What Does Having a ‘White Boy Summer’ Mean? It Means We ‘Cant Truss It’
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We live in an era shaped by social media that adds meta meanings and unintended messaging when they collide with our personal identities and all of our various intersectionalities. In some ways this is no different than any other era. New modes of fashion, trends, and ideas define every era. But the ability to game the system, to hijack it with a Tweet or an Instagram post that precludes even a quorum on a shared language can potentially detonate like an atomic bomb on what is a fractured American identity and psyche.
So the emergence of a concept like “White Boy Summer” espoused by Tom Hanks’ son Chet, which suddenly appears in all sorts of ways divorced from any tangible concept or manifesto is inherently problematic.
To learn that this concept was hand crafted by the son of America’s most beloved actor in the form of an Instagram post that is intentionally vague to obfuscate its meaning despite being loaded with language that sounds adversarial. This is a trend started by an individual who by sheer force of social media influence puts out an ill defined trope based on a song no one knew was coming until he said so.
The New York Post: Hanks released a clip from his controversial “White Boy Summer” video, which shows the rapper bouncing his face off of a woman’s butt repeatedly. Critics have blasted the rap song as racist, Chet isn’t backing down from releasing the tune and accompanying video.“SHOULD I DROP THE VIDEO ON TUESDAY OR WAIT TIL FRIDAY????❓❓❓ #WBS MOST DEFINITELY GOING UP ????????♂️????☀️????????,” he captioned the clip. Kevin Hart’s ex-wife, Torrei Hart, voted for Tuesday in the comments section.
And then last week, 30-year-old Chet was photographed filming his “White Boy Summer” movie.
He said that despite the title, the messaging will be “all-inclusive.”
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“It’s everybody’s summer. This is all-inclusive. This is everybody,” Chet said. “For me, for me, since I’m a white boy, it’s gonna be a white boy summer. You know what I mean?”
No Chet, we don’t.
The Post continues, “Filming of ‘White Boy Summer’ came amid abuse allegations leveled by his ex-girlfriend Kiana Parker, who obtained a restraining order against him this year over claims he threatened her with a knife and allegedly told her he would ‘blow’ her “brains out.”
So there’s that too.
The Guardian notes that it still left us without “the foggiest idea what he meant, so Hanks has been helpfully dishing out ‘rules and regs’ for white boy summer. There’s “no calling girls ‘smokeshows’” apparently. And guys should stop getting “drunk and sweaty” and getting in people’s personal space with booze breath. “Bottom line here, gentlemen, is it’s time for us to evolve, OK,” Hanks said. ‘It’s time for us to go from a Pikachu to a Raichu.’ I don’t know what that means, but apparently evolving Hanks-style involves avoiding plaid shirts or anything salmon-coloured. Instead you should wear clothes from his White Boy Summer merchandise collection; these, rather awkwardly, have been criticised for utilising a Gothic-style font that many on social media are saying is close to one white supremacists are fond of.”
“After four years of Donald Trump emboldening white supremacists, I don’t think now is the time to be calling for a white boy summer. However, I can heartily endorse a hot boy summer. I think it’s important, in the name of equality, that men get a season of their own to strut their stuff. Particularly as lockdown has apparently got men experimenting with micro shorts and skirts.”
In the wake of all that’s happened on thing is certain: it is a concept that is at best tone deaf and at worst a possible lightning rod for fomenting and encouraging even further distrust in our national discourse.
There are the accoutrements that make it seem like benign entertainment: skits on YouTube that set to define “The Rules of White Boy Summer” by evoking 90’s surf champion Kelly Slater and all kinds of “funny” lamentations on what we’ve lost as a culture. Except it’s a joke without a punchline rolled into one ill defined trope.
Ill defined except for the fact that it defines what whiteness means in an era where the anxiety around “white” identity has never been more fraught.
It’s not only not funny, it’s unnecessary. A “joke” that is the definition of “white people shit” without any irony. The timing cannot be ignored. It is an answer to a question no one asked and that they would do so following a previous summer defined by Black Lives Matter, racial uprisings, and a genuine existential crisis of American identity, it can only be seen as a response. A response that calls for a return to “normalcy.”
A response to a white American identity crisis that wants to rebrand the “Karens” as if that was something that is over —even though she’s not dead or even fixed yet— and this notion suggests there’s no need to look back, and dwell on concepts that cause white America ennui, but forward to an optimistic future.
