“Whoop That Trick” is a classic shit-talking, I-dare-you-to-step-to-me rap song with a classic southern (and West African) call and response chorus: Whoop that trick! (Get ‘im!) Whoop that trick! (Get ‘im!). Thus, when Memphis crowds began chanting “whoop that Clip” during the Clippers’ series, signifying on the Al Kapone song from the film, “Whoop that Trick,” and eventually just went all out and actually chanted “whoop that trick”-I was immediately proud. I’ve used Brewer’s film often in my research about southern cities, southern cultures, and contemporary black southern identity, despite some of its problematic epistemology, and I see it as an important teaching tool. When I was a Sociology and Southern Studies prof at the University of Mississippi, I made several classes watch Craig Brewer’s 2005 film Hustle & Flow, including two very white Introduction to Southern Studies courses and two more or less integrated Urban Sociology courses. You can’t help it because your life is inextricably linked with that person or object, the love, the pain, and the structures that influence how you experience the love-pain dialectic. In the blues, you don’t learnto love the one who does you wrong. We are the embodiment of the blues, a blues people, a post-soul people. Many of us have always loved the city, like we love America, despite the fact that it doesn’t do us right. “Yea,” yes, “yea” for white folks’ “learning to stop worrying and love whoop that trick.” But also, “nay,” since it precisely is white folks (and some misguided black middle class folks) who for structural reasons and reasons of unexamined privileged are more likely to be embarrassed by the city’s reputation and public face in the first place.
I’m uttering a lusty and simultaneous “Nay” to the frantic white people energy around the Grizzlies playoff anthem, “whoop that trick,” perhaps most notable in this post by Apryl Childs-Potter. “…the Negro must, while joining in the chorus of “Yeas” which the book has so deservedly evoked, utter a lusty and simultaneous “Nay.” In Ralph Ellison’s 1944 review of Gunnar Myrdal’s The American Dilemma, he begins by describing his feelings about the massive work thusly:
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