1,127 words
American Pimp is a 1999 documentary directed by the Hughes Brothers, the half-black, half-Armenian twins who also directed Menace II Society and Dead Presidents. American Pimp has fallen into obscurity and is now hard to find. But it deserves to be better-known, especially among race-realists. American Pimp is just under 90 minutes. It consists primarily of interviews with black pimps and their prostitutes.
The film opens with clips of white people sharing their views about pimps, which are universally negative: disgusting, immoral, exploiters of women, parasites, gaudy, tasteless, extravagant, etc. It is hard to know if we are supposed to think these are all negative “stereotypes” for which white people should be ashamed. As the movie unfolds, however, we see that these descriptions are all true — and then some.
American Pimp also intercuts clips from so-called Blaxploitation films such as The Mack and Willie Dynamite. Again, it is hard to tell if we are supposed to think that these films are sinister parodies and exaggerations of the truth about pimps. But the documentary goes on to demonstrate that the truth about pimps is far more clownish and sinister than the movie portrayals. Beyond that, the very term “Blaxploitation” strikes me as faux-victimhood whining, since these films generally glamorize and glorify ghetto black behavior for the entertainment of ghetto black consumers.
Judging from the film, the typical African-American pimp is ugly, dark-black, unspeakably foul-mouthed, utterly cynical and materialistic, and has hideous, gaudy tastes in clothes, cars, and jewelry. Gold teeth are optional.
Only a couple of the pimps interviewed speak anything close to standard English. The rest are mush-mouthed bix-nooders whose every third word is “bitch” or some version of “motherfucker.” Usually, they end their sentences with “Ya know whum sayin,’” to which my truthful answer is “no.” It seems odd that this spark of self-knowledge doesn’t seem to lead to self-improvement in their communication skills. Sadly, there are no subtitles for the ebonically challenged, although the French and Spanish subtitles might come in handy.
If, however, one looks beyond the ghetto patois and clown-costumes, the truth is that most of these pimps aren’t stupid in the low-IQ sense. It takes some brains to run any kind of business, and some of the things they say are actually witty. Thus they probably have IQs above the African-American average of 85. This is useful, because if low IQ is taken out of the equation, it highlights other racial differences, particularly moral ones.
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Pimps aren’t necessarily stupid, but all of them are “moral imbeciles.” They manifest the Dark Triad of narcissism, sociopathy, and Machiavellianism.
The gaudy and extravagant peacocking of pimps is obviously narcissistic. The constant parade of expensive clown costumes and tasteless pimpmobiles is one of the most entertaining aspects of American Pimp.
The exploitation of women is obviously sociopathic. One of the funniest sequences of the film is where pimps explain the cut that whores get from their work. They are unanimous: “zero percent.” One of them asks, “How can I give you 100% of my pimpin’ unless you give me 100% of yo’ money?”
Pimps also take pride in their use of manipulation to control whores. Primarily, they use false promises and emotional manipulation. But they aren’t above beating them. One pimp, who is now a Christian minister, claims that if you don’t beat a whore, she’ll start thinking that you don’t care about her. Although I didn’t manage to catch it on my recent viewing, I recall one pimp says that he “didn’t steal nothin’ except bitches’ minds.” (Clearly, my ear for ebonics has gotten rusty.)
American Pimp doesn’t offer much insight into the psychology of the sad hookers who allow themselves to be exploited. By the looks of them, they are mostly below-average in the looks and IQ departments, although the vacant faces could be products of drug use. A large percentage of these women are white. Most of them want to have — or think they have — relationships with their pimps, which bespeaks a huge capacity for self-deception. Many hookers end up dead due to drug overdoses. Others are murdered. Still others end up in mental hospitals. One white hooker ended up married to her pimp. Although most of these women lack much potential, a decent society would protect them from such predators.
The most articulate pimp in the movie styles himself Gorgeous Dre. His real name is Andrè Taylor. He is clearly smarter than the average pimp. He’s also better looking and better dressed. Dre has a great patter about character, manliness, and integrity. One can almost forget he is a ruthless bottom-feeding sociopath. Later in the film, we revisit him in jail. He has been arrested for pimping and sleeping with a sixteen-year-old.
I was rather hoping Dre would be sentenced to life, and maybe shanked in the joint. But it turns out that he did less than a year. He has put his first-class bullshitting skills to good use. He is now a “life coach” and a “community organizer” in Seattle, working to make it easier for black people to commit crimes.
Near the end of the movie, we meet a white pimp, Dennis Hof, owner of the Moonlight Bunny Ranch and other legal Nevada brothels. Hof is clearly a major pervert, but he seems free of the black pimps’ Dark Triad traits. He is a businessman, not a parasite. The women who work for him do so for salaries. They are not manipulated and bullied into giving all their money to him. It is far more humane than the black system, but should a decent society allow even this sort of prostitution?
It is tempting for white people to view black pimps as pathological. But I think black pimps are authentic expressions of blackness. As outlaws, pimps reject white norms entirely. They can do what comes natural to them. Polygamy, the exploitation of women, and peacocking are all quite common in pre- and post-colonial Africa. So it makes sense that they would emerge spontaneously in black diaspora societies among subcultures that reject white norms.
I highly recommend American Pimp as an entertaining tour of the heart of darkness in America today. It definitely deserves a Blu-ray edition with improved picture and sound, as well as English subtitles.
The Unz Review, 2020
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13 Comments
Straying a bit off topic of the movie, but related to white women and black pimps…
Im an older 40something. My whole life, pop culture movies, TV etc, for as long as I can remember, (which would be the 70s but would also include older movies from the 60s that I saw growing up) have depicted white female prostitutes being pimped out by black men.
Gritty cop/detective movies and TV shows from the 70s and early 80s were particularly fond of that motif in their plot.
As I aged into young adulthood, I recollect going to strip clubs with friends, and often seeing one or more of the white dancers leaving the club with a black man, and noticed this occasionally even with Hooters girls getting in a car at the end of their shift. Often a black driver.
How has this been allowed to happen for so long? Did this kind of thing exist prior to the 60s? White women being trafficked by black men? How did it become an accepted fact of American life that young, wayward white women would come to seek out black men for whatever it is that pimps do. (I suppose it is to protect them?) Did white men do this for prostitution prior to integration? I guess the Italian mafia might have handled that kind of sleazy stuff.
What is the driving force that pushes these white women toward black men to fill this role? Is it simply because white men are generally too law abiding and respectable? Is it because we have a conscience?
I know drugs come into play. These women often get hooked on hard drugs, and this is their way of getting access to the drugs. They sell their bodies for the drugs, and the pimp is the provider. Wasn’t women’s liberation such a grand idea! Much better to sell your body for drugs to get by in life than to cook and clean for a husband.
There are so many aspects of modernity that we’ve all become so numb and accustomed to that we don’t give it a second thought. Sure, whores are nothing new, prostitution is the world’s oldest profession etc etc, but we’re supposed to be living in this progressive, liberal era where this kind of thing should be “fixed”, but rather than fix it, the system does everything it can to push more and more women out of families and marriages and into such horrible lifestyles, even going as far as to legitimize the “sex worker industry.”
This country really sucks.
It’s not just in America that this occurs, but in England (and presumably all of the British Isles) where I have visited several time. There, it is called “Grooming”, because young Black men, mostly Moslem, as well as Moslem Blacks — what a doubly awful combination — hit on White teen girls in malls, take them to McDonalds for lunch, and maybe buy them a piece of glitzy jewelry, to get them hooked, and make a meet-up date for the next day, etc. — you can see where this is going. It’s been reported on in the British press somewhat, though only right-wingers bring up the true statistics, that probably at least 500,000 girls have been involved over the years. Girls who have managed to survive the prostitution and the drugs also have reported on it, but no one really wants to get involved — ‘because it will upset the immigrants’! England is the country that does not allow its own flag to be flown anymore, because ‘it upsets the immigrants’! The flag is The Saint George Flag (named for the ‘real’ Saint George, not our newly-minted version), which is a red cross on a white field, dating back to the Crusades. The Crusades, of course, where White Europeans invaded the ‘Holy Land’ to open and guard pilgrimage routes to Jerusalem, were ‘offensive to the Moslems’, so that symbol still is. offensive even now It seems all Semitic peoples never forget any old grudge, ever, even if they move in with their so-called ‘oppressors’ and take their welfare — as well as getting ‘even’ with the White English people and other Europeans, by pressing their young teen girls into prostitution. This is something we seriously need to watch and to make known to the public, and stop it now!
” This country really sucks.” … I’m sorry, but that made me laugh. I said the exact same thing to my wife in two consecutive days. Glad it’s not just me.
I’ve known lots of hookers. All of them were doing it to get money for hard drugs.
As for pimps, they’re parasites. The lot of them should be gassed. So should pushers of heroin, crack, and meth.
Umm, maybe a bit broad? I can’t say I’ve known any hookers (which I identify with “street walkers”), but I have known (and known of) women who had “arrangements” with certain (upper class) men that to me sounded a lot like prostitution. They were absolutely doing it (no pun) for the money – not for drugs, but because there is a “market need”, and it beat working a real job. One might think of such women as “mistresses”, except that they serviced more than one man, and got paid – in cash, not dinners or vacations (though oftentimes the latter were there as extras).
I have a good friend who’s done such “sex work” for much of her life, even during the times when she’s had formal jobs. She knows it seems the same as “prostitution”, but she doesn’t consider it as such, as she doesn’t walk the streets, has never had a pimp, does not solicit, and is under no compulsion to service any man she doesn’t want to. Think Capote’s Holly Golightly (from Breakfast at Tiffany’s, esp the novella; I can’t recall if the Audrey Hepburn film makes her semi-prostitution clear). My friend is very health conscious, extremely sanitary (long before Covid, too!), and admirably frugal and financially responsible. As her looks have declined in middle age she has transitioned into a genuine job as a reasonably well-paid “administrative assistant”. She now has a sizable ‘nest egg’ for her eventual retirement (something no ‘pimpette’ is ever going to accumulate).
I once asked her why she did it. Like most, I suspect, she fell into it, dating a man who grew obsessed with her, even as she tired of him. Eventually and for a long time, they developed an “arrangement”. She’s highly intelligent (why I like her), and loves going out socially. She’s neither mannish nor a lesbian, but she also really likes sex, and said she was never (yet) satisfied with just one man. Why not make money off what she likes anyway? How exactly she is able to ‘transactionalize’ dating into a paid relationship is something she literally has been unable to explain to me. No woman ever propositioned me in that way, so I’m unclear how matters get established. But she’s had some pretty rich men – with some hilarious sexual tastes! – regularly paying her.
I agree, however, that blacks pimping and abusing white girls should be gassed, at the least.
What the conquering king is to the white man, the pimp is to the black man – the apotheosis of success both temporal and spiritual.
A fascinating commentary on a subject that most White women would never get anywhere near in their career-driven, suburban lives. And we need to know this, because when we are presented with the likes of Georgie Boy Floyd as being a saint, we need the ammunition of the truth, even if we can never state the truth openly to others in our mangled, multicultural abyss that’s passing as America right now.
It also, blessedly, presents a marvelous counterweight to Ms. Robin DiAngelo’s newly-penned tome currently taking White people to task — yet again — with “White Fragility”, which I am slowly making my way through reading, because I can’t take more than 5 or 10 pages at a time. I doubt I will ever see this film, though I probably really should make the effort. However, I do have an obligation to guard my psyche against extraneous horror.
There’s a lengthy thing about pimps on The Rialto Report, a well-done Web site on the history of porn, devoted mainly to U.S. and, more specifically, NYC-produced porn. I know most here don’t approve, but the Rialto site (named after a 70s and 80s 42nd Street porn theater) has some great interviews with and info about everyone involved, not just the “actors.” The Rialto Report people are using their expertise to consult with or maybe even produce new TV shows and movies about the “porno chic” days, ala Boogie Nights.
Ok, thanks for your time, I’ll show myself out.
https://www.therialtoreport.com/2017/06/18/gentleman-leisure/
I had seen this Rialto thing before, when it came out, but looking at it again, I realize the pimp looks a lot like Little Richard (RIP). He talks like him, too. “Me, me, me. They love my charming self, etc.” The black hustlers all act and talk like that. Such narcissistic peacocks. I’m a classic rock fan, though, so I can’t disown Richard.
Thanks for the link!
The “pimp” mentality is obnoxious, but it’s more realistic than the White liberal mentality — or the White conservative mentality for that matter. Pimps recognize and accept human nature for what it is and that is a strength anywhere or anytime.
This is a complicated comment and my reply is going to be nuanced.
I think one of the truly disgusting aspects of our modern age is that we have stopped applying social pressures and rules to “discipline” ourselves away from the less virtuous particulars of human nature. Yes, it is important to understand human nature, but that doesn’t mean that we should give in to it. If giving in to human nature is virtuous, then the greed and corruption of the political class is nothing to be concerned about, perhaps even something to be admired. I reject that. Greed is human nature, but we should fight it every step of the way.
Similarly, the base nature of women (who haven’t been taught self respect) is to use their sexuality to survive. Some would even call marriage a form of prostitution, because it amounts to trading sex for the security of a husband and provider…but there is a major difference. Marriage is monogamous, it is a social contract, and it serves the purpose of creating a family. The dregs of society, women who become prostitutes, do not seek security, they live a moment to moment, hand to mouth lifestyle that is as fleeting as their youthful beauty.
I’m not so naive as to think that this hasn’t always been a “thing” in one form or another. But I believe that humankind had kind of reached a peak in the first half of the 20th century, where for most women the shame of prostitution was something they could never imagine. Now we live in a world where there’s a good chance that your next door neighbor’s daughter has an “Only Fans” account or a premium Snapchat where she sells videos of herself masturbating to make extra money.
Human nature is something to be accepted and understood. But it’s also something that needs to be shamed and sometimes corrected.
Um, yeah. Kind of the whole message (OK, a big part of it) of Christianity.
“Nature is what we were put on earth to rise above.” Katherine Hepburn in The African Queen in response to Bogie’s quip about some habit of his (drinking? I forget) being “only natural.”