“Hoes can be hoed out, players can be played out, but pimp is for life”—The Pimp Phenomenon as Strategy of Identity Formation

Abstract

The pimp's ubiquity in popular and youth culture belies its divergent interpretations along racial lines. This article is an ethnographic study of how adolescents at a multiracial urban high school vary in their performance and interpretation of the pimp and how they create racialized identities through these variations. All peer groups studied understood the pimp as representing sexual prowess, but for the African American peer group, the pimp more importantly represented manipulation and generalized power. Departing from Goffman's concepts of performance and stigma, the study illustrates the limitations of both in capturing the racializing and empowering aspects of the pimp persona for the African American students who enacted it. Merging symbolic interaction with the poststructuralist concepts of identity as lodged in discourse and with performance as transgression, this article explains how adolescents' pimp performances produced identities that were informed by white supremacist logic but also subverted this logic in their construction of racial differences.