannabes, and the New Reality of Race in America". In 1993, an article in the UK newspaper
The Independent described the phenomenon of white, middle-class children who were "wannabe blacks". Robert A. Clift's documentary titled "Blacking Up: Hip-Hop's Remix of Race and Identity" questions white enthusiasts of black hip-hop culture. The
term of art wigger "is used both proudly and derisively to describe white enthusiasts of black hip-hop culture". Clift's documentary examines "racial and cultural ownership and authenticity—a path that begins with the stolen blackness seen in the success of
Stephen Foster,
Al Jolson,
Benny Goodman,
Elvis Presley, the
Rolling Stones—all the way up to
Vanilla Ice (popular music's ur-wigger) and
Eminem". He argues that it originated from multiple sources in both the black and white communities, and stresses its multiple meanings, as in this passage: "Where my older son went to junior high school,
wigger was at the same time acceptingly applied by Blacks to whites, disparagingly applied by racist whites to other whites, dismissively applied by whites adopting Black styles to whites who were seen as doing so inauthentically, and used approvingly by white would-be-hiphoppers to describe each other". In political writer
Mark Satin's short story "My Revolution", a wigger thief is portrayed from the point of view of an elderly white
pawnshop owner (who is himself a tax cheat). Outraged by multiple robberies, the owner installs an illegal nighttime security device, which electrocutes a young man breaking into the shop. From jail, the owner comments: ==Lawsuit==