Living for and loving white guys
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Kominas "4 White Guys" mocks various elements of white American culture. It's a jab at typical indie rock band culture with its attempt to recreate the Beatles' Abbey Road album cover (at a janky South Philly crosswalk) and reiteration of being "just four/for white guys." The tennis rackets in particular remind me of the preppy, white upper-class aesthetics of Vampire Weekend. The whole music video consists of the group oscillating between their white and non-white worlds though these two worlds are not really separable. They admire shisha pipes above shelves of American cleaning products, play the sitar and basketball superimposed, and learn yoga from a white man on TV. They try on all these costumes of whiteness, as well as brownness through the perspective of whiteness a la Fanon's triple gaze. But in the end, it is the white box carrying pizza (the assimilation that kills us all) and not baklava (the perceived threats to whiteness) that brings about death! Like Baldwin says to his nephew, submitting to the expectations set by the white world (living "for white guys") will only lead to defeat and destruction. Instead, we must love white guys enough to "force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it" (Baldwin 24)??? I don't know if I agree with that... Love is a strong word... but I guess Maher Khalil ended up sharing his baklava with the very people who suspected him of malevolence.