Wiggaz with attitude (WWA).

Since it's election time, the men of the moment are expected to make a foray or two into the music arena. Who knows what's going on in Bob Dole's acoustic skull when he is dragged into some Branson, Missouri, auditorium to lend an ear to Glenn Campbell cranking out "Wichita Lineman"? Or when his speechwriter makes him fulminate sourly against films he has never seen and hip-hop records he has never heard, and wouldn't recognize if they were blasted in his ear? For white lifers like Dole, any perceived weakness for popular music, especially black music, makes them seem like race traitors. Their handlers are people like the late Lee "the Hortonizer" Atwater, who know which blue notes to play on their guitars and which race cards to play in their campaign ads.

For Bill Clinton, music is less a liability than an obligatory item on his electoral dance card. Hence the complex blend of average white rock, classic crooning, and '60s soul acts at his recent 50th-birthday celebrations (including Hootie & the Blowfish, Tony Bennett, and Aretha Franklin). Then there's Bill's showy sax routine, which has just enough swing to pass muster but not enough to make you wonder. Best of all are the president's Elvis impersonations - almost as much of a minstrel show for white men of his generation as the original was in the 1950s.

Along the way, on the other hand, Clinton chides the gangsta tappers, primarily because he feels for the victims of their misogyny or homophobia. All of these are public feats of whiteness, not because he is unconsciously racist, but because referencing black music and culture is a way of confirming his own racial belonging. Clinton, after all, is not just a white politician who reaches out to communities of color to maintain electoral support. As a white, socially liberal male who came of age after civil rights, some involvement with black music makes his whiteness seem more rather than less natural.

Being Black or Latino or Asian or Indian also involves an unbroken response to white traits. This is an elementary principle of cultural formation in America, yet its inverse has seldom been applied to white culture, and is actively discouraged by the boil-in-the-bag models of multiculturalism that have succeeded the rusty old melting pot. The recent explosion of scholarship (David Roediger, Alexander Saxton, George Lipsitz, Toni Morrison, Eric Lott, Noel Ignatiev, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Ian F. Haney Lopez) on "whiteness" has shown the degree to which white people, who are in fact ethnically various, have played off the presence of nonwhites in order to establish a racial unity among their disparate selves. Moreover, as Robert Farris Thompson puts it, "to be white in America is to be very black," since most American cultural activities have become Africanized over the centuries. The process by which Europeans of all ethnicities became white in the course of becoming American took a lot of cultural work, and evolved in response to Indian policy, slavery, and immigration restrictions. Over time, whiteness became a valuable investment, and, consequently, more difficult to give up. This remains true today, when the economic annuities of whiteness include the cumulative legacies of discriminatory home-loan policies, urban renewal, highway-subsidized suburbanization, and federal tax changes that decreased wage income and increased the value of investment income.

Ever since the minstrel shows, black music has been central to establishing a sense of white unity. Several generations of white parents have worried that their children will cross the color line and never return: the recent panic about "wiggers" (white kids who act, talk, and dress black) strikes a familiar chord. But for quite some time now, white youths' dalliance with black music has been a rite of passage, and one of the more credible ways, in post-Modern culture, of ensuring that whiteness can still get respect. This ritual is so well established that large commercial markets sustained by popular music today depend on the existence of millions of white negroes. Of course, the economic horizons for youth of all races have contracted in recent years, so that black, brown, and white kids have a little more in common than they did in the days of the Beats. But music has always been equally powerful in separating people as in uniting them.

The game of using music to make fine-tuned racial discernments has become more and more complex. Its backdrop is the old game of "love and theft" that Lott defines as characteristic of white-black relations in minstrelsy, and that now lies at the commercial heart of popular culture. Among other things, this legacy helps explain the "go for self" attitude among tappers that aims at getting "paid in full" - a goal that is often disparaged both inside and outside hip-hop, but that can also be seen as a form of reparation for injustices of the past. It's no surprise that the world of hard-core rap is now polarized between the economic empires of Suge Knight's Death Row records in Los Angeles and Sean "Puffy" Combs' Bad Boy Entertainment in New York, and that their leading "playas," Tupac Shakur, Snoop Doggy Dogg, Dr. Dre (now independent), Biggie Smalls, and the Wu Tang Clan have actively fueled the East Coast-West Coast war with their personal threats and warnings of retribution. This is a commercial war, dwarfing the Motown-Stax rivalry of the 1960s, but it is built upon hip-hop principles - the sound-system battles between crews - that have an extensive lineage in black musical history. Let us not forget that the politicians' assault on rap took the form of direct industry pressure, to which Time Warner succumbed by selling off Death Row. When corporate giants are so easily manipulated, it's clear why we need independent black economic institutions with all the commercial ambition of their white equivalents.

Recent musical responses to the attacks on rap have taken a number of forms. One has been to stand firm and to beef up the gangsta posturing and ghetto-representin'. Another has been to bet on the next "alternative rap" horse, in the form of acts like the Fugees. Then there is the challenge of jungle, arguably the first musical genre to emerge from the black British working class that is not obviously derivative of West Indian or American genres (although it pays homage to both the nonlyrical density of dub and the friskiness of free jazz). Above all, there has been a massive transfer of energy and attention away from hip-hop into the lush harmonizing genres of swingbeat, a capella, and sweet-and-spice soul. Sleek multipart harmonies from Silk, Solo, Shai, Jodeci, Total, Immature, and the Whitehead Brothers; solo romancing from Tony Rich, D'Angelo, Faith, Michael Speaks, Toni Braxton, Babyface, Brandy, and Maxwell; and rough-edged R&B from R. Kelly, Montell Jordan, Monica, Aaron Hall, and Mary J. Blige are ruling the airwaves and charts. Most telling, rap's big new phenom, Bone Thugs 'n Harmony, comes in the form of rugged harmonizing with a good dose of nonsecular medicine.

Like jungle's drum and bass esthetic, the new black pop focuses on a technique - harmonizing - that has a rich history in black music. Just as important, perhaps, the new harmonies are disdained by the hip white-male kids who got high on street rap's attitude. Neither jungle nor New Harmony corresponds to the romance of protest music that elevated street rap into the pantheon of rebel rock. This can partly be seen as a deflection of white interest, but, as in dub, it is also an expression of the idea that the ghetto cannot be represented. While the hip-hop contest over "keeping it real" is wearing thin in 1996, the new, honeyed R&B styling is rapidly shifting the scene from the street to the bedroom. The boudoir mood of romancing follows the recurrent swing in black music away from conflict and anger to sensitivity and sexual healing.

If white identity is verified in part by immersion in black music, some component of black identity is reaffirmed when the music shifts to avoid or deflect white love and theft. This has always been an unequal traffic, but popular music remains one of the few places where things really are a little mixed up, racially speaking. While it would be naive to mistake this for a model of a multiracial society, the lessons are too eloquent to ignore.

Andrew Ross contributes this column regularly to Artforum.