The absorption of Black Language and Culture by White America has been dubbed “crossover.” While the label is new, and while it has been accelerated by the twentieth-century evolution of technology and mass media, the process is as old as the African Holocaust itself. In his history of African American Language, linguist J.L. Dillard (1972) tracked young White Americans’ borrowings from the speech of Africans during and after enslavement. During the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s-a period in which the Negro was so-called “in vogue”—Whites flocked uptown to Harlem clubs and cabarets to immerse themselves in the language, music and culture of the “New Negro.” In 1957, White writer Norman Mailer, who came to be celebrated for his critical, awardwinning novels, published a bombshell essay in Dissent magazine.