Needed: A Replacement for ‘Pimp’
By Jabari Asim
The Washington Post
Thursday, March 9, 2006
The best thing about Three 6 Mafia winning an Oscar for Best Song is the likelihood of “pimp” losing its luster of hipness.
While the prospect of previously oblivious whites adopting the word is a nauseating probability, the mainstreaming of “pimp” should reduce its popularity in the black communities where it first shucked its cobwebs and regained its currency. Its anticipated lapse in popularity creates an opportunity to suggest new lingo to my fellow African-American city dwellers, who often originate the nation’s catchiest slang.
My first suggestion: “scholar.”
Imagine yourself amid all the men who used to gather aimlessly on street corners, lounge on the steps of other people’s houses and hang out with the rest of the worshipful congregations outside package liquor stores — all of you deeply absorbed in library books.
Except you can top them all by trundling down the street with — you guessed it — a wheelbarrow almost overflowing with the latest volumes by our nation’s best authors.
You’ll help to popularize an exciting new trend. Once it catches on in “urban” neighborhoods, it will inevitably “cross over” into white ones and, before you know it, openly building one’s intellectual muscles will be known as “acting black.”
You can win friends and influence people — plus earn the undying admiration of the women in your neighborhood who are pining for an intelligent, well-read mate — by handling your load with a mixture of staunch self-discipline and weary resignation.
“Say, brother,” one of your fellow intellectuals might say, “looks like you have quite a bit of studying to do this fine evening.”
“You’re right,” you might reply. “I could be off luring vulnerable women into an exploitative economic relationship based on the trading of sex for money — behavior that would benefit neither myself, the hapless women or all those desperate, duplicitous and disease-spreading customers who should be home with their wives and children. But what can I tell you? It’s hard out here for a scholar.”