On Decadence: Bling Bling

Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery (W. W. Norton & Company, 1995), 111. Hereafter, page numbers will appear in-line.

Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics, vol. 17, no. 2 (1987): 64–81; 67, 66. Hereafter, page numbers will appear in-line.

New Jersey Journal, quoted in Arthur Zilversmit, The First Emancipation: The Abolition of Slavery in the North (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 143–44.

Tocqueville also wrote the following on the demands of freedom facing the newly freed: “a thousand new desires beset him, and he has not the knowledge and energy necessary to resist them.” Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: Vintage Books, 1945), 2:129; 1:344.

William Ellery Channing, A Selection from the Works of William E. Channing D. D (Boston: American Unitarian Association, 1855), 21.

Colored American, May 6, 1837.

Washington, Up from Slavery, 63.

For examples, see Thomas Hauser, “How bling-bling took over the ring,” The Guardian, January 9, 2005 →; and Jay Smooth, “Bling Etymology,” HipHopMusic.Com, April, 26, 2003 →.

Ronald Judy, “On the Question of Nigga Authenticity,” Boundary 2, vol. 21, no. 3 (Autumn 1994): 212. Hereafter, page numbers will appear in-line.