2011, Cash Money Content,158 pages
In the late 1960s Iceberg Slim wrote Pimp, about which he was interviewed on network television. He then wrote Trick Baby, about the rise of a con man Johnny O’Brian, named White Folks, who was “the blue-eyed, white-skinned niցցer con man from the Big Windy,” who had been mentored by black Blue Howard.
The White Folks novels comprise a tutorial on how to get over on the white man by turning his own rigged game against him. Although the period jargon is not the same, and Johnny O’Brian, and Iceberg Slim for that matter, would not even rate as gangsters in today’s game, Long White Con is an expose of the enemy of the author’s people, the multilayered corporate/political/ law-enforcement/criminal system. In many ways this is little different from other novels and movies of the same era obsessed with stings, heists, and big cons—like a black 1970s Oceans Eleven.
A key way Long White Con pays it truer than standard fare in the genre is the narrative device of regarding the subject of the rip-off as simply “the mark” through most of the story. He is not even regarded as human by the narrative voice. This book was written by a social predator, who understood that a whore was only a whore and not a person, as was “the mark.”
For example, in The Naked Soul of Iceberg Slim the author declares, “I suddenly realized that I had lost all power over her and therefore in her cold-blooded whore judgment I was just another customer, a chump john.”
Consider that the young gangsters that trained the thugs, who mentored the thugs, who directed the recent Baltimore riots and purges, having predicted the establishments every move, very likely used the writings of Iceberg Slim—or an author or rapper influenced by him—to gain an understanding of the vulnerabilities of the liberal white slave system that was brought to its knees by a mob of high school children—none of whom will be charged or tried for a crime.
Johnny O’Brian is a fun character, and a good window on the parasitic world. But the best part of this book is the preface, in which Iceberg Slim is saved by White Folks in the nick of time, just as “Big Apple rotten, glossy and slick as ermine droppings,” a “ho” reporter from new York who was flown out to interview Slim in LA, was setting him up for a rape charge, and a beating by the LAPD, just to get a story, because that’s how the white establishment rolls.
I leave you with one typical line from Iceberg Slim, concerning this curvaceous white woman seemingly designed to entrap black man in a sex scandal, and launched across 3,000 miles at a former pimp minding his own business.
“She handcuffed her breath for an instant. You know, like one of those closet bisexual whores in Long Island emoting snob outrage at the visual atrocity of some lackey peasant sneaking a crap in the shrubbery.”
If you would like to understand the depth of black American antipathy toward “the system” and would also like to be entertained by some slick offbeat prose, try Iceberg Slim.
Salient & Sage:
There is no judgment here, simply strategy exposed:
"Consider that the young gangsters that trained the thugs, who mentored the thugs, who directed the recent Baltimore riots and purges, having predicted the establishments every move, very likely used the writings of Iceberg Slim—or an author or rapper influenced by him—to gain an understanding of the vulnerabilities of the liberal white slave system that was brought to its knees by a mob of high school children—none of whom will be charged or tried for a crime."
"Directed" + "predicted" + "vulnerabilities" + "slave system" + "brought to its kness" = *TRUTH* ...
This guy could really write. I was impressed, and glad you liked the review Jim—I pretty much stumble through them and hope it works.