From the Annals of Anthroman

Blogging like a Beast?!

2011-11-28T17:46:00.001-05:00

Martha Marcy May Marlene is a film about a young woman trying desperately (and unsuccessfully) to recover from her traumatic stint as a member of a rural cult, sexual concubine of its charismatic spiritual leader. It is one of those “art house” movies that ended with surprisingly little warning. When the closing credits began, audience members gasped. “What?” “You’re kidding me!” “Is that really it?” That’s only what I heard in the theater seats nearest my own. And I laughed, because I knew exactly what they were reacting to.

The writer had taken us on a complex and nerve-racking journey with the film’s female protagonist (who, at different moments in the story, answers to each one of the names that make up the film’s title). By the “end” of the story, our filmmaker hasn’t really provided us with any resolution. There is no simple (artificial?) closure to the narrative, just a final tension-filled scene rife with unanswered questions and uncertain outcomes.

It isn’t necessarily the way we’re taught to write screenplays, but it was a valuable reminder of what some good storytellers try do accomplish. And how.

Many people have made the claim, but it bears repeating: Good writers write like beasts. They don’t worry about the “audience” in any simplistic and condescending sense. And they certainly don’t care to placate them. They write without self-consciousness (at least, without the kind of self-conscious anxiety that allows for any too-precious preoccupations with making readers happy).

As I craft one of my final few Brainstorm blog postings this week, my final week as a Brainstorm blogger, I can’t help but think about all the interesting and energizing exchanges I’ve had with Chronicle readers over these past few years. From posts about the potentially racist underpinnings of “Obama-as-anti-Christ” rhetoric back in 2008 to a knock-down blog-brawl (played out over several postings) sparked by some comments I made about attending an academic conference, from defenders of Michelle Malkin keen on rebutting my (passing) characterization of her work to more recent debates about Herman Cain’s theories of race and class, one of the most conspicuous features of the blog (as platform and/or genre) is its almost immediately dialogical linkage of readers and writers.

Anthropologist Johannes Fabian has discussed the possibility that on-line exchanges between researchers and research subjects, exchanges modeled on the back-and-forth interactions between bloggers and blog readers, might be the beginning of the end for traditional forms of ethnographic writing, differently configuring those conventional relationships in radically new ways.

At its best, the interactivity of the blog format clears space for the rehearsal of real debates and differences of opinion, especially when the anonymity of the Web doesn’t help foment the worst forms of unproductive incivility. I really have enjoyed my time on the blog, and I feel like it taught me to think about writing in a very meaning-filled way, especially when readers made good-faith efforts to challenge some of my positions. (Even the responses that I’d describe as more like “bad faith” offerings were sometimes useful.)

At the same time, however, I realize that I used to feel as though I wrote (or, at least, tried to write) like a beast, with a cultivated indifference committed to getting my point across as honestly as possible (come what may). Although I have always tried to be honest in my Brainstorm posts, I certainly didn’t feel the freedom to write without self-consciousness, without having to worry about which readerly eyes stood in my path. On the contrary, I feel like I have gotten increasingly more self-conscious over the course of my blogging stint, which I know isn’t necessarily how everyone responds to this platform and its many possibilities (and may not, ultimately, be the worst thing). Sometimes that heightened self-consciousness found me pandering to the gods of sensationalist punditry, trying to be purposefully provocative (even unnecessarily harsh and fairly mean-spirited) as a way to drum up more explicit comments from readers. Any response seemed better than none.

At other times, I started (or conceived of) many posts that I never finished/published, all too mindful of how many colleagues actually look at the Chronicle‘s blogs. If some of these same sentences were tucked into a book that few people ever read, I wouldn’t have to worry about getting a series of emails and phone calls after the writing, which also became a kind of immediate gratification that was, at times, far too intoxicating.

All of this meant blogging less and less like a “beast” every single day. It would be the equivalent of being a filmmaker forced to sit in the theater and listen to audiences complain about the inexplicable ending to your latest movie. You experience that immediate feedback often enough (the audible gasps, the palpable disappointments), and you start to hear those same complaints at your computer screen as you work on the next project. Even positive responses, received as the film’s final credits roll, over-determine a self-conscious writer’s subsequent decisions. Such hauntings can be the kiss of death to any would-be author, and they are incredibly hard to exorcise.

Sacred Bundle 2.0: Anthropology Online

2011-11-04T15:35:00.001-04:00

Oxford University Press has launched a new and ambitious on-line project, Oxford Bibliographies Online, which attempts to provide scholars, students, and other interested readers with introductions to important topics and themes from many academic fields/disciplines. Atlantic History, Criminology, Communication, Philosophy and Sociology are among the modules already available. Later this month, Political Science and Psychology go live, with Education soon to follow.

Anthropology is slated for release early in 2012, and I have agreed to help editor that particular module. Oxford was able to put together a strong editorial board for the project, which included scholars from all four of American anthropology's major sub-fields: archaeology, linguistic anthropology, physical/biological anthropology and cultural anthropology. These nine scholars helped to select and vet the entries on various topics (including Applied Anthropology, Cultural Evolution, Public Archaeology, Language Ideology, and Globalization). All in all, OBO's Anthropology site will launch with 50 entries penned by scholars from across the country and the world, including Michael Herzfeld on "Nationalism," Vernon J. Williams on "Franz Boas," Jeremy Sabloff on "Public Archaeology," Neni Panourgia on "Interpretive Anthropology," Kudzo Gavua on "Ethnoarchaeology," "John Trumper on "Ethnoscience," and Christina Campbell on "Primatology" (just to name a random few).

Once the site launches, four anthropologists (Marcus Banks, Maria Franklin, Jonathan Marks, and Bambi Schieffelin) have signed on to help read new entries (about 25 or so will be added every year), and our authors and editors will all update entries as necessary (when new titles merit inclusion or emergent debates in specialties demand discussion). The idea is to make these entries living, breathing documents that morph with ongoing reconfigurations of our discipline.

I only agreed to assist in this effort because I was intrigued by the idea of re-familiarizing myself with the so-called "four fields of anthropology" mentioned above. As a graduate student at Columbia in the 1990s, I was trained in a four-field department, even though I could get away with doing coursework in only two of those sub-fields. And after teaching for four years in Duke University's Department of Cultural Anthropology (where we all seemed to be in the same scholarly conversations), I am back in a four-field department that demands grad students pass exams in all of the sub-fields, one of the few programs in the country with such a stipulation.

Although I don't consider anthropology's four fields a "sacred bundle" never to be dis-assembled under any circumstances, I am intrigued by the idea of forcing myself to learn more about the four farthest corners of this sprawling and hubris-filled discipline that imagines itself to cut across the humanities, the social sciences and the natural sciences.

Oxford's new initiative will allow anthropologists to think about how much (or how little?) we might really gain from conversations across the intradisciplinary domains that often divide us. OBO's intervention will help us to see how Physical Anthropologists and Cultural Anthropologists might differently approach topics such as "race" or "gender." Or we can determine what kind of reviewer an urban anthropologist working in contemporary Latin America would make for a piece on the histories of cities crafted by an archaeologist.

I'm intrigued to see what (hopefully productive) sparks might fly from such contact, and I've already learned so much about those other anthropological spheres during the build-up to near year's OBO launch. So, if you are an anthropologist gearing up for this month's AAA meeting in Montreal, please know that I might be asking you to contribute to this attempt at a somewhat experimental four-field rendering of our discipline's scholarly world. And please consider taking part.

LA Screening of my new documentary this Friday...

2011-10-21T22:32:00.001-04:00

Bad Friday: Rastafari after Coral Gardens (63 mins.)
A documentary film
Directed by Deborah A. Thomas and John L. Jackson, Jr.
Produced by John L. Jackson, Jr., Deborah A. Thomas, and Junior "Gabu" Wedderburn

When: Screening in Los Angeles at 2pm on October 28th, 2011

Where: Laemmle’s Sunset 5
8000 Sunset Boulevard
West Hollywood, California 90046
www.laemmle.com
Theater #5: Seating capacity is 198

Online ticket sales begin October 7, 2011. For complete details visit our website at www.hbff.org.

Ticket Prices
$15 Screening Tickets*
$11 Children under 12/Seniors/Military/Students w/ID
$11 Matinees before 4:00 p.m.

SHORT SYNOPSIS
Bad Friday chronicles the history of violence in Jamaica through the eyes of its most iconic community – Rastafari – and shows how people use their recollections of the Coral Gardens “incident” in 1963 to imagine new possibilities for the future.

LONG SYNOPSIS
For many around the world, Jamaica conjures up images of pristine beach vacations with a pulsating reggae soundtrack. The country, however, also has one of the highest per capita murder rates in the world, and the population is actively grappling with legacies of Western imperialism, racial slavery, and political nationalism – the historical foundations of contemporary violence in Jamaica and throughout the Americas. Bad Friday focuses on a community of Rastafarians in western Jamaica who annually commemorate the 1963 Coral Gardens “incident,” a moment just after independence when the Jamaican government rounded up, jailed and tortured hundreds of Rastafarians. It chronicles the history of violence in Jamaica through the eyes of its most iconic community, and shows how people use their recollections of past traumas to imagine new possibilities for a collective future.

REVIEWS
“Bad Friday is live evidence for reparations from the Government of Jamaica for the Coral Gardens atrocity of 11 April 1963. The Prime Minister Sir Alexander Bustamante’s order to “Bring in all Rastas, dead or alive!” is a crime against humanity that should not be forgotten.” - Ras Iyah V and Ras Flako, Rastafari Coral Gardens Committee

“Amidst the proliferation of films on Rasta, none have managed to fathom the Rastafari experience of their Jamaican Babylon like Bad Friday. Now that Rasta is an increasingly co-opted global culture, this is as close as the untutored will get to understanding the meanings of being ‘Dread’ during the pre- reggae period when adherents were viewed as a ‘cult of outcasts’ and routinely victimized. A powerful and timely historical document that speaks to the ways that remembering-and-forgetting continue to shape Jamaica’s post-colonial identity.“ - Jake Homiak, Curator of ‘Discovering Rastafari’, Smithsonian Institution

“By bringing to us the poignant testimony of the men and women who witnessed and whose lives were forever scarred by these events, Bad Friday obliges us to confront the shocking level of state violence that was unleashed against not only the individuals involved, but also against the entire Rastafarian community of Jamaica. Now, thanks to this evocative film, we are able to appreciate the full horror of the events from that distant time and what they portended. I salute and congratulate everyone involved in the making of this redemptive and truly valuable work of historical memory.” - Robert A. Hill, University of California, Los Angeles

Is Herman Cain Racist?

2011-10-18T15:58:00.002-04:00

cross-posted @ The Chronicle.

I’m not following the lead up to 2012′s presidential election the way I hung on every Democratic and Republican candidate’s words in 2006 and 2007. Even still, it is hard to miss the major headlines, no matter how much one might try: Obama’s plunging poll numbers, critiques of Romney’s religious persuasion, Rick Perry’s n-worded family home, and the conspicuously growing journalistic indifference to anything at all Bachmann-related.

Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 tax plan might have gotten panned by several of his fellow candidates during last night’s Republican debate (including Bachmann’s likening it to a version of the Biblical “mark of the beast”), but it is the continued public “controversy” around Cain’s take on racism in America that seems to have everyone up in arms right now.

This all started when Cain dismissed racism as a significant cause for African-American marginalization. “I don’t believe that racism today holds anybody back in a big way.” That was the way he put it last week on Fox News.

Add to this the fact that just yesterday Cain characterized his black detractors as “more racist than the white people that they’re claiming to be racist,” a rehashing of chicken-egg counter-accusations of racism:

“You’re a racist.”

“Oh yeah, well, then you’re a racist for calling me a racist.”

“See what I mean. Only a racist would believe that.”

Of course, Cain’s comments about racism are unintelligible if disconnected from his consistent slamming of the “Occupy Wall Street” movement as a form of seemingly anti-American class warfare, a conspiracy between “unions and Obama supporters to distract the American people from the real problem, which is the failed policies of the Obama administration.”

Just this Monday, Cain spoke with conservative commentator Sean Hannity about the Occupy Wall Street protesters. “They’re trying to legitimize themselves by comparing themselves to the Tea Party movement,” he claimed. “There is absolutely no comparison.” According to Cain, the Tea Party represents a legitimate form of political opposition and civic engagement, but the Occupy Wall Streeters are rabble-rousing thugs, a merely apolitical mob.

It is a position shared by the black conservative pundit (can’t remember his name) who was on MSNBC last night complaining about all the public sex acts, violence, and other illegalities taking place under the banner of the Wall Street crowd. These exact same characterizations were mobilized by many conservative pundits during the Civil Rights Era to dismiss that movement as insincere and degenerate, as full of little more than sex freaks and criminals.The response to such dismissals is often the same: How can an African-American such as Cain (or that aforementioned and unnamed MSNBC pundit) celebrate an "anti-Obama" Tea Party over and against other forms of social protestation about social inequality and corporate greed?

Do figures like Cain represent a form of internalized anti-black racism, which is the critique that Cain seems most keen on challenging? Or is it simply (as if any of this were simple) a case of class-interests trumping racial solidarity for a wealthy former-CEO of a national fast food chain? The party/candidate that wins this ongoing debate about the relative significance of race vs. class for contemporary American society might just end up with the next set of keys to the White House.

Doing Diversity DIfferently

2011-09-25T09:22:00.001-04:00

Many universities operationalize their commitments to “diversity” in curious and conflicted ways.

In some academic quarters, the term has traditionally meant diversifying standing faculties and student bodies on college campuses by increasing the number of underrepresented minorities, but diversity is one of those ideals that people sometimes accept much more readily in theory than in practice, a principle supported in the abstract but harder to justify as a hard-and-fast campus policy with any real teeth to it, especially with legal threats of “reverse discrimination” lurking in the shadows.

Campuses debate the very meaning of diversity these days, some seeing calls for, say, “internationalization” as a calculated attempt to replace ongoing university commitments to U.S.-based minority recruitment, others asking specifically for “ideological diversity” to address the low number of self-described “conservatives” teaching at many elite colleges and universities.

Some of these same schools end up crafting faculty diversity initiatives that might seem to go against the grain of their institutions’ regular hiring practices, counting and categorizing bodies and subsequently creating search committees to lure accomplished scholars (especially scholars of color) from other places.

The next trick, upon locating interesting candidates, entails convincing relevant departments to consider hiring them. If the names are big enough, the CV’s impressive enough, a department might acquiesce. But there are several reasons why such a strategy, though arguably laudable for its directness and relative simplicity, may be a bit short-sighted.

We could think of central administrations as the academic equivalent of our federal government, which is an analogy that would make specific departments akin to individual states. And in such a strained metaphorical context, just about every single faculty member we’d ever meet would be a staunch advocate for states’ rights. So any extra-departmental recommendations about future hires are usually treated as infringements on departmental autonomy, which they are, as academically unconstitutional (and unconscionable). If the departments didn’t come up with those names on their own, there will almost certainly be a contingent of faculty members with a vested interest in thwarting the hires in question, and sometimes just on general principle. Of course, part of the problem is that some of those very same departments have a hard time coming up with any “diverse” job candidates on their own, often chalking it up to deficiencies in the pipeline.

But if universities are trying to identify “diverse” bodies in such ways, they may be setting themselves up for failure in the long-term, and not just because of any willfully obstructionist faculty. (Of course, at a time of ever-shrinking resources, departments might take new faculty lines any way they can get them.)

The very process of having special hires for minority candidates makes the entire thing look like a “political” move and not an “intellectual” one, regardless of the caliber of the candidates in question (and even though all faculty hires are political and intellectual at the same time). Such a targeted process can feel qualitatively different from normal hiring practices, reinforcing a kind of ghettoized mentality about the entire endeavor.

Indeed, once universities have gotten to the point of looking for bodies qua bodies, they may have already lost the diversity battle.

For example, one of the reasons why departments aren’t as diverse as they could be might pivot on the intellectual projects and objectives that those departments privilege (or not), the way they prioritize their needs and intellectual goals for the future. It is an empirical question, but I wouldn’t be surprised, for example, to find out that there might be a kind of mismatch in many social science fields between what scholars of color are interested in studying and what departments are interested in hiring. If nothing else, it might make sense to have more conversations within academic departments about how five-year plans and statements of departmental goals may frame certain intellectual questions (and the scholars who pose them) out of serious consideration in terms of future departmental growth.

x-listed @ The Chronicle of Higher Education

The End of the World: Next Week?

2011-05-13T21:18:00.003-04:00

image from kingdomexclusion.com/

Some people invoke the ancient Mayans to contend that the world’s expiration date is quickly approaching, but there are other arguments afoot these days about just how imminent such an end might be. You may have seen the billboards for one of them: Family Radio’s declaration that Judgment Day is “guaranteed” to begin (and quite conspicuously) on May 21st, 2011.

I have been completely fascinated by this proclamation ever since I first heard Harold Camping’s matter-of-fact declaration earlier this year (while surfing the FM dial on a drive up to NYC). Camping is a long-time Christian radio broadcaster who has been a mainstay at Family Radio since the early 1960s. Shuffling through broadcast options in my Saturn, I knew Camping’s voice as soon as I heard it, mostly because I grew up on it. Extended family members always seemed to have his program on in their homes, so much so that it served as part of the soundtrack to my childhood (explaining, I’m sure, many of my subsequent scholarly interests).

Hearing Camping’s distinctive voice earlier this year (some 20 years or so after the last time) made me immediately nostalgic. And then I heard his claim, which wasn’t being argued back in the 1980s and 90s (as far as I can remember), about the earth being slated for destruction next week, and that was it. I was riveted, spending the next hour listening to his contentious debates with listeners about the veracity of that spectacular prediction.

Camping claims the Bible provides “absolute proof” that the Rapture will take place a week from this Saturday, and that God will then destroy the entire planet (and even the universe) on October 21st, five months later. This is God’s plan for the end of the world, Camping argues, and it is a function of our planet’s “wickedness.” Even still, his theological position is quite clear about our agency in the matter. God chose the elect (in a predestinationist sense) at the beginning of time, about 200 million people in all, and his choices are a function of his own opaque will, not any of our actions, good ones or bad.

Camping is considered something of a heretic in certain Christian circles (for allegedly claiming that the Holy Spirit has no connection to most institutionalized Christian churches/denominations today). And he supposedly set a previous date for the Lord’s return, which was slated for 1994.

Family Radio is a religious radio network that spans over 100 markets in the United States, so I’m sure that hundreds of thousands (maybe even millions) of people have gotten a whiff of Camping’s new date.

I should also say that I am particularly primed for such premilleniallist talk. I grew up Seventh-Day Adventist, which emerged out of the Millerite movement’s inaccurate 19th century prediction of God’s return. They picked a date and organized their entire lives around preparing for it.

I’m currently working on a book about a group of African-Americans who made similar predictions in the late 20th century, a group that has built a vibrant transnational community on top of those earlier pronouncements. So you can see why I am particularly drawn to such contemporary contentions.

I recently relayed Camping’s claim to a friend of mine, someone who isn’t a practicing Christian and doesn’t have much patience for predictions about the future based on interpretations of religious texts. Even still, he laughed, shook his head, and added, “but given how crazy things have been lately [by which, I think, he meant the chain-reaction of uprisings in the Middle East, the Tsunami in Japan (and its nuclear aftermath), and the global financial crisis, amongst other things], I’ll probably wake up on May 22nd with a slight sigh of relief.”

I hate Jazz Music

2011-04-02T06:45:00.002-04:00

I’ve always wanted to start a piece of writing with that one provocation—maybe a bit of creative nonfiction, maybe a would-be short story.

My purposefully dismissive declaration is meant to mark a two-fold resentment. First, not being a musician myself, I privilege jazz’s vocalists over its virtuosic drummers, saxophonists, and trumpeters, and for many jazz purists, that is my initial mistake: I want to hear Louis Armstrong sing more than blow his horn. Nina Simone, Arthur Prysock, Ella Fitzgerald, and Billie Holiday are towering figures, no doubt, with huge and loyal followings, but the Miles Davises and John Coltranes and Thelonius Monks undeniably define the music’s canonical core, especially for many would-be connoisseurs. And there begins my second complaint.

At its most pretentious, jazz music sometimes gets mobilized (by a few of those aforementioned connoisseurs) to justify pompous brands of social sifting, a snobby elitism that functions as the class-coded policing of authentic African American cultural production. No other music, the claim goes, can hold a candle to its essential (and even existential) distillation of African American angst and aspiration. If the blues demands respect for its straightforward and vernacular profundities, jazz adds a learned and well-heeled dose of proficiency to the mix. And neither one is hip-hop, still occasionally invoked as “the anti-jazz.”

In the not-so-distant past, musician Wynton Marsalis and cultural critic Stanley Crouch were the most vocal proponents of jazz’s qualitative difference from (and superiority over) hip-hop. Crouch, also an avid fan of the blues, has mused publicly about the “retarding effect” of hip-hop, a genre that, according to Crouch, takes relatively little talent and profits from the denigration of black culture. Marsalis has gone on record dismissing hip-hop as little more than “a safari for people who get their thrills from watching African-American people debase themselves, men dressing in gold, calling themselves stupid names like Ludacris or 50 Cent, spending money on expensive fluff.”

“Jazz vs. hip-hop” is just one instantiation of a slow-burning intra-racial class warfare played out on the boneless (and, therefore, flexible) back of popular culture, pivoting on the politics of respectability in mixed-raced company. Jazz is one black middle-class response to the threat of racial inauthenticity, its trump-card rejoinder to the equally problematic assumption that urban poverty is singularly constitutive of legitimate African-American subjectivity. And this is true even if the black middle class is deemed unable or unwilling to sustain jazz music, which leads to discussions (at least in Spike Lee joints) about the extent to which jazz has become “white music,” i.e., supported by mostly white audiences.

Hop-hop artists Jazzy Jeff and M1 joined academics Jesse Shipley and Wilfredo Gomez at Haverford College last night to talk about hip-hop’s image, history, and technological innovations. Not only that, they placed their thoughts about hip-hop into conversation with other cultural practices and musical genres (though we didn’t hear that much about jazz).

I only bring this all up because the journal Transforming Anthropology has just published a special-issue on New Orleans that, amongst other things, contextualizes “popular culture” (jazz, hip-hop, and Mardi Gras) with recourse to larger questions about post-Katrina life in that region. (The opening of this post is an excerpt from my own piece in that volume.)

This new issue of TA is worth reading, especially since it includes a moving series of articles on the scholarship of Antonio Lauria. I’m not sure what Lauria knows about hip-hop (or if he shares any of my concerns about how jazz gets deployed in the “class wars”), but his research certainly has had a lasting impact on Caribbean anthropology. And beyond.

Disrespected, Take Two

2011-02-26T15:46:00.005-05:00

(cross-posted at The Chronicle of Higher Education.)

I wanted to take a second to acknowledge the responses to my most recent post (about complaints several senior black faculty have expressed to me about their treatment in the academy). I appreciate the discussion that it has sparked, and I definitely want to follow-up on some comments and questions.

goxewu thematizes one prominent (and very reasonable) response to my blog post: that it is just too doggone vague and ambiguous. Mere “blind-quote journalism,” goxewu writes, wanting more specificity to be convinced that there’s anything close to a there there. “There is a middle ground,” he writes, “between complete vagueness and anonymity (which is what Professor Jackson has now) and blowing everyone’s cover.”

Responding to trendisnotdestiny’s question about whether bringing the topic up at all might be enough, goxewu responds: “I’m going to be a little more severe here: Prof. Jackson is essentially saying, “I know a lot of important black professors at elite schools and they confide in me. So take my word for it that in our private conversations, where they let their hair down like they wouldn’t with anybody else, they complain about racial disrespect.”

Then goxewu begins a debate about the similarities and differences between a “paid blogger and a journalist,” arguing that the two are equivalent, which means, he contends, that I am obliged to provide more proof to ground my piece.

marktropolis, who always has great feedback in such moments, pushed back against that blogger-as-journalist claim, but he agreed that it might be useful for me to add more particulars to my story.

Several people wonder if I can go back and get some quotes, or at least add some more details to the descriptions of the faculty I’m invoking.

Then Marc B and Marktropolis have a discussion about the role (and potential cause) of under-representation in academia, a theme I invoke in the post. (And thanks, MB, for the link to your piece from the minnesota review. I just printed it out for an upcoming train ride.)

“But what causes under-representation? Every time I give a talk,” Marc B writes, “whether it’s at an Ivy League school or a community college, you can hear a pin drop when I ask folks to speculate about a truth that everyone present already knows: Why are police departments more diverse than history departments?” Other commentators, including marktropolis, try to answer that question.

Several other comments reinforce the idea that more of the story needs to be told. Professor Chuck Kleinhans wants more specifics and asks whether or not Clarence Thomas might be read as similarly disrespected (and in race-inflected ways), the latter comment spawning a series of sub-debates about the Supreme Court Justice’s relative ideological autonomy (with marktropolis explaining his skepticism about “bringing Clarence Thomas into this thread” and livefreeordie2 contending that marktropolis is disrespecting Thomas).

joelcairo calls for “a full-blown ethnographic study” on the topic, which I do find intriguing. And wilkenslibrary asks about the degree to which “distinguished black women faculty feel as disrespected as their male counterparts.”

Thanks for the comments, and here’s what I’m going to do. I’ll make a few phone calls this weekend and early next week to see if any of these scholars might allow me to provide more substantive details about their stories/sagas (without compromising their anonymity). Maybe I can even get someone to let me post a short Q&A with him about his particular concerns. In fact, someone might even be willing to go public in a less anonymous way, but I’ll find out. I’ll also try to chat with some distinguished black female scholars about their lives in the academy. See what I get. In many ways, what struck me about the scholars I brought up in my post was the fact that these stories were decidedly unsolicited, but it might still be valuable to ask some female faculty, point blank, about their own experiences.

For now, let me just say that three of the scholars I mentioned are at Ivy League institutions, four more work at research institutions on the East Coast or the Midwest, and one teaches in the University of California system. A little more specificity, with possibly more to come.

Disrespected?!

2011-02-26T15:46:00.004-05:00

(cross-posted at The Chronicle of Higher Education.)

For the past year or so, I’ve been inadvertently collecting unpleasant and disconcerting stories from senior black faculty. These stories have come mainly (though not exclusively) from men, most of whom are incredibly accomplished and wildly influential in their fields. These academics are housed in several different disciplines across the humanities and social sciences, and their confidential disclosures demonstrate real unhappiness about their treatment in the academy.

If I had to use one word to describe how these aforementioned scholars feel, it would be disrespected, profoundly disrespected.

In these narratives, senior scholars of color describe themselves as under-appreciated by administrators, relatively marginalized (and even maligned) by fellow colleagues, and somewhat alienated from other experts in their fields.

The first time I heard such a tale, over lunch at a coffee shop in California, I tried to dismiss it as an isolated incident, one person’s idiosyncratic experience. Maybe he was just being hypersensitive. Or I could have caught him on a particularly bad (and non-representative) day. But then I sat across from a few more senior scholars (in Michigan and Massachusetts, in New York and North Carolina) with similar stories to tell (of humiliating slights interpreted as race-based disrespect), and I had to admit that something more was going on than what some might imagine as a lone faculty member’s thin-skinned bellyaching.

Of course, most of these scholars are sharing such stories with me (as their relatively junior colleague) for my own good, in hopes of steeling me for a similar (potential) future of professional discontent. Their point: No amount of publishing productivity or public notoriety exempts one from the vulnerabilities and burdens that come with under-representation in the academy.

In all but one instance, these scholars weren’t lamenting the stain of “affirmative action,” the fear that their successes were tainted by other people’s assumptions about their achievements being predicated on something other than purely meritocratic grounds. Only one person seemed plagued by such a concern. The others were arguing the opposite (or close to it): that they had succeeded at a game decidedly stacked against them, and the thanks they received was a tacit (or not so tacit) attempt to ignore them, to demean them with cool indifference and a series of daily exclusions (from, say, important departmental discussions or substantive leadership roles at their universities).

For the sake of protecting their anonymity, I won’t divulge the specifics of these anecdotes. Not one of the scholars shared their examples with me banking on the fact that I would eventually write about them in The Chronicle. In fact, some of these senior scholars probably don’t perform their disaffection in any conspicuous way, especially not in mixed company. But these intimate discussions have been so disheartening and depressing that I wanted to write something, even something relatively opaque and inadequate, to begin describing this troubling discourse.

My brief post doesn’t nearly do justice to the stories I’ve been told. Or to the seething anger that those stories narrate. And there are many people who would argue that a lot of older faculty members, no matter how distinguished, feel the sting of disregard from younger colleagues. Race, they’d say, has nothing to do with it. But these scholars are thematizing their stories in explicitly racial terms. And even if they are swinging at mere windmills and making racial mountains out of race-less molehills (or mistaking ageist mountains for racial ones), it is still important to figure out why some senior black faculty, very senior black faculty, feel that they are more disrespected than their white colleagues.

To Conference or Not to Conference

2010-11-19T08:28:00.004-05:00

The last time I blogged about attending an academic conference, I found myself mercilessly pummeled by several very upset Chronicle of Higher Education readers (the other place where I blog--a little more consistently). They used my post as an excuse to rail against professors who (irresponsibly!) skip out on their classes in order to attend such "conferences," a practice dismissed as little more than a scam, the kind of racket that allows academics to go off gallivanting in exotic locales under the trumped-up auspices of professional development and research dissemination.

“How many classes did you have to cancel to attend your little conference?” It started something like that. One reader asked me the equivalent of that very question several different times, trying to determine if my conference attendance was at the expense of my teaching obligations. Even after I explained that the conference didn’t require me to miss any of my scheduled class sessions, not one, said reader refused to register my response, asking that selfsame question (about how many of my classes I canceled for the conference) at least two more times.

Several more unhappy readers decided that they were going to use the opportunity to make a larger argument about the complete uselessness (and pseudo-intellectualism) of academia’s self-indulgent tradition of conferencing. Some of them argued that scholars should exclusively tele-conference or deploy other new-media options in their would-be efforts to forge and maintain potentially powerful inter-institutional links with peers. Why, they asked, make a fetish of the face-to-face?

Both those who anonymously posted their anti-conference comments on-line (and the many more who emailed me or called my office phone to express their displeasure over my uncritical celebration of academic conferences) seemed to get particularly upset about the post's characterization of conference-attendance as a mixture of informal chats with other academics in packed conference lobbies and laughter-laced drinking atop cushy stools at fancy hotel bars.

I only ponder that previous debate now because I am currently in New Orleans at the 109th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association. It is my first trip back to New Orleans since Katrina, which almost seems like a scandalous thing to admit. And coming to hang out in such a mystical town was clearly an added bonus of attending this year’s conference.

I just got in Wednesday night, but I’ve already gone to several panels, one of which included an absolutely fantastic presentation by one of Penn’s anthropology graduate students. And I even checked out the first half of a rather hypnotic ethnographic film, Movement (R)evolution Africa, which examines the evocative links between contemporary African choreography and newfangled understandings of African subjectivity and embodiment.

Still, most of my day consisted of hallway-talk with colleagues I haven’t seen in a while and getting the word out about some new scholarly initiatives that I am helping to launch: a book series on the intersections between race and religion and an ambitious and expansive on-line bibliography for the discipline of anthropology. So, I’ll spend a lot of time in New Orleans leaving panels early, getting to panels late, and sipping cocktails well into the night. (Well, maybe not so late. Even as an undergrad, I got tired by about 10pm.) But I don’t buy the claim that any of this isn’t a legitimate way to make sure that I stay tied to disciplinary conversations.

I realize that many of those aforementioned anti-conference readers will scoff at my claim, but at least I didn’t have to cancel class. Again, maybe that's some consolation.

Not that that would have been a huge issue, either. Several students from my graduate class this semester arrived in New Orleans even before I did, which means that we could have engineered an impromptu seminar discussion in the hotel lobby if we absolutely had to. Drinks optional.

The R Word

2010-07-19T07:37:00.002-04:00

The R-word in question is racism. Everyone's throwing it around these days, but very few people seem to agree on what it means.

The NAACP recently asked Tea Party leaders to repudiate the movement's racist members, to stop displaying "continued tolerance for bigotry and bigoted statements."

Mark Williams of the Tea Party Express responded by describing the NAACP's antiquated use of the word "colored" (in its name) as racist and declaring that the storied Civil Rights organization makes "more money off of race than any slave trader" ever did. (Just over the weekend, Williams was expelled from his own group because of a satirical letter he penned that has been described as racist.)

Other right-wingers simply dismiss the NAACP's accusation of racism as racist, the socio-political equivalent of saying "I'm rubber; you're glue. Everything you say bounces off of me and sticks to you."

Via tweet, Sarah Palin called the NAACP's very charge "appalling."

In other racial news, Jesse Jackson is still being clowned and condemned for claiming that Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert can only see Lebron James as a high-priced "runaway slave," and Whoopi Goldberg has been defending her defense of Mel Gibson all week. For the last few days, we've been getting new tape recorded snippets of a voice that sounds a lot like Gibson's (granted, a demonically possessed version) raging against the mother of his youngest child with a barrage of sexist expletives: c-words, b-words, f-bombs and just about every other letter in the alphabet. That same tape-recorded voice matter-of-factly deploys terms like "wetback" and the n-word to color its apoplectic attacks.

"I have had a long relationship with Mel," Goldberg declared. "You can say he's being a bonehead, but I can't sit [here] and say that he's a racist, having spent time with him in my house with my kids."

Detractors dismiss Whoopi as an apologist with a long history of defending the indefensibly racist, Ted Danson's blackface Friar's Club performance being their prime example. Whoopi's position is instructive though, and reminiscent of when African-American comic Paul Mooney took some heat for not demonizing Michael Richards after the latter's 2006 "meltdown," when Richards peppered his comedy club audience with a string of n-words and lynching imagery (in response to some black hecklers).

But there are at least two important things to remember in any discussion about the facts or fictions of racism (and counter/accusations thereof).

First, racism is almost never a smoking gun. It explains very little all by itself. Social causality is much more complicated than that.

Historians of early America have been unpacking and debating a version of this point for years. Our country's history of chattel slavery wasn't caused (in any simplistic and straightforward sense) by racism. Was Trans-Atlantic slavery a clear-cut example of racism? Yes. Did racism (as ideology) facilitate, justify, and rationalize the dehumanization of African people? It did. But racism alone doesn't provide us with the system's motives and raison d'etre. At the very least, we'd need to add economic arguments to that mix.

All of that is simply to say that racists are never just racists. Racism is not a mysterious island somewhere in the middle of the ocean. Eighteenth- and 19th-century slavemasters were racists, but they weren't only racist. They were also revolutionaries and humanitarians, adventurers and religionists. To call someone racist isn't about explanatory exclusivity. Racism is one important ingredient in the recipe for American apple pie, but there are still other details to be worked out about how much it adds, about when in the process it gets added, and about what else goes into the mixing bowl.

Second, racism is less about what someone is (absolutely and forever) than about what a person does (in specific moments). Racism is at least as much about opportunity as ontology (to butcher a proper philosophical term).

We often imagine ourselves to be looking for racists who are racist 365 days out of the year. To chronicle the several days each week or month or lifetime when they are not demonstrably racist is either (i) to dismiss such fallow periods as exceptions (or mere performance) or (ii) to offer them up as proof that said accusations are false. But it doesn't make sense to think of racism the way we think of, say, racial identity (as something we conspicuously carry around with us all the time, everywhere we go). That's one of the most powerful points demonstrated by Officer John Ryan, the disturbing character played by Matt Dillon in the award-winning 2004 film Crash.

In one scene, Ryan is a working-class cop who mercilessly harasses a middle-class black couple during a traffic stop, clearly relishing his racial privilege and lauding it over his intimidated victims. In another scene, he can risk his own life to pry that same black woman from a burning car before it explodes.

Critics knock the film for ignoring the lopsided specifics of America's racial history, making every example of racial prejudice (black on white, white on black, white on Latino, black on Latino, black on Asian...) equivalent to every other.

Dillon's character was often singled-out as a pathetic attempt to humanize and redeem white racism. But that's only one interpretation. The film also argues that a racial monster in one moment can be a self-sacrificing hero in the next. Very few people organize their every breath around racial animus. We often slip in and out of racism's seductive logic: sometimes rising to meet the better angels of our nature, sometimes falling victim to the easy lure of social scapegoating. That's what's so complicated about how racism animates our social lives today, helping to explain why Whoopi is right and wrong about Mel Gibson. Gibson might be a child-friendly, politically correct dinner guest one night and a maniacal phone caller spitting out the n-word in the morning.

(Cross-posted at the Chronicle of Higher Education)

'White Guilt' and the Revolution

2010-06-10T07:43:00.003-04:00

Is "white guilt" really real? Slavoj Žižek thinks so.

The Slovenian political philosopher (once dubbed "the most dangerous philosopher in the West" by the New Republic and "the Elvis of cultural theory" by The Chronicle of Higher Education) has written a communist manifesto, First As Tragedy, Then As Farce, challenging contemporary interpretations of 9/11 and of the global financial meltdown of 2008. I won't try to capture all the nuances of that ambitious and provocative work, but I will give you my version of its punch line: that only what Žižek calls "a dictatorship of the proletariat" can make up for the limitations and constitutive exclusions that inescapably define capitalism (and liberalism and socialism) in all of their various guises.

Far from being a threat to capitalism's undeniable ubiquity and unchallenged global hegemony (as some Leftists attempt to interpret things), Žižek sees the current global recession as potentially clearing the way for even more ramped up capitalist hysteria/utopianism. He also frames it as the context/pretext for intensified tensions between "democracy" (as a political system) and "capitalism" (as an economic formation). What if "capitalism with Asian values" (i.e., the invisible hand of the free market tightly clasped with an iron fist of totalitarianism) proves to be a more efficient and effective way to capitalize on the fundamental logic of capitalism?

French historian Pierre Rosanvallon claims that Scottish Enlightenment thinker Adam Smith was, in effect, arguing for "the withering away of politics," theorizing the emergence of a free market system that could potentially govern all of social life (rationally and fairly) without recourse to merely political concerns and considerations. Žižek's critique of the complicities between and among liberalism, socialism, and capitalism similarly asks what we might gain from thinking long and hard about how particular understandings of the relationship between politics and economics get naturalized.

As part of his argument, Žižek rails against the pathetic hubris of "white guilt," what he labels "an inverted form of clinging to one's superiority." Quoting from a section of Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, a passage that Žižek describes as demonstrating Fanon's "refusal to capitalize on the guilt of the colonizers," Žižek demands that his readers inoculate themselves from the seductive sickness of "identity politics" in all of its "private" and non-universal forms (race, gender, sexuality, religion, and so on).

To be fair, this last point is little more than an aside for Žižek, a drive-by theoretical shooting along a tiny stretch of the much longer highway that eventually leads home to the Communist idea, but any real discussion of "white guilt" (and the ostensible implications thereof) would have to reference the work of Shelby Steele. For Steele, white guilt isn't an aside. It is one of America's central dilemmas. His book on the subject, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era, argues that "white guilt is quite literally the same thing as black power," the reduction of moral authority to a zero-sum game between blacks and whites wherein what was once the stigma of race becomes the neo-stigma of racism. The more guilty whites feel about race/racism, the more empowered blacks are to use accusations of racism (and invocations of America's racist history) as a disciplining rod. Steele cautions against the lure of white guilt: for blacks, as a form of political capital; for whites, as a performance of social penance.

To hear Steele describe it, white guilt sounds like a metaphysical totality that overdetermines contemporary American life (and maybe not just the parts that have anything to do with racial issues). White guilt gets cast as the overarching organizing principle for race relations, but is that really true? Does white guilt explain the central dynamics of contemporary inter-racial exchanges and interactions?

In this version of things, "playing the race card" is political slang for attempting to exploit forms of white guilt. Affirmative Action gets dismissed as a policy predicated on a misguided effort to manage and minimize white guilt. But is "white guilt" really real? I mean, any more so than, say, what we might call middle-class guilt (vis-à-vis poor people)? Or heterosexual guilt (vis-à-vis homosexuals)? Or even, say, Christian guilt (vis-a-vis Muslims)? What manner of "guilt" is this? And does it make sense to offer it up as the analytical framework for our contemporary socio-racial moment?

Indeed, white guilt doesn't seem to define the ethos behind the Tea Party push. Janeane Garofalo isn't the only one who wants to characterize them as reactionary and racist, as anti-Obama simply because they're anti-black. Self-professed Tea Partyers take offense to such accusations, and they also seem to display a decided lack of guilt about America's racial history, a guilt-freedom that serves as one of the engines powering their political efforts. I would think that even though most Americans (and most white Americans) aren't card carrying Tea Party types, they also aren't particularly angst-filled about America's racial history either. Few Americans are.

Maybe a powerful film or book can provoke a pang of sadness, humanizing the past in ways that are poignant and real. And I wouldn't argue that white Americans never reflect on how or why under-represented minorities are so under-represented in elite spheres. But is it really accurate to claim that "white guilt" haunts the American psyche? Can we use that to explain anti-racist efforts anymore than we can use that aforementioned "heterosexual guilt" as the fundamental psychological drive behind the push to get rid of "don't ask, don't tell" in the military? In fact, people are increasingly willing to invoke bad genes or the "culture of poverty" (over and against America's sordid racial history) to explain contemporary racial disparities in education and employment. That seems like a powerful anti-guilt move.

Most of Obama's detractors might be extra careful about deploying their political rhetoric so that they don't find themselves described as racist, bowing to some of the mandates of a politically corrected public sphere, but they have no qualms at all about attacking America's first black president with all the gusto they can muster. They are trying to foment a revolution, and they don't feel guilty about that, not one bit.

Of course, Steele was really talking about liberals not conservatives. Žižek was too. But I'm not sure that "white guilt" is as big a problem as these cultural critics make it out to be. Moreover, the election of President Obama might be ushering in an era of "white rage" that is more than giving "white guilt" a run for its money.

Race, Genetics, and Harvard Law School

2010-05-06T23:14:00.003-04:00

Is it reasonable to simply ponder the "possibility," ever so idly and hypothetically, that bad genes might explain African American underachievement? It is a an old and many-told tale, I know, but it just got a fresh re-telling at Harvard Law School this month.

A Harvard Law student recently apologized for comments she emailed to friends and colleagues following what sounds like an intriguing and heated dinner-time discussion about Affirmative Action. After first expressing concern that some of her earlier comments during that aforementioned dinner were misconstrued as politically correct, the student attempted to clarify her take on the matter.

"I absolutely do not rule out the possibility," she wrote, "that African-Americans are, on average, genetically predisposed to be less intelligent."

Claiming that sound research could convince her otherwise, she seemed intent on dispelling any lingering sense among her friends that she might be too timid about the notion of considering potential linkages between race and intelligence.

She went on: "I don't think it is that controversial of an opinion to say that I think it is at least possible that African-Americans are less intelligent on a genetic level. And I didn't mean to shy away from that position at dinner."

The student then ended her email with a joke. "Please don't pull a Larry Summers on me," citing the firestorm that Harvard's former president caused by broaching the idea that the under-representation of women in math and science might be predicated on their genetic endowment. Summers was eventually forced to resign his post.

After a public reprimand from the law school's dean, Martha Minow, the student apologized for her email and took back her claim about being open to considering possible genetic links between race and intelligence.

"I emphatically do not believe that African-Americans are inferior in any way," she said. "I understand why my words expressing even a doubt in that regard were and are offensive."

But what is she apologizing for? The very thought? Is this an example of "politics" trumping science by deeming certain research questions impossible to ask?

Ironically, the law student appears to have been reprimanded (during that earlier dinner conversation) for a form of political correctness, for not clearly accepting the premise that genetics might explain race-based differences in intelligence (and, by extension, social achievement), a premise that her friends appear to have chastised her for "shy[ing] away from."

This Harvard student's email has been overshadowed by Harvard Professor Skip Gates's recent New York Times op-ed, which is equally controversial in terms of contemporary racial politics. The Gates essay emphasizes African complicities in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade as a way to problematize calls for reparations here in the United States. He asks, somewhat rhetorically, if African nations should by asked to fork over some cash, too.

One reading of the Gates essay (and its critics abound) castigates him for "blaming the victim" and letting Europe and America off the hook, for pretending that every link in chattel slavery's horrible chain carried equal weight.

Of course, it is easy enough to read genetic explanations for racial achievement gaps as another way of blaming victims (and, in that case, their biological makeup), of letting real (social and political) culprits off the hook. If racial thinking is "bad biology" (as social constructionists and many physical anthropologists currently proclaim), we should be suspicious of any too-easy and essentialist invocation of racial groups as "natural" hooks on which to hang causal claims about inequality.

Gates isn't going to apologize for his (post-racial?) reading of history, and some people won't accept this law student's attempt at an apology. But, again, why is this student apologizing at all? That's one of the most important questions we can ask. Is it simply for offending African-Americans? For invoking race as nature rather than nurture? For racial insensitivity? For fear of being labelled a racist? And why do we often invoke genetics as some kind of holy grail that can reduce the messy machinations of everyday life to ostensible irrelevance? What kind of irrationality might that represent?

Academia on Somebody Else's Terms?

2010-04-12T15:17:00.002-04:00

Jay Ruby cautions anthropologists against deploying film and video equipment on terms that are completely determined by an institutionalized media industry with its own assumptions about how stories are supposed to be told and circulated. He argues that anthropologists might need to organize their narratives (and distribute their films) in ways that run counter to industry (and even audience) expectations. There is a danger in approaching film making the way others do, he says, a danger that includes potentially betraying anthropology's intellectual mission.

Philosopher Lewis Gordon has recently penned a powerful piece that asks academics to reconsider current tendencies to perform intellectual authority in ways that traffic in neoliberal logics of financial accumulation and brand-name fetishization, logics that may similarly betray our basic intellectual mission. There is a danger, he argues, in performing scholastic subjectivity on terms that seem foreign (even antithetical) to academia's traditional considerations and methods of appraisal.

Gordon's thoughtful and provocative piece, "The Market Colonization of Intellectuals," reads something like a manifesto, and it made me think about my own too-easy acceptance of academia's hyermarketization. He argues that academics can't serve two masters, can't occupy two separate spheres at the selfsame time: the life of the mind and the mandates of the marketplace. Moreover, he claims that we are increasingly getting used to just such a bifurcated and contradictory existence. Gordon describes a "managerial academic class" of professional administrators charged with aligning academia's values and self-assessments with the organizing principles and measuring modalities of the market. "Market potentiality," he says, "governs everything [that many academics] produce." Gordon designates this "the market colonization of knowledge."

Gordon also questions the branding of analytical concepts such that they are flattened out for public consumption and magically fused with their intellectual creators: deconstruction and Derrida being one of his prime examples. This isn't a critique of Derrida or a dismissal of deconstruction's epistemological purchase. It is a plea for, amongst other things, an academic model of productivity that doesn't reproduce and reinforce the ubiquitous cult of celebrity, one of the most powerful points of entry into a mass mediated public sphere and the overflowing bank accounts of its most recognizable occupants.

The piece even takes on academia's impoverished commitment to (and operationalization of) what it means to be "smart." "In the academy," Gordon writes, "nothing is more marketable than the reputation of being smart. This makes sense: No one wants dumb intellectuals. The problem, of course, is how ‘smart' is defined. In a market-oriented society, that means knowing how to play the game of making oneself marketable. The problem here is evident if we make a comparison with ethics. I once asked an environmental activist, who argued that a more ethical ecological position is the key against looming disaster, which would bother her more: to be considered unethical or stupid? She admitted the latter."

The piece asks what kind of academic world we've created if the universality of a certain apotheosis of smartness becomes our highest (maybe our only) moral value. Gordon demands of academics a more rigorous reflexivity, a critical self-consciousness that challenges what's become orthodoxy in contemporary academic life.

Gordon and Ruby both demand such a critical self-reflexivity from their colleagues. Gordon argues that anything less than that compromises our scholarly significance. Ruby claims that ethnographic films, as one instantiation of intellectual projects, might need to look very different from other motion pictures.

I'm teaching a graduate film course this semester that attempts to take up some of Ruby's challenge, asking students to de-familiarize mechanically reproduced audiovisual products just enough for them to start seeing such offerings in slightly newfangled ways. We are reading critical histories of early cinema (for example, Peter Decherney's analysis of early Hollywood's ties to academia; Jacqueline Stewart's evocative theorization of the links between popular cinema and the lives of African Americans during the Great Migration; Hannah Landecker on the central role of early medical films to any discussion about the creation/popularization of cinema) along with ethnographies of media/mediation (from folks like Roxanne Varzi, Alan Klima, Michael Taussig, Diane Nelson, and John Caldwell), and differently pitched philosophical treatments of film/video/digital products/processes (by Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Kara Keeling, Susan Buck-Morss, Kirsten Ostherr, D.N. Rodowick, and others). We are also watching films/videos that challenge traditional ways of seeing (including Bill Morisson's Decasia, Cheryl Dunye's The Watermelon Woman, William Greaves's Symbiopsychotaxiplasm, and Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York).

The course hopes to trouble some of the taken-for-granted presuppositions that we all have about ways of approaching the ubiquity of televisual, filmic, and digital representations. If the course works, students may not be quite as prone to unproductively normalized assumptions about how we interface with such technology.

The film/video market and its logics can also colonize and cannibalize the minds and methods of anthropological filmmakers/film critics who can find themselves seduced in ways that mirror some of the criticisms delineated by Gordon's challenging essay. You don't have to agree with every facet of Gordon's piece to imagine it as a wonderfully productive starting point for a spirited conversation about what academia ought to be.

Michael Steele's Race Card?

2010-04-10T09:34:00.002-04:00

The RNC's Michael Steele has recently made national headlines for "playing the race card" by agreeing with the claim that African-Americans like himself, in positions of power, have "a slimmer margin of error" in America. Steele included President Obama in that calculation, which was met by a swift dismissal from the White House press secretary.

Critics always find it ironic (even pathetic) when proponents of purported color blindness frame their own problems in terms of "racial victimization." The "Left" is assumed to traffic in such sophistries. The "Right," however, is supposed to know better. Clarence Thomas calling his confirmation hearing a "high-tech lynching" stands as the quintessential example of such racial irony. Even the people who claim obliviousness to racial reasoning seem susceptible to its rhetorical seductiveness.

But who really doesn't see race? When is it ever invisible? Immaterial? Irrelevant?

I just talked to a small group in Philadelphia about my most recent book, Racial Paranoia, and one of the listeners, an elderly white man, responded with a plea for the insignificance of race and racism as rubrics for understanding everyday life, especially his everyday life. He claimed that race had no impact on his daily activities. He wasn't a racist, he said. And he simply didn't see race. He had spent that very day teaching students, judging a science fair, and debating a group of university scholars. Race and racism, he assured me, had nothing to do with any of these experiences. And he made his case without anger, in clear and confident tones.

I responded by basically telling him that he was wrong, which wasn't the best route to take. I admitted to him that I am always a tad suspicious of people who claim not to see race at all. Indeed, I think that the very aspiration of postracialism (in most of its guises) is misplaced and romantic, repression passing itself off as transcendence. He listened to my response and then restated his point, very matter-of-factly. Several audience members tried to push back against his claim, arguing that even when race isn't explicitly thematized in, say, a classroom setting (one of the locations that the man had invoked), it might still be a valuable analytical lens, a real social fact. It might still be there, even if we don't see it. Not because it is biologically real, but because culture is most powerful when we can't clearly see it.

According to some theories on the matter, the only real racists left in America are the people unwilling to stop obsessing about race and racism, the folks who seem to see race behind every corner. If they just let race go, racism would wither and die away. The invocations of race and racism are incantations that keep bringing this beast back to life.

But Steele is just the most recent example of how easily self-serving calls for color blindness can morph into equally self-serving color cognizance. And it might not be useful to imagine that we only have two options: fetishizing race or ignoring it altogether.

It's Not Just HBO. It's TV.

2010-04-01T12:54:00.005-04:00

Did Congress ever pass health-care? Seriously. Lately, I've been trying to cultivate my own ignorance of all things "political." The news stories are just getting too bizarre: ongoing sagas in the wake of major earthquakes in Haiti and Chile; racial epithets that serve as soundtracks for Tea Parties; sex scandals that allegedly implicate, quite directly, a sitting Pope; Sarah Palin telling protesters to "re-load" in the context of actual violence linked to congressional votes and Tweets calling for Obama's assassination. With that as the backdrop, I've decided to issue my own self-moratorium on watching CNN, FOX and the evening news programs.

Instead, I'm using my television for more otherworldly fare. And TV has never been better. Although it is the quintessential site for sensationalized news-mongering, it is also the best place to spy complicated fictional tales about human life.

When (and why) did TV become so much better than motion picture film? I feel like that undeniable fact just kind of snuck up on the nation's couch potatoes. One minute we were awash in nothing but schlock melodramas and uninspired derivatives of Friends; the next, The Wire, The Chappelle Show, Mad Men, and The Sopranos drastically raised our televisual expectations.

In Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television, John Thornton Caldwell argues that a show like 24 radically altered the way television shows get made and further nuanced/complicated the narratives they deployed, a claim that anticipated part of the argument made in Steven Johnson's Everything Bad Is Good for You.

Last year, my colleague Elihu Katz used The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science to wonder aloud about TV's potential demise. His query: are we currently witnessing "The End of Television?" Katz's point is hardly reducible to the "repertoire of output (call it content)" that one can watch today. That was just one element in a much more nuanced discussion he facilitated about the place of the "old" medium in a changing (new) media landscape. But if we were to go by content alone, we'd probably have to say that TV is far from dead. It has probably never been more alive.

Indeed, most people consider 2009 one of Hollywood's better years with respect to the quality of movies produced, big-budget fare (Avatar) and more independent/low-budget films (District 9 and The Hurt Locker). But I'd argue that the best of TV in 2009 was still far, far better, by leaps and bounds, than Hollywood's most celebrated offerings.

Of course, TV is a mixed bag, but at its best, it can sometimes best Hollywood, even the latter's most impressive stuff. And I say this as a filmmaker and an enthusiastic film watcher.

For one thing, the complexities of character development that one can witness over a TV show's entire season dwarf the best 2-hour attempts at cramming specificity into a protagonist's portrayal.

TV (even network TV) also allows for taking more chances than Hollywood filmmaking currently affords. Precious is a "controversial" and "daring" little film by Hollywood standards, but it would just be another HBO gem, and an even more impressive adaptation if we had gotten a chance to see Lee Daniels actually unfurl the other nuances of the book (over several weeks and months) that were bracketed out of the the powerful film. (The irony, of course, is that TV adaptations of motion pictures are usually uninspired and short-lived, sometimes even unwatchable. But that's because the TV-makers with the most nerve and talent are more interested in bringing their own projects to the air.)

In fact, you know how people say that movies are never as good as the books on which they are based. I'd go so far as to claim that TV series (at least the very good ones) have the potential of seriously rivalling novels in terms of nuance and artistic virtuosity, even upstaging them.

It is probably reasonable to say that TV is no longer simply Hollywood's mistreated step-child. More and more Hollywood actors, directors and producers are using TV as a venue for their wares. That only makes a good situation better. One potential downside, I think, is what I'll call the Mad Men effect: a too-short commitment to the slow-burn that weekly serials provide (maybe, in part, because it is hard to serve two masters, film and TV, at the same time).

My concerns about its treatment of race notwithstanding, AMC's Mad Men rewards "close reading." It is a well-crafted show. But it also seems to air something like eight episodes a "season." That isn't a season. That's a fairly long movie broken up into a few pieces.

Even the shows with more episodes a year tend to broadcast them in ways that destroy the continuity of their narratives and frustrate fans: two-, three-, even four-week breaks (sometimes more) between new installments. Now FOX's 24, which has just announced that it will not have a ninth season next year, is TV's gold standard: a weekly unfolding of 24 episodes. That's a season! In fact, it spans two.

HBO's How To Make It In America feels like it just started yesterday, and this coming weekend is already its season finale? Did I hear that right? If so, give me a break! The producers might as well have just made a movie. (Of course, the networks sometimes only order a certain number of episodes, less not more, because they don't want to over-commit to a bust. But HTMA just started. I say, bring back True Blood already, and make it last. If not, I might be forced to watch more of contemporary TV at its worst: those dreaded "news" shows. That's one thing that theatrical film clearly has over TV. It got rid of newsreels long ago.

The Politicization of Everything (that the other side is doing)

2010-03-15T12:37:00.003-04:00

Frank Rich wrote a NYT op-ed this weekend that began by criticizing former White House Press Secretary Dana Perino and former NYC Mayor Rudolph Giuliani for their ideological readings of 9/11. Giuliani was appearing on ABC's Good Morning America in January; Perino, on FOX's Hannity last November.

"We had no domestic attacks under Bush," Giuliani declared (though he probably meant after 9/11).

"We did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush's term," Perino stated. "I hope they [the Obama administration and the liberal wing of the press] are not looking at this politically. I do think we owe it to the American people to call it [the Ft. Hood shooting] what it is [a terrorist attack]."

The Rich piece is really about the extent to which Karl Rove (in his recent memoir) and Keep America Safe (a new foreign policy advocacy group founded by Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol) engage in ideologically heavy-handy historical revisionism.

"To hear them tell it," Rich writes, "9/11 was so completely Bill Clinton’s fault that it retroactively happened while he was still in office. The Bush White House is equally blameless for the post-9/11 resurgence of the Taliban, Al Qaeda and Iran. Instead it’s President Obama who is endangering America by coddling terrorists and stopping torture."

But I'm most intrigued by Perino's request that others not mislabel last year's horrific Texas tragedy for politically motivated reasons. It is the hollowness of such a call that moves me. And so many people make it. These days, the opening salvo of just about any debate is usually grounded in the charge that the other side's position is over-determined by mere politics and extremist ideology (as opposed to the speaker's own relatively neutral, fact-based analysis). Admittedly, Rich's essay implicitly pivots on something close to that same move. As does my own posting. But it is a question of degree and kind. And of what one imagines to be the categorical difference between competing sides of any social issue.

For instance, the claim that only left-leaning justices might be described as "activist judges" is silliness. Pure balderdash. Just this week, we find out that Virginia Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, is starting a conservative lobbying organization (with links to Tea Party groups). It isn't the Justice himself, but her activists efforts will probably reflect the ideological assumptions behind the kinds of Supreme Court decisions that her husband has been making since the early 1990s. Why don't conservative pundits consider his opinions instantiations of judicial activism? Will that be harder to deny with his wife literally functioning as a political activist? (For those who want to imagine "originalism" as some kind of innoculation from petty politicking, read Matthew Engelke's A Problem of Presence. He's talking about Christian Scripture, not the Constitution, but he unpacks the "semiotic ideologies" that anchor claims about written words that are imagined to speak for themselves, or even to speak at all.)

An invocation of "the political" (to describe "the other side" and its self-serving motivations) is probably one of the most political moves (by that very same definition of self-servingness) in our current rhetorical arsenal. It is also a catchall term, ubiquitous in its squishy polyvocality.

For example, I can't tell you how many queries I get from Chronicle readers who want the inside scoop on the weekly's coverage of events: Why haven't they run an article on the racial angle of that Amy Bishop shooting? Do you know that the Chronicle you write for engages in some unethical censoring of its readership vis-a-vis their comments to articles, especially posts left by "conservative" readers? Just today, somebody was concerned that they hadn't found any coverage of the recent deaths at Cornell University. Is the Chronicle being pressured not to cover the story? The person asked this last question with implications that hover closely to a more non-partisan invocation of the political (to describe "backstage" machinations with a conspiratorial tinge, an example of the political's amazing elasticity).

Moreover, the political is cannibalistic. It feeds off other things, making it more difficult to disentangle political posturing from meaningful political practice. Political incentives can compel people to, say, pounce on Rep. Eric Massa. But that doesn't mean that Massa's actions should be defended, because his attackers smell political blood. (Of course, the logic of our current political/partisan system usually means that we defend our teammates almost no matter what, even to the point of hypocrisy and egregious double-standardism.)

Everything is political. And you don't have to be a card-carrying Foucauldian to think so. Even still, two things seem worth mentioning (as ways to organize and ground such an ostensible truism).

1) Claiming some kind of non-political Archimedean vantage point from which to survey the ideological landscape is unhelpful. And a lie. We can aspire toward greater degrees of objectivity without matter-of-factly declaring that our team (unlike the other side) has already achieved it.

2) Attempts to dismiss other positions as merely political distracts us from the point. The option isn't apolitical vs. political. And the folks who most adamantly declaim that the other guys have cornered the market on political motivations have drunken their own Kool Aid. Or they are betting on the fact that they can get some of us to drink it for them.

Academia in the Age of "Reactionary Foucauldianism"

2010-02-17T11:40:00.003-05:00

I'm taking part in a faculty discussion today on "teaching controversial issues." In preparation for that meeting, I started to jot down some thoughts on the matter. (I'll be responsible for saying a few words.)

There is a hyper-politicization of higher education today, a hyper-politicization that I want to call "reactionary Foucauldianism." If Foucault's nothing-is-innocent post-structuralism gets marshaled to make arguments about knowledge production as a "power play," the same "metaphysics of power" informs reactionary critiques of academic culture. While Foucault is deployed to challenge "the state" and what he labels "governmentality," reactionary Foucauldianism is a critique of those critics (on similar knowledge/power grounds).

To discuss, say, America's history of imperialism is to practice "communist indoctrination." (Of course, some of this is about the logic and language of punditry. Hyperbolic sound-bites are the coin of our realm, but that seems like very little consolation for a targeted faculty member.)

Everything in academia has become controversial (or potentially controversial) as academics are consistently being asked to defend their ostensibly "liberal" leanings. I know of scholars who don't want to put their syllabi on-line for fear that "others" will troll the Internet, find the document, and use their required reading list to castigate them as ideologues. (And one gets very little traction by pointing out that, ironically enough, unabashed ideologues tend to be the folks most interested in such ideological witch-hunting.)

The increasing hegemony of a think tank counter-academy is also part of the discussion, especially when their powerful publishing arms produce best-selling books by circumventing the so-called "leftist" mainstream.

I teach quite a bit about race and religion, both of which are hot-button topics, growing more and more controversial by the semester. Any discussion of "religion" as something that is social, cultural and political (invariably how anthropologists frame their takes on the sacred) bleeds quite easily into the traps of partisan electoral politics vis-a-vis questions about the "war on terror," "Islamic Fundamentalism," and the "Christian Right" (just to name three of the most obvious ones).

For many people, any talk about race at all is an example of racism. Period. According to some, it is the only contemporary manifestation of racism worth noting. This idea that race-talk is an instantiation of racism (nothing more) can mean that a curricular offering on the topic is only ever a venue for preaching to the choir and supposedly damning the unbelievers. Defensiveness (about being dismissed as a "liberal") meets defensiveness (about being labeled a "racist"), which doesn't make for particularly constructive conversations.

In the Wake of Haiti: Jay Leno and Amy Bishop

2010-02-15T11:10:00.003-05:00

It feels callous, even pathetic, to go on with business-as-usual while Haiti continues to reel from such a singular catastrophe. Not that it is really a viable alternative to stand still, catatonic and mouth ajar, wallowing in all the graphic (sometimes gratuitous) images offered up all day, everyday, by news outlets.

Those same media outlets have toned down their coverage of Haiti considerably these past two weeks, which seems welcomingly merciful, I have to selfishly admit, even as it also shocks me how quickly the 24-hour news cycle can chew up and spit out any story, including one as massive as the Haitian disaster. A nor'easter seems hardly to merit displacing it at the top of anybody's news hour.

Even after we've sent our checks (contra Rush Limbaugh's suggestions) and commiserated with friends about the tragedy (the injustice of the event itself, the high-profile mean-spiritedness of certain religious explanations for it, the frustrating tales about the difficulty of relief efforts and the plight of those "kidnapped" orphans), we still have to go on with the rest of our day, the rest of our lives, right? Anything else seems almost like courting psychosis, dancing with the devil of existential despair.

And I have certainly taken that advice. I spent the end of January and the beginning of February staying up late at night to watch Conan O'Brien and David Letterman hurl insults (in the guise of "jokes") at Jay Leno. I guzzled down the season premiere of 24, and I made it my business to YouTube Mo'Nique's acceptance speech from the Golden Globes (just because everybody seemed to be talking about it). I did all of this with the Haitian earthquake's aftermath punctuating the noisy pauses between these silly vices.

For me, it feels almost schizophrenic to be following the events in Haiti while, say, preparing for weekly sessions of my graduate course (on the noeme of film). I also have a few grad students and recent grads on the academic job market, so I am writing recommendations and helping them to deal with the inevitable anxieties that such professional hurdles produce. This week, I'll spend much more time on that stuff than I will watching the news coverage from Haiti.

All academic eyes are now focused on the shooting in Huntsville. A faculty member at the University of Alabama is denied tenure (another one of those anxiety-filled professional hurdles), and she makes some of her colleagues pay for it with their lives. The entire affair feels like academia's version of a natural disaster: what can happen when the tectonic plates beneath the ever-secretive tenure process shift just enough for others to really feel it. Of course, the person denied tenure already feels the devastation, but it is a decidedly individualized experience, mostly dealt with off-stage and out of public view.

At the same time, very little really feels "natural" about this Law and Order-type murder story, its headlines coming fast and furious. The Chronicle Of Higher Education has descended on the scene like academia's version of the New York Times, and we are continuing to get details about the shooter's quirkiness and interpersonal oddities.

An academic friend of mine claims to find it "strange" that such post-tenure shootings don't happen more often, especially given how "nutty" academics can be. And she readily includes herself in that unflattering characterization, which I respected, even as I demanded that she make an exception for my own self-avowed normalcy. But is she right? Given how fraught the climb up academia's ladder, is it shocking how infrequently such violent retaliation takes place? What, if anything, does this shooting really tell us about a "life of the mind" or about the way academics adjudicate it? How long before the Amy Bishop story gets bumped from the headlines, and is there something faculty members should actually learn from the entire thing before it does?

What to do with GREs?

2010-02-12T16:41:00.002-05:00

Four Theories of the GRE's evaluative significance:

1. The Primacy of Quantitative Scores: This position holds that high quant scores are a good indication of how crisply someone thinks, regardless of whether or not the discipline they are applying to demands any robust use of mathematics at all. The rebuttal maintains that unless someone is going to be working with numbers, the quantitative score can be completely discounted if the other two scores are high enough.

2. All or Nothing: Some reviewers of grad applications maintain that unless the GRE scores are quite high in all three domains, the student should be considered a bit of a risk. I've even been privy to a theory that links high-math/low-verbal scores to anti-social behavior. The high-verbal/low-math applicant sometimes gets dismissed by others as someone who talks a good game but doesn't have anything substantive to say. All style and no substance.

3. The Declining Significance of GREs: Some reviewers don't even look at GRE scores. They dismiss them out of hand. If the statement is strong and the letters are convincing/supportive, they don't need any other information. This position usually gets justified with recourse to discussions about the relative underperformance of minority candidates on standardized tests (whether that's chalked up to cultural biases written into those tests or to "stereotype threats" priming said students for failure). Of course, this anti-GRE position doesn't mesh well with university-wide attempts to clearly demonstrate the exceptionalism of incoming classes.

4. Writing, Writing, Writing: I've heard at least a couple of qualitative social scientists and humanists wax eloquent about the singular significance of the writing component of the test. (I don't even think we had a writing section when I took the test.) A high writing score means that whatever the prospective students know/learn will get translated into the coins of the realm in academia: the written conference talk, the term/final paper, the publishable article, and the Dissertation. This, they argue, is where the rubber hits the road for graduate studentry. And bad writers with good ideas have a more difficult time thriving in the academy. Good writers can survive even if their ideas aren't always instantiations of incomparable genius.

When I'm on a selection committee, I tend to go through all of the other materials in the files before I look at GREs. Starting with GRE scores can sometimes bias one's reading of the rest of a prospective student's application. Once I go through the written materials, I then compare my assessment of the student with his or her GRE scores, usually just to see how hard a case I'll have to make to my colleagues (if those scores are particularly low). Of course, I almost never win those low-GRE cases.

Snow Days

2010-02-10T12:06:00.002-05:00

What's the best way to spend a snow day?

A nor'easter decided to add an exclamation point to the massive winter storm that pummeled Philadelphia (and the entire mid-Atlantic region) this past weekend, which means that schools famous for almost never closing due to weather concerns have cancelled their classes today. I'll have to pay for this later (trying to re-schedule campus meetings that were difficult to schedule the first time around), but there is one major upside. I can to slash through a chunk of my growing To-Do List.

First things first. I sent out 33 emails in an hour, emails churned out with a reckless disregard for grammar or even comprehension, which probably means that I'll have to spend more time sending follow-ups for clarification.

I've already had three very useful phone calls with colleagues (related to my administrative roles on campus), and I am now all set for a big committee meeting this Friday. Check. Check.

And then I slipped down a bit of a rabbit hole. Snow days are great for such wonderlandesque expeditions.

I have a few doctoral students on the job market right now, and they keep telling me about those infamous "wiki" sites where applicants can get unofficial updates on the status of current academic job searches. This is madness! I am so glad that such sites didn't exist ten years ago, during my first real stint on the academic job market. It reeks of neurotic possibility.

I actually went through some old text messages this morning (from and about undergrads applying to doctoral programs), and I can't believe that the same kinds of cyber-sites are available for them, spaces where other prospective graduate students anonymously post any information they know (or have heard) about the results of departmental decisions about incoming cohorts. So, I have been meandering through these virtual wastelands and fretting over how much discipline it takes for graduate students and would-be graduate students to avoid the gravitational pull of such sparkling baubles.

If I can spend a chunk of my morning shaking my head at the phenomenon, I wouldn't be surprised if snow days give students license to get swallowed whole in these bastions of high-end gossip-mongering. I can see the mesmerizing draw, even if I can't spend all of the time-out-of-time that is my snow day on these addictive sites.

Why co-teaching is not a scam

2010-02-04T11:01:00.003-05:00

I recently had someone tell me that co-teaching was one of the biggest academic scams going. "The biggest, in fact," he corrected. According to him, this was insult to injury in the context of a larger academic universe that was itself, by his estimation, one gigantic institutionalized racket of Mafioso (and "governmental") proportions. (A side note about his "governmental" critique: I should probably add that this person is a libertarian, and something of a conspiracy theorist.)

And he wasn't just talking in the abstract. He was offering me a bit of a browbeating for the amount of co-teaching that I have done over the course of my professorial career.

To hear him tell it, co-teaching is just a way for faculty members to get full credit for half the work. They conspire with their colleagues to split a semester or quarter in two so that they don't have to prepare for (or attend) all of the sessions. With this illicitly gained free time, they can then selfishly work on their own projects, which was at least a better option, he admitted, than what he suspected was the usual alternative: doing absolutely nothing productive at all, like the closeted slackers all academics seemingly want to be.

I have heard this critique of co-teaching many times, and I've seen examples of co-teaching that do seem to merit the cynicism, structuring the "collaboration" such that students experience it as little more than two distinct pedagogical ships passing one another in the dark curricular night. (Of course, these same students tend not to enjoy such courses, or to consider them valuable educational experiences.)

To complicate matters even more, there is also the question of how much co-teaching should really count toward faculty teaching loads: as a full course (like any other)? Half a course? (Even less than that, my interlocutor might argue, given his aforementioned assessment of things.)

If done well, I would argue that co-teaching with a colleague could even count as two courses. Or at least a course and a half. That's because to really do it right, to do it well, means many more hours of preparation beforehand: debating the foundational structure of the course, comparing notes/takes on the material, and doing justice to two distinct perspectives on the subject matter. It can require as long as a year (even longer) for colleagues to effectively collaborate (over coffees, lunches and late-night bull sessions) on the conceptualization and organization of a substantive (and reasonably coherent) co-taught syllabus.

I've actually only ever co-taught courses where both of us attended all of the sessions, read all of the materials and prepared lectures/comments/questions for one another and the students every single week, but I realize that that isn't always possible, especially if an institution asks that such co-teaching be conducted as an overloaded add-on to a person's regular teaching schedule (which is how some academics have described the policies of their schools to me).

In a course on "Film and Reality" that I co-taught with a Kantian philosopher at Duke, every class session was a learning experience for everyone involved. Some sessions he'd lead, and my role was to respond/rebut (from an anthropological perspective). When I led, he'd do the same (providing philosophical/analytical counterpoints/extensions to my positions). In a lecture on semiotics (and the ostensible differences between Ferdinand de Saussure's binaries and Charles Sanders Peirce's tripartitism), my co-instructor pushed back with a challenge to the distinctiveness of iconicity and indexicality vis-a-vis what I had described as the more arbitrary and un-motivated sign. It was a great discussion. Not because we got lost in our own debate (another minefield to avoid on team-taught terrain), but because we were able to use that discussion as a way to structure a series of student questions/comments about the contemporary utility of semiotic approaches to social analysis (and discrepancies between them).

Since coming to Penn, I've co-taught graduate courses and undergraduate courses, small seminars and large lecture offerings. In all of these instances, my collaborators and I met each week, before the actual class sessions, discussing our divergent take on the readings, sharing our thoughts on the specifics of the week's agenda, and making sure that we had a detailed set of expectations (of ourselves and our students) before we stepped into the classroom. When it works, this is an enriching experiences for everyone, which makes the extra preparation worth it.

In an academic world where interdisciplinarity is offered up as part of the intellectual air we breathe, co-teaching will probably become an increasingly valuable way of training students to think across conventional disciplinary (and even methodological) dividing lines.

In an academic world where interdisciplinarity is offered up as constitutive of the intellectual air we all breathe, co-teaching should become an increasingly valued way of training students to think across conventional disciplinary (and even methodological) dividing lines.

(crossposted at The Chronicle of Higher Education)

Anna Deavere Smith's Craft

2010-01-27T11:46:00.004-05:00

(crossposted at The Chronicle of Higher Education)

Anna Deavere Smith describes her life-long project as an attempt to theorize the links between language and identity. She came to this realization about the fundamental nature of her actorly goals while still studying her craft (several decades ago) at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. Last night, Smith presented excerpts from her most recent one-woman show, Let Me Down Easy, at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, and she tried to explain to a packed-house just how her creative process works.

For those who don't know Anna Deavere Smith, she is famous for what has been called "documentary theater," a genre that, for her, entails interviewing people from various walks of life (interviews organized around a particular theme or event) and staging those juxtaposed interviews as monologues in critical conversation with one another.

Fires in the Mirror dealt with 1991's Crown Heights riots (between Afro-Caribbeans and Orthodox Jews in that small section of Brooklyn) and included interviews with rioters, African-American activists (such as Al Sharpton), rabbis, city officials, local residents, and other interested parties with a spin on the conflagration. Twilight: Los Angeles dealt with that 1992 riot/uprising, bringing excerpts from her interviews to life on stage as a way to demonstrate the many angles from which Angelenos and others made sense of that public tragedy.

Let Me Down Easy is a commentary on death and dying in America, on the state of health care and on how the actions of health care providers are over-determined by cultural assumptions that get powerfully exposed when Smith places them on conspicuous theatrical display. Given the extent to which our current political conversation pivots on the "health care debate" and its political fallout (including the election of a Republican senator in MA), Smith's material is amazing, even uncanny, for its timeliness.

Smith's power stems from the fact that her performative skills allow her to conjure up her interviewees in all of their demographic and idiosyncratic specificity, seemingly out of thin air, using their words, speaking styles, and bodily gestures to plop these beings unto the stage with an almost occult-like immediacy. She also does a commendable job giving voice to many different swaths of the political spectrum, placing opposing viewpoints in conversation such that each side of the debate is rendered with nuanced humanity. Alas, if only our everyday political discourse followed a similar organizing principle. Indeed, one of her projects as a scholar-artists (she is, after all, an academic: University Professor at NYU) is to promote robust conversations across ideological divides. (She is the founding director of Harvard University's Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue.)

As someone who spent the last few month of 2009 beginning my own attempt to think about staging ethnographic data for theatrical presentation (first, this year, at academic conferences and then, much later down the line, in a full-fledged one-man show), it was encouraging and instructive to hear Smith describe her approach to such work. "Documentary theater" is a valuable example of what "ethnographic theater" could look like--and even of what anthropological theatricality might usefully define itself against. Several ethnographers have already begun to dabble in a version of what might be called "ethnographic theater," which is yet another way to continue ongoing discussions within anthropology about the political and poetic implications of ethnographic representation and cultural critique. It is also a different way to think about questions of observation, embodiment and intersubjectivity.

Anna Deavere Smith was an inspiration last night, and not just for scholars interested in harnessing the electrical powers of theatrical space for their own scholastic purposes.

Smith juggles her "documentary theater" work with stints on shows like NBC's The West Wing and HBO's Nurse Betty. That stuff pays the bills, she says, but documentary theater is really her passion. It is also a way for her to show that social identities only emerge as fully meaningful and culturally intelligible once we are willing to slip our feet into other people's shoes, to wrap our mouths and minds around other people's words.

What is Pat Robertson Really Saying About Haiti?

2010-01-14T10:31:00.006-05:00

There are many reasonable people (and even some otherwise unreasonable ones) who would maintain that Pat Robertson's take on the recent earthquake in Haiti need not be dignified with a response. I understand that point, and I see where its adherents are coming from. But we are fooling ourselves if we think that Robertson represents an isolated quack. We ignore him at our own peril, especially since there are many people who accept his basic premises without question. So, I do feel like a few words are in order about the significance of his supernatural claims about divine justice.

One thing to note is that the political "fringe" is no longer as fringe as it might once have seemed. I got about 10 messages (via twitter, email, and facebook) regarding Robertson's comments within a few hours of him making them. I've also seen his thoughts discussed on several cable news programs on several different channels more than just a few times in the last day and a half. His comments have gone viral, and it means that "dignified" or not, they are circulating quite widely already.

If you are still one of the few people who haven't heard it, Robertson argues that 18th and early 19th century Haitians were able to throw off the chains of race-based slavery and colonial dependency by (literally!) making a pact with the devil. As a function of that Faustian bargain, they have been cursed by God, which explains their history of violence and their contemporary degree of poverty.

I got the surreal news (via text message) about the Haitian disaster on an Amtrak train from Washington DC to Philadelphia Tuesday evening (after attending the AAA symposium on race that I blogged about on Monday). And it just so happens that I was reading, in an almost eerie kind of irony, a small new book by Susan Buck-Morss during that ride, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History.

The book is an extrapolation on her Critical Inquiry article (from 2000) where she tried to argue that Hegel got his master-slave metaphor from the Haitian revolution, and that such a seemingly clear and self-evident historical fact has been sorely under-appreciated (in fact, missed just about entirely) by the best and brightest philosophers and historians who have worked on Hegel. She chalks these omissions up to a series of factors, including the narrowcast biases of disciplinization and academic specialization. Buck-Morss argues that the early Hegel was clearly influenced and inspired by the Haitian revolt (championing the psychic need for slaves to forcibly reclaim their full humanity by asserting it in the face of brutal reprisals), even if the later Hegel (of The Philosophy of History) ends up dismissing all of Africa as radically ahistorical, uncivilized and unprepared for full sovereignty.

In many ways, Robertson's pseudo-religious reading of the Haitian tragedy is a sensationalized version of the very logics that Buck-Morss critiques.

I call it "pseudo-religious" because I think of Robertson's comments as self-serving political claims hiding behind the cloak of religiosity. Of course, religion is inescapably political, but Robertson's own religious texts don't provide evidence for such wildly specific and offensive claims of satanic collusion. On what evidence, from what sacred book, does Robertson base his theory of Haitian history (or any of his past pronouncements, including the "argument" that 9/11 was divine retribution for America's legalization of abortion)? Is he merely performing a xenophobic reading of Voodoo's spiritual difference from his particular version of Christianity?

Instead of seeing 18th and 19th century Haitian freedom fighters as subjects of history, agents capable of throwing off the shackles of foreign oppression (in a manner similar to America's 18th-century revolutionists, a group that I've never heard him call lapdogs of Satan), Robertson removes them from the political and geopolitical playing field altogether, dismissing their post-revolutionary plight as comeuppance for a bad deal with the devil. About that theory, two last things:

First, I would recommend that Robertson read Randall Robinson's An Unbroken Agony: Haiti, from Revolution to the Kidnapping of a President, which shows, quite compellingly, that Haiti's current politico-economic predicament is a direct result of how Europe and the United States responded to the country's 1804 assertion of autonomy: by very purposefully isolating and exploiting Haiti (politically and economically) for the next two hundred years. Therein lies much of the answer, Robinson demonstrates, to Haiti's current woes. (The details he provides, mostly uncontested and unhidden facts of history, will be shocking to many readers).

Second, if the Satan-theory is accurate, I would just ask that Robertson finally let them out of their contract with him. As a function of the kinds of horrible and inhumane ideas he spews, Robertson must be the other contractual party of which he speaks. It would explain how he knows the details of such a secret compact.

GUEST COMMENTARY

2010-01-07T22:06:00.002-05:00

The career pipeline: Not leaking but pouring
By Katherine Sender

At a recent meeting of Penn faculty members from across the University, the provost spoke with concern about “the leaky pipeline,” where large numbers of women and minority faculty drop out of the career track as they move towards senior positions. Then followed our president announcing that Penn was moving from a position of Excellence to Eminence—in the twenty-first century university even Excellence isn’t good enough anymore. I was struck by the juxtaposition. Was there a relationship between this constant push to greater levels of distinction and the leaky pipeline?
What does this leaky pipeline look like at Penn? A Gender Equity Report in 2007 found that women made up 28 percent of all faculty. How this plays out across rank is striking: women made up 42 percent of assistant professors, 30 percent of associate professors, and only 18 percent of full professors. This is not a case of more women coming up through the ranks because the proportion of standing women faculty had increased by only four percent since 1999.

The leaky pipe for racial minorities is as dramatic. A Minority Equity Report of 2007 found that minorities made up 17 percent of Penn’s faculty. People of color made up 27 percent of assistant professors, 17 percent of associate professors, and only 9 percent of full professors. We may take heart that the proportion of minority faculty has almost doubled since 1999, but of the current 17 percent of minority faculty 11 percent are Asian, meaning that the proportions of African American and Latino/a faculty are very small indeed.

Reliable career track information on gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender faculty is impossible to come by, but my sense is that the tenure and promotion process isn’t especially kind to this group either. Expressly queer faculty—politically irascible, non-heteronormative and even non-homonormative academics—are likely to have an especially hard time.

I’m using Penn’s figures as an example, but Penn isn’t especially bad—or good—compared with its peers. I also know that some people are leaving academic careers for good, self-chosen, life-affirming reasons. But it’s worrisome that these departures are differentially distributed across gender, race, and probably sexuality. The pipeline isn’t leaking, it’s pouring.

At a recent Gender Studies conference here at Penn the leaky pipeline was addressed as a family issue: the tenure clock is hostile to women who want to have children. Indeed, nationally, women with children are half as likely to get tenure as women without. But this is only part of the problem. If it were only a fertility issue, minority men would be doing just fine.

The tenure and promotion process isn’t only inhuman for women who want and have children, it’s inhuman for everyone. Jerry Jacobs, a sociologist here at Penn, found in 2004 that both women and men faculty work more than 50hrs per week irrespective of rank, and about a third of them work more than 60 hours per week. The expectation of increased working hours is only likely to grow. The MLA found in 2006 that not only research universities but all academic institutions have greatly increased their expectations of tenure track faculty to publish articles and books towards their tenure cases without reducing their teaching hours.

While expectations of productivity have increased, so too has the shift to employing more part-time faculty: in the US only a third of faculty are now full-time tenured or tenure track, down from 55 percent in 1970. This puts increasing pressure on those full timers to do additional service work. Work that more often falls to women, and work that gets little credit in terms of promotions and merit pay. As we are increasingly asked to account for our productivity, I wonder how much of the intellectual and pastoral labor more often done by female and minority faculty are recognized as productive?

These increased pressures are on everybody, but they are experienced unequally by women and minority faculty because of how resources are differently distributed:

Pay: In the US women faculty earn 85 cents to every male dollar, this rate goes down at the higher ranks. [Couldn’t find comparable figs for minority faculty.]

Time: Women faculty are much more likely to be partnered with another full-time worker and are more likely to be partnered with another academic—i.e. someone also working long hours. In heterosexual couples, women are much more likely to carry more responsibilities for childcare and domestic duties.

Emotional resources: Women and minority faculty are less likely to feel confident about their performance. Educational research suggests that girls consistently rank their sense of their own abilities much lower than do men, even though they perform better in assessments. Students of color constantly have to work against teachers’ expectations of low achievement.

Recognition: Who has a voice in the university and what are they allowed to say? Mark Anthony Neal has mentioned the chastisement of faculty who dare to “think while Black.” Tenure and promotion discourage speaking while Black, female, and gay.

The demands on all academics escalate, but different groups have varying access to resources that make those demands bearable. This is not only an issue of pressures on junior faculty to produce for their tenure file. Even those at the top of the ladder continue to work extraordinarily hard.

Senior faculty and administrators need to recognize that few of their group would have met the standards currently set for tenure and promotion. They need to publicly scale back on expectations of quantity and focus more on quality. This is not only for the wellbeing of their junior colleagues, it is also likely to foster more careful, intellectually rigorous research. They also need to think imaginatively about different kinds of productivity than written scholarship in a changing multimedia world where monograph contracts are harder to score.

But we also need to consider our own complicity. In my research I read a lot of scholarly concern about how reality television shows cultivate the ideal self-governing neoliberal citizen—someone who is adaptable, mobile, always a bit anxious, self-monitoring, and willing to work harder not only to get ahead but to stay in place. While we communication scholars worry about the effects of reality TV on its audiences, we need to look for the beam in our own eye: academics are the most obligingly self-governing citizens of all. We can work whenever we want as long as we work all the time.

Like many universities, corporations, and governments, Penn has adopted a strategy of “Sustainability.” I agree that huge communities like universities have a responsibility to environmental issues. But sustainability can’t only be a matter for nations and institutions, we also have to think about sustainability at a human level. The demand for constant growth means that we extract more and more energy from a limited resource. How do the developing nations in the university world—women, men of color, and part-timers—unequally bear the brunt of overtaxed resources? And looking forward, what kind of labor legacy are we leaving for the generation of scholars we are nurturing into the profession?

Don’t get me wrong, I love my job. But I don’t want to do only my job. We need to model livable lives for our students. We need to do more than just work, and not only if we want a family. We need to consider the law of diminishing returns and the possibility that creativity comes from working less. We need to make space for political and community engagements that feed our intellectual work in other ways. We need to think about why universities matter not only for the world but for the people working within them.

Katherine Sender is the associate dean for graduate studies and an associate professor at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Business, not Politics: The Making of the Gay Market and the forthcoming Makeover Television and its Audiences.

An Academic Recap of 2009

2010-01-04T23:20:00.001-05:00

Given the media's current fixation on one golfer's rampant infidelities, it is hard to remember that anything else happened in 2009, especially before that failed suicide attack on a Detriot-bound airplane Christmas morning took over the headlines this holiday season.

Of course, much did happen last year, and most of the mass mediated, end-of-year lists captured the big stories, including those angry town hall meetings, the concomitant dulling of a "post-racial" president's post-election luster, our ongoing economic crisis, the passing of a Kennedy, America's war efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq, protests in Iranian streets, the King of Pop's unexpected death, and the panic about H1N1.

But academia also had its own big stories this year. Here's my top ten list (in no particular order):

1. Protests against cuts in the University of California system. New Yorker magazine just published a fascinating glimpse into Berkeley's branch of that movement, which has students, staff, faculty, and administrators waging a war over the future of public education in that state (with implications for the rest of us). There are even controversial proposals (published in places like the Washington Post) that pivot on a decoupling of Berkeley from the other UC campuses, of saving top-tier public universities across the country through selective privatization. For now, there are strikes (and threats of more strikes) on Berkeley's campus, and faculty must decide whether or not to cross those picket lines and teach their classes.

2. That bizarre and surreal "story" about an African-American professor at Columbia who allegedly got so upset about a white colleague's indifference/insensitivity to contemporary racism that he punched her in the face at a pub near campus. The story went viral in a day (back in early November) and disappeared just as fast. I can only hope (against hope) that that only means it was all some kind of sick joke/hoax. Indeed, if it wasn't, the dropped coverage on this confounding tale is troubling in and of itself.

3. The long wait for the National Research Council's national ranking of doctoral programs. They released a detailed guide to their methodology this past Fall, but not the actual rankings. This non-story is clearly a big story in its own right. And I'm sure that the plot will only thicken in 2010.

4. Lincoln University's attempt to impose a body-mass index requirement on its graduating seniors. The initiative was met with cheers from some (for addressing rampant obesity) and jeers from others (who labelled it a form of discrimination). The 'nays' won, and Lincoln rescinded the requirement.

5. The stimulis money that funneled into university-based research projects as part of the government's economic recovery package. I know quite a few colleagues (in several different fields) who were able to take advantage of this initiative, stimulating their own research projects, even and especially those that had already run out of funding.

6. Media stories about how the economic downturn potentially made a bad situation worse at Harvard University. Vanity Fair's expose on the matter is still one of the most startling, attempting to blame at least some of Harvard's current financial predicament on its previous investment strategies and the people who made them.

7. University responses to H1N1. Duke University took a particularly pro-active approach to thwarting the threat. We may not be out of the woods yet, but this summer's media coverage now seems somewhat overblown.

8. Ongoing stories about how universities across the nation are tightening their belts to weather the economic downturn. I first heard about massive budget cuts at the University of Washington in Seattle. Other institutions have followed suit. What university initiatives get put off and de-prioritized when annual budgets are slashed by 15% or more?

9. That controversial New York Times op-ed in early April (from Columbia University Professor Mark Taylor) pleading for us to "end academia as we know it." The piece began by describing graduate education as "the Detriot of higher education," a provocative opening salvo. There were many academics who quite publicly disagreed with Taylor's remedies, including his call to end tenure.

10. An anemic academic job market. Newly minted PhDs continue to lament the slim pickings. 2009 was probably a little bit better than 2008 (at least in some fields), but there are even bigger questions to debate about academia's increasing reliance on adjunct labor and its implications for the future of doctoral education.

Academic Publishing...

2009-12-14T09:55:00.005-05:00

During the AAA conference last week, I spent a ton of time in the Book Exhibit. But I wasn't just checking out the newest anthro-titles, which can be its own small joy, especially when friends and mentors have new offerings to share. I was actually walking the exhibit with students, trying to introduce several current dissertation writers (and a few newly minted PhDs) to editors at academic presses. I don't know many editors, but one or two introductions are better than none.

Every introduction won't turn into a publishing match-made-in-heaven, but it is important to grease the wheel for students as they attempt to clear that important hurdle. Indeed, it is an advisor's job.

When I was writing my dissertation, my advisor told me to "write a book," which is something I also ask of my current students. I realize that that isn't an uncontroversial position, and it is far from self-evident what the call to "write a book" even means. When you haven't even successfully written a dissertation yet (let alone a publishable manuscript), the suggestion can feel like replacing one opacity with another.

One of the things it means, I think, is to write with readers in mind, to make your claims with attention to the dramas, tensions, and storylines that will keep audiences oriented and invested. It need not mean sacrificing rigor for readability. It just asks for a little attention to storytelling (along with argumentation).

After I had defended my dissertation, my advisor made it her job to introduce me to several university press editors. In fact, she spent a lot of time helping me to think through my pitch, boiling my arguments down to their most interesting (and publishable) permutations.

My advisor made a point of saying that graduate students aren't "islands" isolated in some academic sea all by themselves. As most academics know, if the process works the way it is supposed to work, a dissertation advisor takes on a career-long role. And one part of the job description entails de-mystifying academia's backstage, helping students as they (i) prepare for "the market," (ii) negotiate job offers, (iii) deal with the challenges of post-doctoral life (committees, new colleagues, more demands, etc.), and (iv) publish their research.

In terms of the publishing maze, things are changing quite a bit. There used to be a time when it was roundly frowned upon to submit manuscripts to several academic publishers at once. That is increasingly becoming less true. Indeed, the only bit of leverage that a junior faculty member might have these days (vis-a-vis potential publishers) is the threat of going with another press that is equally invested (and also pressuring reviewers for reader reports). Again, this isn't uncontroversial, but there is a lot to recommend such multiple submissions, as long as you are up front with editors about it. For one, if an editor is really interested, he or she might promise to expedite the review process (pushing readers even more adamantly) to avoid competition. Indeed, I only submitted my first manuscript to one publisher, but only if they promised to expedite the process (not leaving one waiting around for months and months without word).

The other benefit of multiple submissions is the fact that you get more critical feedback. If Publisher 1 sends it to three anonymous reviewers and Publisher 2 sends it to three more, you can feel much more confident about the coverage your material is getting. There is less likelihood that you have missed a key critique.

Academic journals still routinely disqualify articles that have been submitted to several places at once. Book publishers are becoming more amenable to that idea, even if they aren't all happy with it. At the end of the day, a good relationship with an academic press is about a good relationship with an editor. So, whatever you do, make sure you are up front, honest, and straightforward. Editors will tell you where they stand, what they will stand for, and you all can both make informed decisions about how to proceed from there.

Why publish "Obama's mama's book" at all?

2009-12-04T09:36:00.002-05:00

Why publish “Obama’s mama’s book” at all?

That’s probably one of the most dismissive and derogatory ways of phrasing a question that at least a few anthropologists are asking at this year’s AAA conference, and in just such disparaging terms. I know that some of my colleagues won’t agree, but I can’t help but think about such a query (even in its less choleric/unflattering registers) as a somewhat non-anthropological way of framing the issue.

Duke University Press officially launched S. Ann Dunham’s Surviving against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia yesterday, which included a noontime press conference where the only question posed actually pivoted on a differently pitched version of the same theme music: Is Duke University Press only publishing this book because it was written by the President’s mother?

I received a similar e-query over the summer from a colleague, a sociologist, responding to my post about what other anthropologists had been describing, optimistically, as President Obama’s potentially anthropological sensibilities (as a function of being an “anthropologist’s son”). The sociologist started with an excerpt from my posting and then succinctly offered his rejoinder.

I wrote the following, which he cited:

Anthropologists often get lampooned and dismissed by other social scientists (and by those outside of the academy) for their (our) assumed epistemological and presentational excesses: opaque jargon, solipsistic navel gawking, the politicization of research, and on and on. But even though she didn’t raise Obama for the entirety of his childhood, his mother seems to have imparted in him a degree of thoughtfulness and genuine appreciation for cultural differences (as partially manifested in his campaign’s inclusively “multiracial” ground game) that I want to embrace as the best of what the discipline of anthropology can share with the rest of the academy and beyond.

He responded: I agree with John L. Jackson! (But would you go as far as to publish her unpublished dissertation as Duke is doing?)

Why not publish it?

I can understand some of the skepticism behind the sociologist's question. If it wasn’t published before Barack Obama became President Obama, it probably isn’t worthy of publication. It probably isn’t very good. So, why pander to the depravities of the market?

Deborah Thomas and I had a different thought. We were gearing up for last year’s AAA conference, and we heard that Dunham’s colleagues at the University of Hawaii (including Alice G. Dewey and Nancy I. Cooper) were already in the process of trying to get the dissertation published. The research was based on fieldwork in Kajar, a blacksmithing village in Indonesia, and we thought that it might be interesting to have a panel on the work (and the book) at this year’s AAA meeting.

Deborah called up the folks at Hawaii, and she found out that they’d been working to get this dissertation turned into a book for quite a long time, almost since Dunham’s death. Deb also discovered that although a few publishers had shown interest, they were dragging their feet. So, we started to read through bits of the dissertation. It is super long (in the general vicinity of 1,000 pages), and we didn’t get through all of it. But it seemed like an intriguing mix of old-school ethnographic holism and a relatively newfangled analysis of a rural Indonesian industry that Dunham characterized as "surviving," despite some anthropological predictions of its inevitable demise. She also placed her study (an “ethnography of microfinance” before microfinance was cool) within robustly historical, analytical, regulatory, and cultural contexts, which accounted for her manuscript’s daunting length.

If anyone was going to consider publishing the manuscript, it would have to be edited substantially, cut by more than half. That’s when we went to Ken Wissoker at Duke. We asked him to look at the manuscript, to talk to Dunham’s colleagues at Hawaii, and to consider publishing the work. And we wanted him to do all of that quickly enough so that it might be out and available in time for this year’s conference.

Duke was interested in publishing the book because it was written by President Obama’s mother. That is also why Deb and I were interested in it. We had even thought that President Obama might be willing to attend this year's conference and talk about his mother’s ethnographic research and its impact (if any) on his own politico-cultural outlook. He didn’t take us up on that invitation, but Dunham’s daughter, Maya Soetoro-Ng, graciously agreed to talk about her mother’s anthropological exploits.

But this idea that Dunham’s publication should be marked with a scarlet letter because its relevance is inflected by the fame and significance of her progeny seems strange to me.

Don’t all publishers weigh the merits of the books they produce with recourse to the potential audiences they might entice, especially university publishers increasingly being asked (by central administrations) to pay their own way? It was published because she is our President’s mother. And because that means that more readers might be interested in reading it. And because it is a bold critique of a certain Geertzian spin on the region. And because the stars aligned in just such a way that a stalled publication process got re-energized by some outside interlopers. And because it is a very solid manuscript.

The implicit presumption that that latter fact alone (or something close to it) ostensibly explains why more “legitimate” manuscripts are published by academic presses seems like an unproductive and disingenuous fiction to me, a scholarly fairy tale of Santa Clausian proportions.

This book should have been published before Obama moved into the White House. If Dunham hadn’t died prematurely, maybe it would have been. To dismiss it out of hand because it is being published now, so long after she completed the dissertation, as a function of its situated-ness at the trickster-haunted crossroads where scholarship meets “politics” (in many senses of that latter term) is, I think, a tough position to hold. Without such “from the ashes” reclamations (political and intellectual in the selfsame instant), Zora Neale Hurston, for one, wouldn’t be on any anthropological syllabi either.

Day One at the AAAs

2009-12-03T16:10:00.003-05:00

The anthropologists are finally here!

Philadelphia's Downtown Marriott is housing the 108th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, which started last night, and The Chronicle of Higher Education has already run a story on one of Wednesday night's panels.

"A Critical History of the Darkness in El Dorado Controversy" was organized around Alice Dreger's scathing critique of Patrick Tierney's Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon, which was equally scathing in its criticism of how Napoleon A. Chagnon (author of, amongst other things, Yanomamo: A Fierce People) and geneticist James Neel conducted their research in the region. According to Tierney, they actually exacerbated a measles problem, failed to acquire true "informed consent" for research, and even (in Chagnon's case) allegedly fomented violent conflicts among community members. I remember the AAA meetings in 2000, 2001, and 2002 when the book's accusations first surfaced.

Conducting research for a book that she is currently writing, Dreger revisited Tierney's assertions. Not only does she claim that Tierney's work was sloppy and inaccurate (his accusations mostly flat wrong), but she also criticizes the AAA for throwing Chagnon and Neel under the bus in its 2002 report about the matter. I missed the session, but I'm sure that I'll hear anthropologists talking about it for the rest of the week.

I missed that particular panel because I was teaching my grad class yesterday afternoon (goxewu will appreciate that). And then I stayed on Penn's campus for two AAA-affiliated events.

Penn's Anthropology Department joined forces with two AAA journals (Anthropology and Education Quarterly and Transforming Anthropology) to throw an opening-night reception in the Penn Museum's Chinese Rotunda. 90-feet high, it is one of the largest unsupported masonry domes in the entire country. One of the most amazingly breathtaking interiors that any college campus can boast, it was a spectacular setting for the fete.

I left that reception early enough to attend an intimate performance of Pouring Tea, a one-man show by ethnographer E. Patrick Johnson (also, like Dreger, from Northwestern University). The performance took place at Penn's LGBT Center in The Carriage House. Vocalist Joya Jones and poets Nina Harris and Joshua Bennett (of HBO's Def Poetry fame) sanctified the space with three blistering performances. Then Johnson spent the next 40 minutes performing excerpts from interviews he conducted for his most recent book, Sweet Tea: Black Gay men of the South. He has played much larger venues with this show (and is currently preparing a more expansive stage version for a May opening in Chicago), but this tiny, cozy space was a perfect way start to a week that will be chock full of ethnographically inflected conversations. As Johnson himself described the event in his post-performance Q&A session, "it felt like I was bringing you all back with me into those small and intimate living rooms where I conducted the interviews."

This Week: "On Location" at the AAAs

2009-11-30T10:04:00.002-05:00

The American Anthropological Association is holding its annual meeting in Philadelphia this week, and I'll be there with bells on (maybe literally).

I realize that the last time I mentioned anything about academic conferences in one of my blog-posts, the critical responses came fast and furious.

One of the consistent commenters for that posting was someone named goxewu, who kept asking me if I had to cancel any of my classes so that I could trot off to these conferences. Even though I answered the query a few different times (and a few different ways), goxewu continued to push the point, even implying that I would probably have canceled my classes this semester if they were on Mondays and Fridays (instead of Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays).

But goxewu's major gripe wasn't necessarily about those missed class sessions. One of goxewu's final comments makes the argument plain: "Prof. Jackson may have done academe an unintended service with his post on conference-going, which unintentionally shone a light on the academic equivalent of Congressional junkets (which are also about a third legit, a third of marginal use, and a third paid vacations)." But are only a third of all academic conferences really legit?

Back when I was in graduate school, we used to read the yearly journalistic stories (some called them "attacks") on the ostensibly bizarre themes found among offerings at academic conferences. And these stories were seemingly offered up with a similarly delegitimizing impulse at their core.

A Philadelphia Inquirer article on the 2004 Modern Language Association meetings started with the following line: "When a professor draws a parallel between Dumbo and Detective Monk, you just know you're at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association."

The annual news stories about the AAA meetings often playfully invoke the tone and register of traditional ethnographic monographs, as does this Chicago Sun-Times piece from 1991: "Adorning themselves with jackets of tweed or gaily colored beads, puffing on elaborately carved pipes, ears pierced and decorated with rings, members of a national tribe are holding their annual potlatch in Chicago this week. They number some 3,700 [closer to 5,000 will attend this year]. But once here, they will break into smaller groups."

In many ways, I am an advocate of the academic conference. And I don't think that these venues are a waste of time, or a scam--or that they will be quickly/easily scrapped for cyber conferences in the not-too-distant future (another theory offered up after my last post). But I do sometimes mildly grumble about the fact that I can't make all of the interesting ones that are relevant to my work. And new meetings seem to pop up every single day.

For instance, on Wednesday night, E. Patrick Johnson is performing his electrifying one-man show, Pouring Tea, an adaptation of his powerful new book Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South, based on an extensive oral history project. On Thursday night, the AAA will host a book launch and reception for Surviving Against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia, by S. Ann Dunham, the mother of President Barack Obama, who died in 1995, before she could publish her work. Dunham's daughter, Maya Soetoro-Ng, will be present to offer remarks at the reception, which follows a panel about Dunham's work. And the exhibit "Righteous Dopefiend: Homelessness, Addiction, and Poverty in Urban America," opens on Saturday at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Philadelphia (and runs through May 2010). The exhibit is based on ten years of ethnographic research by anthropologist Philippe Bourgois (my Penn colleague) and photographer-ethnographer Jeff Schonberg. They worked among a community of heroin injectors and crack smokers in San Francisco. The exhibit is based on their new book, also called Righteous Dopefiend. (Another Righteous Dopefiend exhibit is being presented in conjunction with the Slought Foundation, 4017 Walnut Street. It is a multimedia installation that will run from December 3 through 31.)

I'll blog about these conference events--and others--all week.

The End of an Oprah

2009-11-20T09:22:00.003-05:00

Later on today, Oprah Winfrey is supposed to announce that she's closing up shop on her wildly influential daily show. The lights go out on that televisual institution in 2011, and that will be the end of a pop-cultural era.

Of course, Oprah didn't invent the genre (and she wasn't the first person to ratchet its stakes up to national prominence), but she has owned that format for much of the last two decades, using it as an amazingly powerful platform, one that has made her the most recognizable first-name celebrity on the planet.

Some credited her "book club" with almost single-handedly keeping America literate (and the publishing industry solvent), a not completely hyperbolic claim.

I probably watched about 10 to 15 episodes of the show a year, but they were some of the most riveting moments of network TV: Tom Cruise prancing around on that couch and attacking psychoanalysis; Dave Chappelle, just back from Africa, explaining why he left his own lucrative and highly successful television show; Whitney Houston admitting her bouts with drugs, alcohol and Bobby Brown; and, of course, who can forget the James Frey controversy, which was probably the beginning of the end of her book club's golden age.

Earlier this year, I watched her show with Jay-Z, and just this week, I DVR'd her Sarah Palin interview. The hour-long format makes her engagement with these folks feel so much more substantive than the five-minute packages that you get most places on TV. She has time to ask Palin all the questions you thought needed to be posed (about that infamous Katie Couric non-answer, about Levi Johnston's public attacks on her family, about her preparedness for the White House). They are all questions we've heard put to Palin before, but Oprah's space feels like a much more intimate place for the conversation.

Indeed, Winfrey's been criticized for just such would-be intimacy, especially as it informs her unprecedented crossover appeal. Is it really fair to call her a postmodern mammy-figure (as some detractors have)? That seems like a cheap shot, an overly dismissive critique that can be thrown around quite self-servingly.

Part of what makes her show so entertaining, especially when it features someone like Palin, is that she is always as famous as the person she's interviewing. Palin is one of the most sought-after guests right now, a star in national politics, and the closest thing Republicans have to an Obama-like figure. Even still, Palin seems to recognize (and defer to) the aura of Oprah. Everyone does!

Over the past few years, Oprah Winfrey has been all over the news for what she's been doing outside of her daily broadcast (that all-girls school in South Africa, her stumping for then-Senator Obama, etc.), and she plans to devote more time to her new network, which will provide her with 24 hours a day to fill, not just one.

Winfrey is also doing things like financing the new Lee Daniels film, Precious, which I have still yet to see. Ugh!

With all of these pots on the fire, Winfrey is probably betting on the fact that she'll be even more influential after they shutter the doors to her studio show. I wouldn't doubt it.

Is Diversity a Dirty Word in the Academy?

2009-11-19T09:33:00.002-05:00

Former United States Senator Rick Santorum penned an op-ed in this morning's Philadelphia Inquirer that questions the military's commitment to "diversity." Santorum's "The Elephant in the Room: Diversity, but at What Cost?" argues that the Naval Academy's characterization of diversity as "highest personnel priority" is not just silly (as manifested in an attempt to diversify an all white and male color guard before a recent world series game) but also potentially "dangerous," especially if "the military's commitment to 'diversity' as job one prevented military officials and the Department of Defense from 'connecting the dots' when it came to the accused [Fort Hood] shooter."

Of course, academics hear a great deal about diversity, but is it becoming a dirty word in the academy, a potentially dangerous threat?

According to detractors, what's the problem with diversity?

Santorum likens it to "a politically correct incantation that forces otherwise reasonable people to say silly things," a critique many would extend to diversity claims within academica. (Indeed, it has been used to characterize the arguments made by many a brainstorm blogger, myself included.)

But what's wrong with diversity? The naysayers have many answers: that it discriminates against white males; that it rewards mediocrity/incompetence; that it perpetuates minority under-achievement; that it threatens the integrity of higher education; that it is undemocratic and unethical; that it runs counter to all of our loftiest ideals of equality. Diversity, they argue, is the euphemism of choice for quotas, which should be considered unfair and unconstitutional.

We know what the detractors think, but how do diversity proponents counter. Santorum lays out a version of diversity's defense in his piece, a version that seems pretty accurate to me (and woefully, as Santorum would agree, insufficient).

What's the defense of diversity, not just as an abstract principle, but as translatable into concrete decisions about, say, student admissions and faculty hiring?

Given the extent to which recent Supreme Court decisions have demonstrated growing judicial hostility towards race-inflected admission decisions/formulas (and with the increasing thematization/politicization of academia as ideologically Far-Left), are advocates conceding too much? Are they trying to have it both ways? That is, might academia be falling into a trap when it attempts to ostensibly cloak its programmatic commitments to diversity (one of the criticisms leveled at many current academic interventions)?

Is it enough to re-name programs that used to be explicitly marked as race-specific initiatives and still deploy them in service to similar goals, walking on egg-shells all the while? Are academics still fighting for a version of diversity with real institutional teeth? Or has that battle already been lost?

2009-11-13T12:40:00.002-05:00

Most of the reviews are in, and if it weren't for Wes Anderson's new animated film, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Lee Daniels might have the most critically acclaimed motion picture of the year.

Precious, based on the novel Push, by the poet Sapphire, is finally going into wide national release today, but most critics have been gushing about this gritty little film for weeks.

Even before it had a distributor, I wrote about Daniels and the Sapphire book right here on my blog, especially after the film won prestigious awards at Sundance and Cannes, something close to the equivalent of Best Picture Prizes at both festivals.

I called my previous post "Sundancing with Controversy," because I thought that Daniels had chosen a very difficult book: the first-person story of a poor, sexually-abused (by her father), HIV-positive black teenage mother named Precious Jones who has to negotiate a cruel and unforgiving world. Daniels court's controversy in his films, so I wasn't surprised that he'd gone after this powerful (and disturbing) little book. Here's some of what I wrote about him back in January:

Lee Daniels is the unconventional filmmaker responsible for helping to create provocative and disturbing independent films such asMonster’s Ball (famous for Halle Berry’s controversial sex scene with Billy Bob Thornton) and The Woodsman (which boasts Kevin Bacon’s riveting and sympathetic portrayal of a pedophile). Shadowboxer, his 2005 directorial debut, was most cited for its incestuous interracial sex scenes (between Cuba Gooding, Jr., and Helen Mirren). But I own a copy of that movie simply to show people its bizarrely unexplained (and matter-of-fact) depictions of a suburban Philadelphia landscape seemingly awash in stray Zebras.

In all of his films, Daniels pushes the envelope. He usually rips and defaces it, too.

And just as I thought, even though most reviewers applaud his film as "unforgettable," "remarkable," and something that, according to Rolling Stone, will leave audiences "moved like no film in years," one or two critics have come down very hard on Precious. For example, Armond White's NYPress review has been making the rounds as the harshest version of this anti-Precious critique. "Not since The Birth of a Nation," White writes, "has a mainstream movie demeaned the idea of black American life as much as Precious." Quite a claim!

My colleague at Penn, Salamishah Tillet, has penned a very thoughtful reading of the film that places its generally positive critical reception in conversation with the venom that Spielberg's adaptation of Alice Walker's The Color Purple received. Her essay puts the film's critical praise in a much more productive and robust cultural/political context. And it might help us to unpack some of White's hostility, too.

Has anyone out there seen the film? (It has been in NYC for at least a week.) If so, what's your verdict?

It just got to Philadelphia today. So, I'm planning to buy a ticket for the weekend. As you can guess, I'll give you all my two cents after I see it.

Loathing Academic Conferences

2009-11-11T09:41:00.002-05:00

For the sake of full disclosure, I should probably start off by admitting that I'm in the middle of a particularly heavy conference stretch right now, which clearly informs this mini-tirade.

American Studies, one of my favorite annual meetings, held its conference in DC this past weekend, and the event overlapped with the American Academy of Religion's gathering in Montreal. I'm finally just back from both, and the National Communication Association's conference starts tomorrow. In Chicago!

It seems that many of the academic associations (at least the ones putting on conferences that I've planned to attend) have conspired to meet at one and the same time most years. Indeed, some folks might even push for a few extra weeks in the Fall semester just to accommodate all of these meetings.

I have to admit that I really enjoy a great deal about these conferences. At ASA, I hung out with old classmates from Columbia, and met up with Doug Mitchell from the University of Chicago Press, the editorial impresario responsible for much of what's most amazing about Chicago's backlist.

Then I hopped on a plane for AAR (finishing, in flight, the provocative epilogue for Liberalism, Black Power, and the Making of American Politics, 1965-1980, a powerful argument about the links between liberalism and black radicalism/nationalism written by Devin Fergus, who matriculated through Columbia's History Department while I was making my way through Anthropology).

I have only been to three AARs in the last decade or so (and once it was simply to screen a film that I helped produce on African American deployments of the Bible), but I immediately got caught up in the energy of the meeting this year. Besides taking part in a panel that I found particularly useful for my own work (a session examining methodological concerns specific to the ethnography of religion organized by Marla Frederick and featuring Kersten Priest, Tracey Hucks and R. Marie Griffith), I also hung out with old friends, reconnected with new ones, and had a great discussion (about so much more than just my current book project) with Sharmila Sen at Harvard University Press.

But given all that, why am I back in Philly and feeling so drained? Usually, good conferences energize me (Ford Fellows Conferences got me through my final years of grad school), and I would characterize my experiences at both of these recent events quite positively.

Part of my problem, I think, is that I'm still trying to figure out how to "do" academic conferences properly. At this point, I spend so much more time just chatting with people in the convention hallways and grabbing "coffee" at hotel lounges (as opposed to sitting attentively through actual sessions) that it almost seems scandalous. Indeed, I went to a total of two sessions at AAR (besides my own) and not even one at ASA. I told you: scandalous! Granted, I only had a day (less than a full day) at ASA before shuttling off to Canada, but it still felt wrong.

And I made a pact with myself way back in graduate school that I would never read a paper at an academic conference. And I've stuck to that irrational decision. Maybe it is my own idiosyncratic version of ADD (academic-speak deficit disorder), but I get super bored when most scholars read papers, especially when they don't even seem particularly moved by what they're saying. So, I have lunged in the other direction. I just try to talk my stuff out. Sometimes with notes and sometimes without, which usually means that I forget semi-major points (even when I have the notes in front of my, I tend to make the mistake of not looking down at them) and probably come off as somehow not taking the event seriously enough (because I didn't read prepared comments). It also means that I don't always bring everything back together neatly at the end of my 20 minutes. But I think I am getting better at that. And cultivating such a non-readerly skill is worth the minor embarrassments along the way.

So, I come back from conferences not quite sure of what (substantively) I got out of them. And then it is right off to the next one.

In early December, the American Anthropological Association meetings are here in Philadelphia, and I am going to take part in all of that one, too. This time, at least, I won't be presenting. But I have already committed to checking out several sessions on every single day. I'll let folks know how that goes.

2009-11-02T09:51:00.001-05:00

Who posts "comments" to blogs? And why?

It isn't just happenstance that some of the most dismissive and hostile "comments" to blog posts come from anonymous readers. Anonymity gives courage to the cowardly. And that was the case long before the Internet.

Of course, it doesn't even make sense to respond to dismissive comments. Nothing good can come of it.

I'm not sure that both of the comments listed below are dismissive, but I did want to take a second to reframe a couple of responses to my recent "mentoring" post.

The first, posted by "goxewu," is simple and straightforward:

Wait a minute. There's an "associate dean" for just "undergraduate studies" in just one school (and the middleweight one of "communications," at that) at Penn? Prof. Jackson is hereby enjoined from ever, ever complaining in the slightest about the problem of administrative top-heaviness in higher education.

This "goxewu" ignores the point of my piece and asks why a "middleweight" school like "communications" would even need an "associate dean" for its undergraduates? Is it really that atypical for "just one school" to have a dean devoted to undergraduate education? If anything, I would have imagined that "goxewu" would have asked why communication/s was a school at all, instead of just a department. The lack of such an additional query seems telling.

And why this drive-by attack on "communications" as middleweight in the first place? What does that even mean? Goxewu represents a lot of people (academics and non-academics) who relish the idea of banishing entire fields with the snobbish wave of a hand. In faddish discussions about interdisciplinarity, we should spend some time interrogating our assumptions about disciplinary pecking orders, assumptions that get translated into all kinds of easily assumed hierarchies within the academy.

The second comment, left by "vfichera," responds to the actual substance of my posting. S/he quotes some of what I wrote:

"I have been touched by some equally memorable students here, and I have been trying to ask myself how I can be most helpful to them, especially in the context of an academic lifestyle that can already feel so overburdened and hectic."

And then responds with the following:

A little bit of "Prairie Home Companion" would be useful here or a touch of Jaime Escalante ("Stand and Deliver") -- all of the students are potentially memorable. Mentoring is not about just helping the "memorable" to achieve greater heights of success but of unfolding the talents of all of the students, of touching those who feel out-of-touch, of being a true advisor instead of having "professional advisors" for students to "relieve the faculty of that burden."

The corporatization of the university has indeed been achieved by proliferating administrations which have, with the consent of the tenured faculty, eroded the traditional roles of faculty into bits and pieces which are "adjuncted-out" to the point where undergraduates are even paying tuition to teach and advise themselves, as "undergraduate TAs" and "peer-mentors" -- often for academic credit.

Mentoring starts with faculty's acceptance and faithfulness to the full panoply of teaching and governance responsibilities, not just research. As the tenured faculty participate in the unraveling of their own duties and responsibilities onto more "manageable" personnel, they are "enabling" nothing less than the transformative unraveling of the idea of the university itself.

I feel like vfichera is picking a fight with someone else, a fight that he or she has probably been waging for quite a while.

vfichera's discussion about the "corporatization of the university" should be taken seriously, and s/he lists a number of reasons (not excerpted above) why "the tenured professoriate" should do better by its students, which was the point of my post.

I don't want to fall into that old Clintonian trap of parsing what is is, but should we talk about what it means to call a student memorable?

I remember students for any number of reasons, including those "who feel out-of-touch." vfichera is right that mentoring isn't a zero-sum thing. We should take on all students, especially if they are willing to meet us close to half way. But is it wrong to remember some students more than others? Is anything else even possible?

But part of vfichera's real point is about the shifting of duties from tenured/tenure-tracked faculty to the growing number of hired guns working on an adjunct basis--and with much less job security. The adjunctification of higher education is an important issue. I'm just not completely convinced of vfichera's way of linking it to my post on mentoring.

Of course, comments to blogs (like blog entries themselves) often boast a tangentialist logic, stream-of-consciousness as organizing principle. Fair enough. And vfichera's point is still well taken: the move to relieve faculty of more and more of their advising duties is something that faculty members should be spending much more time discussing.

Academic Melancholia?

2009-10-23T10:43:00.002-04:00

Do academics have good reason to be depressed?

When I was in graduate school, I had two friends (also grad students) who cried (literally broke down in tears) just about every single week of their graduate school careers--and it might even have been more like every day. They seemed truly miserable much of the time, and it took them both a lot of soul-searching to find a way out of that existential morass.

For me, back then, their plight always seemed like a powerful lesson, a reminder that "the life of the mind" should be challenging without being debilitating. But it isn't necessarily easy to maintain some kind of discrete firewall between those two alternatives. And academics seem to have more and more reason to court such melancholia all the time.

For one thing, the nature of our conversations/debates are sometimes so unnecessarily cantankerous--if not downright petty. Very little is new under the sun, least of all of that rhetoric/stance of dismissive and hostile critique. But how useful is it? What's the point? And that stuff only gets worse with the Internet. Everyone's doing it. With ostensible impunity. Indeed, academics aren't the only ones who seem to have gone FOX News (even National Enquirer) in terms of over-the-top and ad hominem attacks on interlocutors. But we are supposed to offer up a different model of engagement, no? (Just reading the venomous comments posted to people's Brainstorm Blogs can make one depressed.)

And are academics friendship-deprived?

That could be another reason for academic melancholia. Of course, we have colleagues. If we're lucky, very generous and supportive ones, but are we under-friended? I have one colleague who claims that he hasn't made a new "friend" in the academy since 1997. Not just a cordial acquaintance, but a substantive and full-fledged friend. Given the nature of our sometimes-hostile exchanges (as mentioned above), it stands to reason that we wouldn't concomitantly cultivate the skills needed to successfully befriend folks. I just had a grad student return from an academic conference and complain about the fact that everyone she met in the lobby of the conference hotel seemed to only half-listen to her as they scanned the crowd for more prestigious scholars to talk to. Does getting disciplined into academic life mean unlearning some of the basic rules of social interaction? If so, that's reason enough to be discouraged.

For most of us, how happy is life within the Ivory Tower? I keep telling non-academics that academia is the best gig around. And it is. But why do so many faculty members across the country sometimes appear quite clearly unhappy and anxious about their lot? And it is a state that often lasts well after individuals have cleared the tenure hurdle.

Racial Headlines: Rush Limbaugh, Marc Hill and Injustices of the Peace

2009-10-19T09:44:00.005-04:00

I spent the last four days in sunny Southern California, and most of that time found me losing my mind about the zaniness of America's current racial landscape.

I went out West to take part in a fantastic conference, "Reading Scriptures, Reading America: Interruptions, Orientations, and Mimicry among U.S. Communities of Color," sponsored by Claremont Graduate University's Institute for Signifying Scriptures. I presented research from the book I'm currently writing (an examination of African-American Hebrew Israelites) as part of one of the conference panels organized by Velma Love (Florida A&M University), sharing the stage with Renee K. Harrison (Payne Theological Seminary).

Since it had been a long time since my last stint out West, I ended up squeezing in several different things: meetings with potential agents in Los Angeles (about some screenplays I've written), spending time with a couple academic friends and their newborn at UCI, and very briefly crashing the Ford Foundation Fellows conference in Irvine, California. (The Ford conference was as inspiring as ever!)

During much of my trip, I was also following three breaking news stories, excluding that boy-in-a-balloon "hoax" that CNN spent most of the weekend unpacking.

There was the story about that Louisiana justice of the peace who was unwilling to marry an inter-racial couple, Rush Limbaugh's response to his recent NFL snub, and Rupert Murdoch personally announcing FOX News contributor Marc Lamont Hill's firing at a stockholder meeting. All three stories are still playing themselves out, but I just wanted to make a few early comments.

1. Keith Bardwell, a justice of the peace in Tangipahoa Parish in southeastern Louisiana, refused to marry the mixed couple out of concern for their offspring--at least, that's the argument he made on CBS's The Early Show today. "I've had countless numbers of people that was born in that situation," Bardwell said. "And they claim that the blacks or the whites didn't accept the children. And I didn't want to put the children in that position." What a fascinating twist. Traditionally, such racially informed objections to miscegenation would have been framed in terms of eugenics (the degeneration of racial purity/prowess) or adamant white supremacy (the divinely pre-ordained discreteness of our racial order), but concern for the social plight of the children themselves wouldn't necessarily have been the trump card for an official in Bardwell's position. Of course, what is most interesting about Bardwell's stance is that he denies being racist at all--and claims not to even understand why his recusal has caused such controversy. He doesn't believe that what he did was unconstitutional, and he doesn't think that it should be considered racist. My recent book, Racial Paranoia, anticipates Bardwell's move and helps to explain the unprecedented logic of racialism in contemporary America.

2. Bardwell doesn't accept the charge of racism and neither does Rush Limbaugh. The latter penned a very careful response to his recent disavowal by those would-be St. Louis Rams owners in the Wall Street Journal while I was out in Cali. Limbaugh claimed that many of his accusers (including Jessie Jackson and Al Sharpton) are actually the racists, citing Jackson's infamous "hymie-town" reference and Sharpton's role in the Tawana Brawley case. He also blamed Sharpton for fomenting the racial rage that erupted in two NYC riots during the 1990s. Sharpton is contemplating a lawsuit (for defamation) unless he gets an apology from Limbaugh, which I can safely predict will probably not be forthcoming. I did read my Brainstorm colleague's short post on the Limbaugh story last week. Mark Bauerlein's piece nicely frames the controversies, and he later asked readers if they could actually "cite Limbaugh's racist statements." Is Limbaugh a racist? That's become the operative question. I have listened to Limbaugh. His commitments to racial provocation are, in my opinion, self-evident. His investment in racial insensitivity (like his playful celebration of that "Obama, The Magic Negro" song) is also legion. Does that mean he's a racist? Part of the point of my recent book is to argue that claims/counter-claims about racism aren't productive. His advocates claim "no." His detractors say "yes." If someone can definitely prove that Limbaugh is a racist, does that mean that he doesn't have the right to own an NFL team? It is his $400 billion dollar media contract. He can spend that money on whatever he wants. But NFL players also have the right to voice their objections. Hopefully, the two sides can listen to one another instead of starting a shouting match that ends with both camps sulking in their respective, non-communicative corners. Also, I can understand why Limbaugh would try to defend himself against accusations of racism. But I don't buy the claim (given Limbaugh's consistency on questions of race) that the accusations themselves are on-their-face absurd. They can be wrong without being unreasonable.

3. And what can be said about Murdoch's ousting of Marc Hill? Hill was the object of an on-line campaign after a recent blog-post from David Horowitz that voiced outrage at the fact that Hill was given the privilege of serving as a pundit on Bill O'Reilly's nightly show. Hill was accused of supporting cop-killers (for comments about Assata Shakur and Mumia Abu Jamal) and of anti-Semitism (for an old article Hill wrote about Khalid Muhammad). I had assumed that Hill's job was safe. Fox News gets tons of pressure to oust other controversial figures on their programs, and they never buckle. If Glenn Beck and Ann Coulter are welcome on Fox, how could they ever justify firing Hill? Well, I was wrong. Moreover, there is a general logic to such witch-hunting that has become a pathetically hegemonic mode of political activism. It is justified by rhetoric of holding people "accountable." But what kind of politic really manifests itself in such victories? Is getting Beck or Hill or Coulter or anyone else off FOX News truly a gesture of political significance? How about thwarting Limbaugh's attempt to spend his millions? Or do such moves exemplify a trivialization of politics that is part of the problem?

The Ethics of the Pop Quiz

2009-10-14T11:06:00.002-04:00

When I was an undergraduate, which really wasn't all that long ago, attending classes and completing my coursework constituted the sine qua non of my university existence. And that was probably true for many of my classmates at Howard University. Sure, we had extracurricular activities (some political and some recreational, some artistic and some just plain self-destructive), but that stuff probably didn't take up nearly as many hours per week as the tons of things students are busy with between class sessions these days.

I first noticed the difference (between then and now) when I taught at Duke University and served as faculty-in-residence for a first-year dormitory. I did the latter for three energizing years, and each incoming class seemed more over-extended and hyper-scheduled than the one before.

They were all serious students. They wouldn't have gotten into Duke if they weren't. But they also boasted an amazingly full life outside of the classroom. They volunteered for every worthy cause you could imagine. They interned at some of the most prestigious institutions around. They played multiple sports, toured with high school musical bands, and some of them even had time to start their own non-profits. And they were doing this all at the same time. In high school!

Indeed, what was most shocking was the realization that this model of full-time schooling mixed with full-time everything else only got ramped up once they started college. They were so accustomed to being frantically busy that they didn't even blink at the prospect of piling on tons more extracurricular work to their demanding semesterly courses: cheerleader, columnist for the campus newspaper, volunteer for university and community programs, RA, GA, athlete, lead performer in the campus play, official MC for weekly spoken-word events on campus, and on and on and on. It was exhausting (and admittedly exhilarating) just to watch them run around campus.

Of course, they got most of this stuff done because they barely slept. Again, I lived in the dorm. I know this to be true. They might have gotten up a little later than I did each morning, but that's only because they went to bed as my alarm clock rang out.

I think that I probably did two all-nighters during my entire undergraduate career. Nowadays, some students are lucky if they get away with two all-nighters a month--or even a week.

And they do all this not just because they can (new media technologies facilitate such hectic social dynamics in truly unprecedented ways), but also because they know that we (their professors and advisers) expect it.

It is no longer enough to be valedictorian. You have to excel in the classroom and demonstrate a robust set of commitments far beyond it. Everyone is telling them that this is what is going to make them stand out. And they've been hearing that mantra for a long, long time now, which means that some of them have been juggling schoolwork with other kinds of work (with an eye towards scholarship competitions and college admissions) since well before high school. It is hard-wired into is generation's cultural DNA. They assume that future employers are looking beyond 4.0 grade point averages (especially in an age of supposed grade inflation), so they are meeting those expectations with a vengeance.

And since that is the backdrop, I always feel a little guilty about the fact that my testing instrument of choice is (and has always been) the pop quiz. After all, aren't we supposed to be treating students like adults? Providing them with the readings, giving them the test dates, and then asking them to manage their time such that they are prepared for the scheduled exam--or not, right?

My pedagogical model, instead, is always predicated on wanting to make sure that students read the materials as I assign them, in time to contribute to classroom discussions, not as their admittedly packed schedules allow. But is that fair? Infantilizing? Unreasonable?

My students know that the unannounced quizzes are easy 100s for those who have done the reading. There are no trick (or particularly difficult) questions on them, just a request that students demonstrate (in "short answer" form) a basic comprehension of the readings before we go over them.

I've even been known to manifest the pop threat if a large lecture class seems particularly under-attended one slow Wednesday morning in the middle of the semester. Again, it is a reward for the folks in attendance and a punishment for the students who thought to sit that day out. But should I leave students alone to manage their hectic semesters and stop waxing nostalgic/romantic about some bygone, seemingly prelapsarian, moment when the classroom was ostensibly the center of the undergraduate universe?

You Can't Lose for Winning, Or Can You? Obama's Nobel Prize

2009-10-09T10:44:00.001-04:00

I never understood the phrase, "you can't win for losing." Not really. I assume that it implies something like "without bad luck, I'd have no luck at all," the assumption that some people would only win anything if we gave out awards for Best Loser.

Obama recently lost his bid to help Chicago host the Olympics, but he clearly is a "winner," and that was even before he beat McCain in the last presidential election.

But the Nobel folks have taken his winningness to entirely new heights, and some detractors are confused (and insulted) by their recent decision--an attempt, some say, to counteract that Olympic snub or to thumb noses at the last Bush regime.

My brainstorm colleague Laurie Fendrich has already beaten me to the punch with her provocative and "political" contextualization of this morning's Nobel announcement. But I still wanted to add another inflection to this morning's Obama buzz, and it is predicated on the twitterati's tongue-in-cheek responses to Obama's newest win.

In a thread called ReasonsBHHwonNPP, here are some of the TwitterWorld's answers:

Because he fostered a friendship between a black professor and a white police officer.

For restoring US rep because they couldn't kick Bush a Nobel War prize on the way out the door.

Because he didn't smack Joe Wilson.

Because a beer in the rose garden is a revolutionary way to broker peace.

Because he has directed american military might toward our common enemy: the Moon.

Because the Arizona State University board of trustees weren't voting.

Because going for the Nobel Prize is like a race and well, he is half Kenyan.

Because anyone who has to deal w/Am Politics tday & hasnt punched anyone in the face deserves it.

And I know that Chronicle readers could undoubtedly add some zingers of their own. Indeed, Obama probably would have preferred not winning this particular prize, just because so many people are going to spend their time further demonizing him for it.

"Don't hate the playa," hip-hop MCs advise. "Hate the game." That's another colloquial saying that seems very appropriate today.

Establishment Clause vs. Memorial Cause

2009-10-08T10:04:00.002-04:00

I'm teaching an undergraduate course on the mass mediation of religious beliefs this semester, and the students are taking an interdisciplinary look at how new media technology's ubiquity has changed (in big and small ways) people's religious experiences and practices all over the world, re-configuring spiritual communities and re-framing debates about religious tolerance.

The course examines the power of celebrity televangelists and their massive "digital churches."

It tries to provide some historical context for current (decidedly post-Scopes) debates about the science of "intelligent design."

It also traces contemporary and historical deployments of faith and religious truth to justify concomitant claims about the nature/reality of racial differences and gender hierarchies. For instance, popular readings of Noah's curse on Ham or Jacob's usurpation of Esau's birthright serve as two irreconcilable origin stories for the divine sanctioning of racialism. And Paul's oft-cited admonition in Ephesians ("Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord.") has been a relatively unambiguous (if increasingly contested) justification for "male headship" in the church and beyond.

I have tried to organize the course such that students approach religion from an anthropological point of view (respecting religion as a particularly important example of "culture") while also recognizing that such would-be social scientific treatments might still represent blasphemous or irreverent engagements/interpretations (from the perspective of some believers). Or that it could slide too-easily into a dismissive attack on religion altogether, reducing it to little more than "false consciousness" (in the Marxian formulation) or even "neurological disorder" (in the Bill Maherian sense, which you find in his recent documentary, Religulous).

Students are asked to take religion seriously (culturally, socially and politically) without falling into the trap of seeing it exclusively as a threat to humanity. Indeed, for much of the time that sociologists and anthropologists have studied religion, they thought about it more as social glue than anything else, as something that helps societies to reproduce themselves over time and not only a potential handmaiden to our own annihilation, which is one version of the current take on religious excess in the age of WMDs.

The course also spends some time getting students to think about the relationship between "secular humanism" and "fundamentalism," two fraught and loaded terms in an ongoing debate about the true nature of religion's place within a seemingly rational "public sphere," a public sphere that was supposed to be creating more and more distance between its logic and the seemingly unfalsifiable principles of religious dogma. Of course, all of this means that my students and I are particularly primed for following any public coverage of religious controversies, and the newly Sotomayor'd Supreme Court's pending decision on that five-foot tall memorial cross housed (for over 70 years now) on a stretch of the Mohave Desert owned by the United States government is one case in point.

Since I co-taught a course on "race, religion and the law" at Harvard Law School last semester (with an absolutely brilliant scholar who truly understands these issues inside and out, Noah Feldman), I am particularly interested to see how the Establishment Clause fares against the memorializing cause that the cross represents. For the ACLU, this case is cut-and-dry. They say that such "stand-alone religious symbols" shouldn't have any place on public land whatsoever. Many military vets are outraged about the ACLU's stance, and some religious leaders accuse the organization of trying to purge America's public landscape of any and all religious iconography. The cross was declared a violation of the Establishment Clause in 2002, and Congress has been trying to find some way to resolve the issue without tearing down the cross itself. The ACLU thinks that the Congressional move to fix the constitutionality dilemma (by giving that strip of land to a veterans organization and declaring it a national memorial) is just a sham and doesn't correct the church-state problem in the least.

Any day now, the Supreme Court is going to tell us if the ACLU is right. For the students in my course this semester, the entire controversy is another example of religion's central place in America's cultural and political landscape.

The White House Strikes Back

2009-10-02T10:06:00.004-04:00

In a web-post labeled "Reality Check," the White house recently blasted Fox News for trying to "smear the Administration's effort to win the Olympics for the United States."

The White House has been attempting to stay somewhat above the fray with respect to partisan media debates about the coverage of Obama's administration, but its official website offered a blog entry this Wednesday that castigated the "fair and balanced" network for supposedly being anything but. The post specifically highlights Glenn Beck's criticisms as indicative of the network's overall "disregard for the facts" in its coverage of Obama's White House.

The White House pushes back against several things:

a) Glenn Beck's claim that Vancouver lost a billion dollars when it hosted the Olympics is dismissed as a function of the fact that Vancouver will, in fact, host its Olympics in 2010.

b) A Beck guest arguing that Chicago's city government is so fiscally irresponsible that it has to close down city-services several days every week is met with the counterclaim that Chicago will only have three reduced-service days (including Thanksgiving and Christmas) in all of 2009.

c) Beck's questions about Valerie Jarrett's financial stake in Chicago's Olympic proposal is flatly denied by maintaining that she "divested all her real estate holdings except for a single investment that has nothing to do with the Olympic bid."

Of course, Beck won't let this stand, and his defenders are most certainly marshaling evidence for their rejoinders right now. I haven't checked, they might have already launched their counterattacks. At which point, Obama's supporters will be forced to respond in kind. America's politico-cultural war is all about an irrational escalation of this rhetorical arms race.

There is certainly no Archimedean point from which to engage these issues. Not for Obama, not for any of us. We all get dragged into this partisan alley-fight, even those of us who think we can just play-dead by the electoral curb somewhere, curling our political selves into a fetal position as rabid ideologues throw wild haymakers at one another above our heads.

Could it be possible that, say, Valerie Jarrett will get even richer as a function of Chicago succeeding to win the Olympic games? Probably. As will Chicago's "haves" on the other side that supposedly firewalled-off political aisle. Elites from both parties lie when they maintain that the other side corners the market on any self-interested implications of the work they perform in the public sphere. There are legitimate cases to be made about when such self-serving consequences cross the line, ethically speaking, but is there a point when the wildly partisan discourse that constitutes our political bathwater gets so dirty that the baby might not be able to survive? As professors, is there any way to teach our students to see the potential political ramifications of our social and cultural choices/beliefs without forcing them to gulp down the swill from that same filthy tub?

Are You E-gnoring Me?

2009-10-01T09:44:00.004-04:00

The beginning of the academic year is full of excitement and activity. Especially activity. There's all that frantic prep to get courses ready for students (completing syllabi, posting readings, organizing lectures). Then your Fall meeting schedule starts to kick-in, and you end up spending late nights doing all the reading and writing that's no longer possible during daylight hours. I get it. I've been there. Truth be told, I'm marooned there right now.

If you have any "televisual interests" (i.e., if you are even the mildest of TV-Junkies), the new Fall season has started, and the shows you forgot about are clamoring for your distracted attention.

Many academics want to have their cake and eat it, too. We spend our summers hunkered down trying to make major headway on our research projects (which, for me, meant editing the first rough cut of an ethnographic film on violence in Jamaica and starting to gain momentum on my next book, an examination of Black Hebrewism/s). But we still want to maintain at least a bit of that scholarly momentum after the start of the Fall semester. And all of this is piled on top of things like childcare and/or romantic relationships and/or all the other substantive stuff of life convincing us that it's worth living.

Of course, something has to give. And for many academics, the composite "something" includes diligence about email correspondences.

And I get it. I'm notorious for delayed responses to emails. There are many folks who could tell you that. So, I am the last person who has the right to get upset when his own email queries drop into that cyber vortex reserved for unrequited letter-writing, a veritable black hole of avoided emaildom.

Many of us abuse emails, which means that others of us feel inundated by too many of them, most of it Internet litter (or worse) that requires disposal.

And what more than hubris allows any of us to assume that we'll get an email response back from someone we haven't even met, or don't know very well. For all we know, it probably just landed in their hyper-filtering "junk-mail" box.

But what about friends and colleagues who don't respond? You've sent off what you imagine to be an urgent or personal or detailed message, carefully crafted, about some topic of importance to you and, hopefully, them (not the forwarding of spam-infected jokes that some supposed cyber-friends propagate). But you get nothing back. Not after a day. Not after two days. Or a week. Or two weeks. Eventually, after a month or two, you just happen to remember, in a flash, that you never heard from them at all. "Hey, s/he never got back to me?" Not even an automated confirmation that it was received and opened, which is some small consolation for the cyber-dissed.

What is the proper response to such e-gnoring? Am I the only one keeping a list of such offenders--for some subsequent moment of non-cyber reckoning?

Promotion Paranoia

2009-09-24T10:48:00.001-04:00

Earlier this week, I received a phone call from a friend/colleague at a university on the West Coast. (I'll try to stay purposefully vague about things, which will include avoiding gendered pronouns.)

The person, a rigorous scholar in the social sciences, is frantically trying to get a dossier completed for a pending promotion review, which explains why I would get a buzz at 8:45 in the morning, Philadelphia time. Said friend/colleague was pulling an all-nighter.

This colleague was freaking out about the tenure process, and our conversation went something like this:

ME: Hey, it has been a long time. How are things?

THEM: I'm going crazy over here.

ME: Why? What's up?

THEM: This tenure thing. They are trying to make me go insane.

ME: All the material you have to assemble?

THEM: No. Well, yeah. But not just that. There is all this voting about the process. Everyone is constantly voting on whether my file should move to the next phase. All these hurdles. Voting, voting, voting. And I've caught myself interpreting every small exchange with my colleagues as an indication of how they might stand on my case, on how they might be voting. Ugh! And every once in a while I get a strange look or comment that nearly drives me over the cliff. It has gotten to the point where I wish I could just avoid any contact with ANYBODY until the process is done. How did you cope? Any tips?

Unfortunately, I didn't have any tips. At least nothing that I thought would really help. I was lucky enough to be on leave when I first went up for tenure, which meant that I could mostly avoid the kind of "promotion paranoia" that my friend was describing.

I always tell people that one of the benefits of going to Columbia University in the mid-1990s was that you were exposed to some very high-profile tenure denials. There was one in Comparative Literature that I remember. And even in my own department, Anthropology.

Those decisions made some of my fellow graduate students completely terrified of the tenure process, which was so secretive and seemingly capricious. But for other students, those same decisions were potentially liberating. That's because we thought of them (fairly or not) as little more than "political" decisions, either with the capital "P" of ideological differences (people who just don't like your theoretical endgame) or the small "p" of pettier interpersonal differences (people who just don't like you).

Either way, it seemed to instruct us that we had better do what we really enjoyed (as fledgling scholars), because there would never be a foolproof way to game the tenure process, to predetermine the outcome in any particular case. So, we didn't want to get stuck doing a research project for years and years simply (or mostly) because we thought it might land us a good job on the road to tenure.

But do folks have other ways of coping with this promotion paranoia that they would recommend? If so, I'll pass them on.

Either/Or Racial Analysis

2009-09-18T13:16:00.003-04:00

On the train ride back from Washington to Philadelphia this morning, after catching the U.S. premiere of filmmaker Haile Gerima's new feature film, Teza, I read the David Brooks NYTs op-ed, "No, It's Not About Race." Brooks does a compelling job historically contextualizing the "populist backlash" against Obama's policies. The partisan media, on the Left and Right, is making racism the story, Brooks says, but the real causal truth lies elsewhere.

"[Obama] has fused federal power with Wall Street, the auto industry, the health-care industries, and the energy sector," Brooks writes, and there is a long history of Jeffersonian and Jacksonian resistance to "the fat cats and the educated class; for the small towns and against the financial centers." All this, coupled with the fact that the tea-party demonstrators mingled peacefully on September 12th with thousands of African Americans out that same day for a Black Family Reunion Celebration, gives Brooks confidence that racism has nothing to do with the anti-Obama protests, even at their most hostile and high-pitched (seemingly secessionist) levels.

I have already tried to argue, in my recent book on "racial paranoia" in contemporary America, for the substantive difference between, say, purchasing a hot dog on the street from someone of a different race, having an innocently fleeting conversation with a racial stranger, and forming substantive ties across racial lines. The former is the problem when it is not reinforced by the latter. Did members of these two groups (the Tea Partyers and the Black Family Reunioners), as a function of the happenstance of their unrelated public events, exchange phone numbers and start lasting relationships? Or did they simply perform the self-conscious dance of anxious racial politeness that our post civil-rights assumptions about public civility demand, especially across racial lines?

Indeed, I also want to push back a bit against this zero-sum-game kind of public analysis about race and racism, this all-or-nothing rhetoric that says either racism is the definitive cause of something (a smoking gun still hot to the touch and smelling of ash) or completely irrelevant, relegating anything more nuanced and realistic to the dustbin reserved for the politically useless: what can't be dismissed or demagogued in a single sound bite.

In some ways, Haile Gerima might offer a more compelling take on the issue than Brooks. Gerima's new film, Teza, is a powerful epic tale of an Ethiopian medical scientist and would-be revolutionary who returns from Germany, where he did his studies, to find an Ethiopia torn asunder by the socialist dogma that he once espoused. Gerima's most ambitious and powerful film to date, Teza is also a story about what do with race/racism as a factor in social life.

Without giving too much of the film away, Gerima decides on a both/and model. Just when you think that he's offering a view of Ethiopian politics that pivots exclusively on ostensibly nonracial ideological concerns, he tries to remind us that racism is always there, less a smoking gun than a smoldering fire that continues to burn, slowly and faintly, even after we think we've stamped it out. And if not carefully minded and fully doused, Gerima claims, it can always find a way to burst itself back into flame.

Where Is Your @$%!&*ing Final Paper?

2009-09-14T10:21:00.001-04:00

I missed most of President Obama’s speech Wednesday night, but I’ve been getting tons of messages about S.C. Representative Joe Wilson heckling him during the address, screaming “You lie!” from a seat in the audience. Even though it does seem a little weird and disrespectful that a Congressman would decide to voice his objections in such a backalley way (and he’s since, of course, apologized), was this vulgar display all that qualitatively different from, say, Wilson going on FOX News later on that very evening and calling Obama a liar after the fact?

I actually don’t want to talk about the kind of rage that prompted Wilson to publicly yell at the standing President, but it reminded me of one of academe’s double standards around public displays of hostility.

What are we to make of the athletic coach who shouts at his or her players for making a bad play?

I’m not just talking about Bobby Knight-style tossing of chairs across basketball courts. He’s something like the King of Sports Rage. But so many coaches do it, even seemingly mild-mannered ones. And sometimes with four-letter expletives as rhetorical garnish. “What the @#&!$^% were you thinking on that play!? Sit the @!#$& down!!!!”

I spent four years at Duke University watching from the stands while two relatively even-keeled coaches (Coach K and Coach G) periodically hurled quite enraged charges at their undergraduate players. I remember thinking, what would people say if faculty treated those same students that way?

“Where’s your @&#!&!ing paper? This final paper is absolute @&#!!*!”

It would be absurd. Outrageous. But why do coaches get away with such abuse when these very students don their athletic uniforms? It seems like just the kind of arbitrary social convention that demonstrates a version of what anthropologist Mary Douglas once described as the central importance of culturally specific understandings of “matter out of place.” Things get deemed profane/dirty/obscene/vulgar as a function of “where” they are, not just “what” they are. For some reason, we think about the classroom as the wrong place for university employees to curse at their students. What makes basketball courts or football fields more appropriate? Does the presence of the crowd somehow matter? What is it?

Of course, just one of the many differences between a coach shouting at his/her players and Wilson snapping at Obama is that the coach and athlete consider themselves to be fighting for the same goal, literally on the same team. How many people in Congress really think about their colleagues “across the aisle” with a similarly inclusive attitude?

(Previously published on The Chronicle of Higher Education's Brainstorm Blog and in the Durham Herald-Sun.)

Ode to Lingua Franca

2009-09-10T13:08:00.001-04:00

In symbolic preparation for the start of another academic year, I ritualistically cleaned out one of the many file cabinets today, one of the several that I haven't opened in what seems like millennia. There are usually at least two or three pleasant surprises to be uncovered during such a process, and this time around I came across my old stash of Lingua Franca magazines. And I immediately had a dilemma. Do I throw them away or not?

The purported rationale for this annual late-summer exercise is just such purging. I'm a packrat, a trait I probably got from my mom, who tosses just about everything that comes across her kitchen table into a cardboard box (to be filed away and subsequently forgotten). Plus, I'm an ethnographer who considers just every bit of material culture ever manufactured potential "data" that might be deployable in some future attempt at cultural analysis, which means that I always have a "professional" rationalization for my hoarding.

Even still, I try to be strong during my September office purgings. But Lingua Franca has a special place in my heart. Maybe it should be granted some kind of special/prileged status amidst the other junk in need of immediate discarding. I mean, this magazine got me through the first couple years of graduate school at Columbia.

Something like The Chronicle of Higher Education meets The Nation (with a little National Enquirer thrown in for good measure), Lingua Franca was a not-so-guilty pleasure for my grad school cohort in the early 1990s. That's where we learned how academic/intellectual debates translated into institutional fault lines and interpersonal squabbles. It covered academe under the guise of in-depth investigative journalism, which meant that it didn't just dish the gossipy dirt (which was always in full supply); they also tried to breakdown complicated theoretical ideas and explain disputes within fields that had implications beyond them.

For the grad students I knew, this was like getting a cheat sheet on contemporary academic life and its conceptual/analytical conflagrations. Of course, the stories always had a slant, and they usually angered as many people as they excited. But this still seemed like a wonderful way to get at least one pretty well-researched (and popularly pitched) interpretation of academic issues with an impressive degree of institutional contextualization of things.

When I found out that the magazine was closing up shop in 2001, I was no longer a graduate student. And though I'd kept my subscription, I'd stopped doing the cover-to-cover readings that had given my years in grad school such delicious pleasure. Even still, I was crushed that future grad students would be denied the same opportunity to enjoy Lingua Franca. What a pity.

(For one take on the end of Lingua Franca, see "Who Killed Lingua Franca?")

Which brings me to my question: In the age of on-line publishing, could someone resurrect Lingua Franca and actually make it profitable? Or does The Chronicle pick up enough of the slack?

The Second-Nature of Politics

2009-09-01T16:12:00.005-04:00

So, the semester has finally started. It really has. And I've got a stack of half-written student recommendations (and more than one unfinished syllabus) to prove it. Classes don't begin at Penn until next week, and I have been trying to take a little break before the delicious storm that is the start of every new academic year pours down on my head.

I've also re-read many of the scathing comments to my last few Chronicle posts, trying to honestly consider their criticisms, including the idea that my Chronicle posts exemplify the kind of left-wing brainwashing that needs to be purged from the academy.

I don't see it, but I would also readily concede that that doesn't necessarily mean the criticisms are unfounded. Culture is powered by self-deluding blinders. It is a kind of second-nature that usually only gets harder to recognize the more you try to spot it. Culture wouldn't be culture if we spent most of our time second-guessing it, especially not the parts of it we take for granted. We do most of whatever it is we do everyday with a lack of explicit consciousness that rivals the potency of more ostensibly hard-wired and biological instincts. So, that is all to say that any ideologue is the last person to recognize his or her own subjective biases passing themselves off as objective truths in the public sphere, which means that I'd probably be one of the last people to see (or want to see) any truths in those aforementioned criticisms.

To make matters worse, other people's cultural practices are always easier for someone else to see, at least insofar as they differ from the cultural practices of the person doing the looking.

All that is simply a way of saying that I take all critiques seriously, if not as statements of objective fact about the world then at least as a different set of cultural assumptions about what "facts" actually mean, where the rubber hits the road on all this stuff anyway.

Even still, I want to state my distaste for a few common moves in the rhetorical/ideolgocal battle being mercilessly waged between so-called The Left and Right. First of all, there is this winner-take-all mentality that only tries to defeat the opposing team--at all costs, come hell or high water. That might work in the short term for people trying to win elections (even if not for the long-term good of those they represent), but it certainly doesn't work if the default team in quiestion is robustly inclusive. Economist Glenn Loury makes this us-them point quite clearly with respect to multiracial conflicts in his book The Anatomy of Racial Inequality. What if we all started with the assumption that we were playing for the same team? Would our rhetoric change? Our political endgame?

Point two: just because the Chronicle is about "higher education" doesn't mean that discussions of hip-hop artists being deployed to explain international politics or an invocation of "obamaphobia" in a discussion about our over-heated public debates are categorically out of order. One can talk politics without trying to brainwash people or push a partisan agenda. Of course, we live in a world where many people seem happy to reduce any talk of "the political" to one or both of those impoverished alternatives. I reject that claim, even if I sound like Pollyanna.

Do I tend to lean "left" on most things? That's probably true (most days), but I'm genuinely interested in listening to other people, from all sides of all issues, and challenging my own too-comfortable cultural assumptions about politics or anything else.

At the same time, I do get a little froggy and want to jump back at what I think are unproductive attacks. For example, when Michelle Malkin describes my aforementioned "Obamaphobobia" post as a "screed" on her website and declares that I have called her book "a hate crime," it takes all that I have not to cry "foul." What was she reading? Is this the kind of gloss on texts that informs the interpretations found in her bestselling book? Besides that, she's calling somebody else's work a screed? That seems like the pot signifyin(g) on the kettle, if you know what I mean. If only her mention of my post had gotten my Racial Paranoia book anywhere near the hemisphere of her book's sales figures. Maybe it would have all been worth it.

Shame On You, Joyce Joyce!

2009-08-13T15:14:00.034-04:00

I had just started reading an article by literary scholar Joyce Ann Joyce in a recent issue of the journal Callaloo when I came across her severe critique of my latest book, Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness.

Joyce is probably most famous in some academic circles for having been tapped to replace Molefi Asante as head of African American Studies at Temple University in the late 1990s. Asante wasn't pleased with that selection, and he made his displeasure very public. He even went so far as to claim that she would destroy his Afrocentric project/curriculum. Many scholars dismissed his attacks as sexist bigmanism, but having been subjected to so many vicious attacks during her stint at the helm, Joyce ended up stepping down a little ahead of schedule.

Anyway, that's just a too-short recap of the Joyce-Asante dispute. Here's the passage from her new article that discusses my book:

In his book Professor John Jackson, Jr. makes his contribution to the devaluation of racial issues in the quality of Black lives. In the chapter “Racial Paranoia’s Canonical Texts,” he uses John A. Williams’s The Man Who Cried I Am and many other invaluable historical studies, such as Carter G. Woodson’s The Miseducation of the Negro as examples of a long line of conspiracy theories that imbue Black paranoia and that retard healthy relations between Blacks and Whites. Johnson’s use of Woodson’s The Miseducation of the Negro contains a humorous ironic element. Carter G. Woodson not only details how a Euro-American education influences the thinking—and thus the methodology—of the Black intellectual, but his work and especially his success at forging the institutionalization of Black History Week, which is now Black History Month, precedes and makes the way for the Civil Rights Movement, Black Power Movement, Black Arts Movement, and thus the institutionalization of the first Black Studies Program at San Francisco State College (now San Francisco State University) in 1968. This initial program provoked universities to add Black Studies to their curriculum and to focus on the hiring of Black faculty. Thus were it not for what Johnson refers to as paranoia and an obsession with unfounded conspiracy theories, it is quite possible that he would not be securely ensconced behind the walls of the University of Pennsylvania. Fortunately, Black intellectual history counters Johnson’s paranoia with legal facts (though I am fully aware that some intellectuals no longer believe in the concept of facts). Yet, I hope that we still believe in what we can see. One of the things we can see is the overwhelming number of Blacks, Latinos, and poor Whites in the American prison system. Gloria J. Browne-Marshall’s Race, Law, and American Society presents a documented history of laws that affected Black survival from the early seventeenth century to the twenty-first century. Her detailed summaries of legal and Supreme Court decisions over a four-hundred-year period suggest that Blacks have substantial reason to be paranoid.

First of all, a relatively minor point. My name is Jackson, not Johnson. She calls me the latter three times in this paragraph. Three big red flags.

Second, I quote the books/authors she mentions because they are important and canonical . Not because they are somehow responsible for "retard(ing) healthy relations between Blacks and Whites." That isn't even close to the book's argument about social causality vis-a-vis race/racism.

I don't blame Carter G. Woodson or John Williams for "racial paranoia" at all. In fact, I don't even use those two texts in the same way. I invoke one portion of Williams's marketing strategy for The Man Who Cried I Am to illustrate the ingenuous way he tried to increase general interest in his 1967 novel by playing off of urban legends and conspiracy theories. I invoke Woodson, Kunjufu, Diop, Cress-Welsing, and others to demonstrate that African-American skepticism toward White America's espoused commitments to full racial equality has a substantial reading list. Is that really a controversial claim?

Joyce writes that "were it not for what Johnson refers to as paranoia and an obsession with unfounded conspiracy theories, it is quite possible that he would not be securely ensconced behind the walls of the University of Pennsylvania." I am far from arguing that African Americans have an "obsession with unfounded conspiracy theories." And we certainly don't corner the market on such proclivities. I do contend that legitimate racial skepticism pivots on some of the very same terrain as seemingly "unfounded conspiracy theories." And the anthropologist in me wants people to take such theories seriously as "social facts" instead of dismissing them out of hand. That's my point. I must not make it clearly enough.

I deploy "paranoia" quite purposefully, pointedly, and NOT as a way to disparage/ridicule Black skepticism.

My use of "paranoia" is hardly a concession to reactionary dismissals of Black skepticism (as misplaced and dysfunctional). Rather, it is a reclamation of the term as a potentially reasonable response the surreal cultural logic of our contemporary racial moment. Moreover, I want to argue that Blacks who invoke racism to describe anything short of Black people being lynched from trees are already labeled paranoid. Given that context, I maintain that being called "paranoid" for invoking subtler forms of race/racism isn't something to be feared.

Joyce ends her criticism of my book by referencing Gloria J. Browne-Marshall's Race, Law, and American Society and arguing that "Blacks have substantial reason to be paranoid." Again, that is one major summary of my book's very point, especially in a politically correct environment wherein racial wolves (formerly dressed in white sheets) know that they have to pass themselves off as sheep to be taken seriously in the public sphere. (Obama's election may signal the beginning of the end of "political correctness" in its current form as a function of the re-politicization of "whiteness" as a "marked" category in newly urgent need of defense against threats like "reverse discrimination." Indeed, much of the Sotomayor hearing seemed to frame the conversation about contemporary race relations in just those terms.)

Joyce maintains that my book contributes "to the devaluation of racial issues in the quality of Black lives." Devaluation in what sense? I'm not taking racial issues seriously by taking even the most cynical and skeptical ones seriously? Maybe she (or others) can accuse me of placing too much value on racial issue, but too little?

Joyce doesn't even disagree with my argument: that there is a powerful (and historically grounded) reason for Black paranoia/skepticism today. So, why is she misreading my book? Or reading it so ungenerously? Or maybe not reading it at all and just assuming my endgame based on the book's title?

One answer, I'd argue, is that some Black academics have already gone post-racial.

Post-raciality could never really be about completely eliminating race. That's a fantasy. Instead, it tends to mean finding ways to evoke race when helpful, using it for protective cover as necessary and disqualifying any opponent's equivalent gesture. It means, for some people, claiming not to see racism almost anywhere except when it is purportedly "reverse racism" to be spied. It is a convenient and self-serving form of racial reasoning, and there's an equally self-serving organizing principle around race/racism at work in certain sections of the academy. And some Black academics have their own variation on that theme.

I don't know Joyce Ann Joyce. I've never met her. And that might be the beginning of the problem.

Some Black academics seem to think that a racially inflected nepotism/cronyism is equivalent to progressive racial politics writ large. The Black folks they know and love are family, fictive kin. Supporting their own social network is supposed to mean supporting "the race." Anyone else can go to hell--Yellow, Brown, White, or Black.

Joyce doesn't know me, but she assumes that she's seen my kind before.

Maybe she thinks that I am a reactionary Black neo-con who lines his pockets by dismissing Black angst and struggle. Or maybe she just maligns my book (after an insultingly cursory glance) because she doesn't actually know me. I hope her sense of racial community (her investment in the "quality of black lives") doesn't simply begin and end with her own social capital. That would be a form of post-racialism masquerading as a racial agenda. If so, shame on you, Joyce Joyce.

Shame on me, perhaps, for calling out an "elder" in public, but I wanted to correct what I consider a blatant (and unjustifiable) misinterpretation of my work.

Joyce knows the danger of such wholesale dismissals. She is also someone who should care enough about the book's topic/theme to read it carefully, even if she would still ultimately disagree with its actual arguments.

Obamaphobia 2009

2009-08-13T11:45:00.004-04:00

"He's a socialist." "He's a communist." "He's anti-American." "Heck, he wasn't even born in the United States."

By most accounts, Obama has been taking a public pounding lately. His poll numbers are falling. His attempt to revamp our health care system appears decidedly stalled.

Of course, that very same health care agenda has even been blitzed by angry protesters at town hall meetings all around the country, protesters accused (by those on the Left) of either being extremist zealots or disingenuous provocateurs/plants.

These same indignant protesters claim to read between the lines of Obama's public statements about health care, accusing him of trying to nationalize it. Or worse.

Over the last few days, there has even been talk (media-covered talk) about an Obama-led Democratic conspiracy to create "death panels" charged with determining which sick Americans will be given the privilege of government-dispensed health care.

There are also rumors about secret FEMA "concentration camps" being built by an Obama regime with a specifically Totalitarian and Fascist endgame. Conservative commentator Glenn Beck went on FOX News to announce that after "several days of research" to debunk such claims about secret camps, "I can't debunk them."

FEMA is one "usual suspect" in conspiracy theories about evil government plots. In my book Racial Paranoia, I discuss similar theories from the 1950s and 60s about secret concentration camps being built for troublesome Americans. In that earlier version of things, those on the Left were prime candidates for such ideologically driven gulags. Today, far Right conservatives are the ones imaginings themselves most vulnerable to the possibility of political imprisonment. And pundits such as Lou Dobbs (for his straight-faced coverage of the "birthers") and the aforementioned Glenn Beck have been consistently criticized for fomenting such outlandishness.

Of course, Beck already didn't like Obama. "This president has exposed himself as a guy over and over and over again who has a deep-seated hatred for white people," Beck claimed (on another FOX News program). "This guy is, I believe, a racist." (Some of Beck's show's advertisers have dropped his program as a function of such statements.)

But Beck isn't alone in this game of high-profile Obama-bashing. Michelle Malkin's bestselling book Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks and Cronies is a manifesto of Obamaphobia.

In many ways, this is simply how politics gets done. And it probably always has been. Many of the attacks on George W. Bush were brutal and merciless, and they still hardly hold a candle to some of the partisan rhetorical assaults of the 19th and early 20th centuries. In some ways, we've mellowed as a nation, even as the non-mellow among us gain increasing access to far-flung members of their "fringe" with advances in global media. A relatively small group of like-minded people can have a disproportionate impact on our collective public stage, especially if they make effective use of new media technologies. They can almost create Movements, and seemingly overnight. Indeed, we might be living in an era of the incessant and media-spawned Mini Social Movement. (Again, think of the "Birthers Movement" and its claim about Obama not really being an American citizen.) We could call such things social movements du jour, maybe pseudo social movements. But with a little media coverage, even pseudo social movements become "real" in ways that can have substantive consequences for all of us.

Americans' current "run on guns" isn't just about a potential change in national policy around gun control and the right to bear arms. Some of it also seems to be predicated on an uptick in right-wing militias and their renewed calls for a "race war." Part of it is about a kind of "racial paranoia" linked to economic insecurities, a racial paranoia that pivots on a growing social movement around reactionary racial politicking. (The way "race" functioned in the Sotomayor confirmation hearings was one example of what this reactionary racial rhetoric sounds like today. The fallout from the Gates-Crowley Affair was another.)

Mark Potok, editor the the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Report sees "a resurgence of right-wing hate groups and radical ideas" linked to the ascendence of America's first Black President. Recent reports put out by the Department of Homeland Security and the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms seem to corroborate that claim. With unemployment and deficit spending on the rise and Americans full of fear about their own economic futures, we should be careful not to fall into the same old trap of racial scapegoating. It is easy. We've mastered it. It might even allow some of us to sleep more soundly at night. But it is utterly and ultimately the most self-dstructive response we can have to our present predicament.

Birth Certificates to Beer Summits: It's a Baudrillard World!

2009-08-07T11:38:00.000-04:00

Nobody talks about Baudrillard anymore, but this has been a summer replete with political absurdities of Baudrillardian proportions.

Budrillard is most famous for his use of the concept simulacra, the idea of a copy passing itself off as "the real McCoy" without anything original or genuine actually vouchsafing it. This was his post-Marxian and post-Freudian attempt to talk about the newfangled nature of late 20th century culture, especially as funneled through--and even concocted out of wholecloth--by mass mediation itself.

There was that delicious reference to his book, Simulacra and Simulation, in the first installment of the Matrix trilogy, but Baudrillard is often dismissed as too ridiculously hyperbolic to take seriously (for instance, his 1995 claim that "the Gulf War did not take place"). His critics describe him as even more theoretically vacuous than other fetishized, French-imported social critics. But after watching the bizarre wall-to-wall coverage of Michael Jackson's death for the last month or so, I am starting to think that Baudrillard has become more useful (to think with) than ever before.

Who else but Baudrillard can make sense of the nonsensicial mainstream ratcheting up of absurdist (and seemingly unfalsifiable) claims about Obama's supposed foreignness? What better justifies globally covered "beer summit" over race-relations proffered as a technique for innoculating ourselves against future racial misunderstandings? How else can we wrap our heads around Sarah Palin's decision to open herself up to new attacks on her political preparedness (just as she is wont to fend them off)?

Is the Baudrillardian moment upon us? Have we moved unabashedly from "real" politics to mere simulacra? I think so. This has been the summer of simulacra.

Indeed, the only folks who might have a more productive handle on the contemporary political moment might be the early 20th century surrealists. Although, truth be told, it seems to me that we might have already collectively "jumped the shark" (as a global public) so much that we could be experiencing something closer to a simulacra of the surreal, its artificially manufactured, cynically pre-fabbed, and hyper-produced Reality-TVesque carbon copy.

And if even our contemporary surreality is a sham, we are in real big trouble.

Think about it. Imagine a world where a Boston police officer calls Skip Gates a "banana-eating jungle monkey" and declares that he would have actually used pepperspray on the professor. And then the officer seems dumbfounded that people think he sounds like an unreconstruced racist. And this, even after the media's hyper-scrutiny of Sotomayor's "wise Latina" comments. Is this all too stupid to really be surreal?

The Logic of Racial Expectations: Skip Gates and the Cambridge Police

2009-07-22T01:10:00.003-04:00

The folks I follow on Twitter (yeah, I’m still experimenting with that seemingly useless social networking tool) have been raging over the past day and a half about Skip Gates’s recent altercation with the Cambridge Police Department, an altercation that began in his own home, spilled out onto his front porch, and eventually landed the iconic Harvard professor in jail.

I’m hunkered down at home right now trying to finish a short “afterword” for the paperback edition of my most recent book, Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness, but I just wanted to take a quick break to weigh-in on the entire affair.

At this point, I’m sure that most interested parties have gotten the details: the phoned-in tip about two Black men apparently breaking into a Cambridge home, the cop who arrives to confront Gates, already safely in his living room despite a jammed front door, and then Gates allegedly lighting into said officer, chalking the indignity of being asked for ID in his own home up to the logic of racialized expectations, an officer being suspicious for no good reason. Because “I’m a black man in America’‘ is how Gates supposedly put it. Of course, the cop would probably maintain that race had nothing to do with it.

Two quick ironies before I get back to work.

First, the book for which I’m currently writing that aforementioned “afterword” tries to explain just how such a scenario could have gone down in the first place. It attempts to connect dots between Gatesian accusations (of race-thinking) and a cop’s defense (of colorblindness and racial neutrality).

The Gates exchange isn’t really all that very different (in some ways) from the cases I highlight in my book (for instance, comedian Dave Chappelle walking out on his successful TV show or Cynthia McKinney accusing a DC officer of cloaked racial bias).

So, I’m currently working on the paperback edition of a book that is an extended riff on just how such a blow-up between Gates and the officer could have happened in the first place. And I try to explain why Gates could have been angry enough to scream at the officer (as the police report claims) instead of just shrugging it off and going on about his business (or even being thankful to the cop for checking on his place). Gates’s response isn’t crazy or irrational. It is a direct byproduct of America’s relatively recent racial successes.

The second irony: Gates was generous enough to write a blurb for the dust-jacket of the hardcover version of Racial Paranoia, which only makes me feel that much more invested in getting the word out about its argument.
Readers don’t have to agree with my conclusions, but I do believe that my claims provide some useful terms for any potentially productive conversation about the reconfigured realities of race in a supposedly post-racial world.

As an aside, I remember my first day up in Cambridge, MA. Almost a decade ago now. I had defended my dissertation the morning before, rented a U-haul, and drove myself (along with all my earthly belongings) some four hours north from Harlem, New York, to Everett Street, just across from Harvard Law School. I was about to spend my next three years in Cambridge on a postdoctoral fellowship. But the truck had only been parked in front of the building for a couple of hours on moving day when a well-meaning pedestrian bounded up to it, a red-headed white woman in her twenties, and asked me how much I charged to move people. (She actually walked right past the person helping me, a friend of mine who happened to be white, and asked me her query. My assumption was that she thought he was moving in and that I was the hired help. Of course, that might not have been the case at all. But such ambiguities, I argue in the book, have very real existential value in questions about race in a politically corrected world. Looking for the iron-clad ground of certainty in contemporary discussions about race/racism sometimes means setting yourself up for failure.) I told the woman that I was moving myself into my own apartment and that I wasn’t actually a professional mover. She apologized and headed up the street, but a logic of racial expectations, similar to the one Gates negotiated yesterday, had probably overdetermined that little Cambridge exchange, too. (And, as my potential critics would add, from both sides.)

Pat Buchanan's America and Sotomayor

2009-07-19T09:44:00.001-04:00

I've been watching the Sotomayor confirmation hearings pretty faithfully since Monday, and one thing jumps out about the entire affair. Obama might get his nominee confirmed, but the Republicans soundly won the week anyway.

Conceding their relative powerlessness to stop the Sotomayor train from eventually reaching its final destination (the chambers of the Supreme Court), they turned the hearings into a very dramatic lesson on "the perils of reserve racism." On the white man's newest burden: being victim par excellence of a newfangled American racism.

Their sessions with the nominee were less about Sotomayor's judicial record or her professional readiness for the highest court in the land and more of a public referendum on Affirmative Action and the logic of racial rhetoric today. And the Senators did a masterful job pummeling Affirmative Action at every single turn.

Not only did two of the firefighters take part in the closing act (Ricci and Vargas), sincerely voicing their anger and frustration at the 2nd Circuit's Summary Judgement on their case, which they read as dismissive and indifferent, the Republican Senators spent the bulk of their time lecturing Sotomayor on why there shouldn't be any governmental recognition of race at all--or questioning the nominee about whether or not there should be double-standards (one, say, for Latinas and African Americans and another for working class Whites) in discussions about race and racism in America.

Her now-infamous invocations of that "wise Latina woman" took center stage all week. And they asked her the same questions obsessively. What did she mean by that comparison? How could she have said it in the first place? Does that explain her response to Ricci? Why did she think she could/should get away with that when none of the White men questioning her could have invoked their racial masculinity in the same way without being tarred and feathered?

They completely controlled the terms of that discussion.

It has already started to go viral, but in case you missed it, Pat Buchanan was on Rachel Maddow's MSNBC show last night, and he almost seemed to be caricaturing the Senators' position, providing a less cloaked rendition of what detractors understood the Senators to be doing all week: defending the White working class against undeserving Affirmative Action babies. (The YouTube clip is above. Please take 10 minutes and watch the entire thing.)

Buchanan argues that White people built America (without help from anyone else) and that that explains why over 99% of the Supreme Court judges in this country's history have been white. Whites, he proclaims, were the only ones who died at Gettysburg or signed the Declaration of Independence. To invoke racism as an explanation for their dominance on the Court, he declares, is as ridiculous as arguing that black athletes only dominate America's olympic track team because of discrimination against White runners.

In many ways, the Republican Senators who questioned Sotomayor seemed to be implying something similar in their attacks on Affirmative Action and the logic of New Haven's attempt to determine why no Black firefighters passed the test for promotion. Those Black firefighters just didn't study hard enough, the senators believe. And they might be right. But where was even the gentlest Democratic push back against the wholesale lack of curiosity or conversation about the Black firefighters' collective failure? Maybe a Wise Latina Senator would have pointed out that palpable silence.

Crossposted at The Chronicle of Higher Education's Brainstorm Blog

Pailin Calls it Quits

2009-07-07T00:07:00.001-04:00

It is one thing not to seek re-election, but why would Palin resign? And before her first term is even done?

I have to admit, most of the answers I've heard to that straightforward question don't sound particularly compelling, not even her own, the one she offered up at her press conference last week.

So, why did she call it quits?

It is ostensibly not because of any soon-to-be-announced federal indictment, contrary to what some news outlets had been speculating.

And if she wanted to end the media feeding frenzy on her personal life, making such a move seems like the exact opposite of what she needed. Finishing the term without incident and riding off into the Alaskan night would probably have been more effective.

Of course, there is also all this talk about her need to cut loose of Alaska altogether so that she can run free (and raise her profile) in the lower 48s. But again, why the urgency? She'll still be in demand in a couple of years, especially with a successful (even if it were just a successfully uneventful) stint as governor under her belt.

Could she really be contemplating a 2012 presidential bid? I find that the least plausible guess of all. She got mauled in 2008. So, why would she come back for more?

There is also all this talk of her doing a Huckabee and getting some kind of television show on FOX or something. Again, FOX isn't going anywhere. She could have waited, and probably even raised her asking price in the meantime. So, what gives?

If she was doing this to save Alaska money (to the tune of $2,000,000 for the paperwork that it had/has to produce as a function of investigations into her conduct), it seems that she could have made that a clearer talking point in the news conference.

But that also doesn't sound quite right. Has anyone heard an explanation that seems more plausible than these? What is Palin thinking? And will it work in the end?

Khadijah White on The First Lady's Sacrifices

2009-07-02T16:22:00.002-04:00

"When Men Should Learn from Michelle"
by Khadijah White

She’s the perfect woman, right? Tall, good-looking, well-educated, stylish and endlessly devoted to her family. Michelle Obama is The Cosby Show's Clair Huxtable personified.

Especially important to the public’s obsession with Michelle Obama is her relationship with husband Barack. Between the couple’s affectionate photos on the cover of various magazines and the love story that warmed our hearts on the campaign trail, it’s hard to avoid getting wrapped up in the bigger-than-life fantasy of idealized Black coupledom that the Obama union seems to represent. But while people are falling all over themselves to tell Black women how to land a man like Barack, I rarely hear anyone talk about what Michelle had to give up to be with a man like Barack. What would make her eventually tell her highly coveted husband, "You only think of yourself... I never thought I’d have to raise a family alone"? For all the single men looking for their own Michelle, the answer to that question might help reduce any of their Barack-sized expectations.

Michelle was working for a law firm in Chicago when her future partner arrived as a summer intern. Barack often talks about how hard it was to get Michelle out on a first date. No surprise there. She was a young, Black female lawyer in a corporate firm, and a colleague that she had been assigned to mentor was pursuing her as a romantic interest. But we know how that story ends. At some point, Michelle accompanied Barack to a community organization meeting and quickly fell in love.

Soon after they started dating, Barack went into a superior’s office and announced he was going—and taking Michelle with him. Despite the pay cut, her move to work in the public sector would be extremely helpful in establishing important political networks for Barack’s career. His continued influence upon her professional life became clear when Michelle subsequently applied for a position in the mayor’s office. Before accepting the offer, she had to get her fiancee’s approval and set up a face-to-face meeting for Barack and her prospective employer. With his consent, Michelle began her new post.

Once Malia and Sasha arrived on the scene, the Obama marriage was in a tense state. By this point in time, Barack was a State Senator and spent three days a week away from home much of the year. Michelle was both the primary breadwinner and caretaker in the Obama family. She was exhausted, and angry and resentful towards her career-driven husband who, in return, thought of her as "cold and ungrateful." It was Michelle who dressed, fed, bathed, chauffeured, and read to Sasha and Malia every morning and night, even while serving as an extremely successful director of a nationally recognized community service group during the hours in between. Somehow, she had become both a married woman and a single parent at the same time. "What I notice about men, all men," Michelle would later tell a reporter, "is that their order is me, my family, God is in there somewhere, but me is first….And for women, me is fourth, and that’s not healthy."

On inauguration night, Michelle dressed up like a Princess and danced with her husband to Beyonce’s melodic rendition of “At Last” at the inaugural ball. And, in a way, Michelle had become a fairytale princess in a manner that mirrors the most paternalistic aspects of Disney's tradition. She had met a man, left her job, moved into his castle, transformed herself into a beauty icon and began an unpaid gig as a White House debutante and spouse premier.

"Michelle and Barack" may be an ideal in some ways, but let’s be truthful about what sacrifices she has (and he hasn’t) made along the way. Black women, no matter the education or accomplishment, are still shouldering way too much of the responsibility in the Black family. In recognizing Michelle's sacrifices and struggles, Black men should consider very carefully what it means to be a life partner, in every sense of the word.

White is a PhD student and Fontaine Scholar in the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Previously, she worked as an Associate Producer at NOW on PBS.

Taking the Twitter Plunge

2009-06-19T11:08:00.000-04:00

I'm stilling planning to get to my "Friday's Flick" post later on today (probably a review of Kristy Anderson's Zora Neal Hurston: Jump at the Sun, but I just wanted to send out a quick note this morning about Twitter.

I had lunch with Marc Lamont Hill yesterday. Hill, an anthropologist based at Columbia University's Teachers College, did a very convincing job explaining the appeal of Twitter and its form of social community, a form predicated on pithy, punctuated (pseudo-intimate) interactions.

Hill is the kind of public intellectual who is always in demand. When he's not lecturing at a college or high school somewhere, he's giving as good as he gets on Cable TV, debating the likes of Fox's Bill O'Reilly on the issue of the day. I put him in a category with John Hartigan, Mark Anthony Neal, Imani Perry, Eric Klinenberg, and Melissa Harris-Lacewell. These are some of the academics who masterfully juggle rigorous investments in public intellectualism with everyday commitments to academic teaching and scholarly research. They all do it differently, but they all do it well.

And given how busy these folks are, I am shocked that any of them have time for Twitter. But they do. At least four of the five of them have Twitter accounts that can be followed. How is that possible?

I have already blogged about being dumbfounded by the entire Twitter phenomenon, especially given how much I can't even keep up with the new communicative technologies I already use. But Marc Hill swears by Twitter, so I checked out the Web site yesterday and started to consider taking the plunge. However, I just wanted to do a pre-Twitter test run first. So, after lunch yesterday, I tried to take note of the kinds of things I might conceivably Twitter. What I came up with is listed below.

As I feared, most of it seems completely banal and unimportant, which is part of Twitter's point (see the video link above for a kind of anthropological argument in support of these seemingly insignificant communiqués). But I am still tempted to join up, even if just to inundate myself with other people's Twitters, starting with the scholars I mentioned above.

If any Brainstorm readers are already tweeting, can you let me know what kind of stuff you send out? Who do you follow and why? Or let me know if joining Twitter is more like making a pact with the cyber-devil?

Thursday, 6/18
2:30 p.m.
At the bookstore, thumbing through a new ethnography of a summer basketball league in Philadelphia, _Black Men Can't Shoot._ To buy or not to buy?

3:50 p.m.
Just read MHL's critical CNN.com review of Tavis Smiley's documentary, _The Stand._ How did I not even know the movie existed? I'm not that far out of the loop, am I?

8:10 p.m.
Finally watched the comedian Artie Lange's controversial guest spot on HBO's Joe Buck Live. I can see why EVERYBODY is talking about the Monday night performance. Surreally hilarious.

11:22 p.m.
Had to watch the Lange's profanity-strewn segment again. Just found out that The Howard Stern Show's Lange has supposedly been blacklisted from HBO sports.

Friday, 6/19
1:06 a.m.
I'm really enjoying the opening segment of Kristy Andersen's documentary about Zora Neale Hurston.

7:13 a.m.
Going through other people's Brainstorm blogs. I really enjoy reading these things. Particulary appreciate Gina's post Teaching and Tenure and Sara's discussion of pre-tenure motherhood. As usual, readers' comments run the gamut.

9 a.m.
About to blog on my current Twitter preoccupation. Marc Hill has me rethinking my aversion.

Seeing Harlem

2009-06-17T15:41:00.000-04:00

The New York Historical Society is highlighting the powerful Harlem photographs of Camilo José Vergara in an exhibit, Harlem: 1970-2009, scheduled to be up through mid-July.

As someone who has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Harlem since the mid-1990s, I have had one of the many front row seats to the massive changes that just recently transformed this section of northern Manhattan.

In the 1980s, many experts were still labeling Harlem "gentrification-proof," so symbolically linked to African-American cultural difference that wealthier whites would never feel comfortable moving into the area, at least not in any significant numbers. The 1990s and 2000s have already proved that prediction absolutely wrong.

Vergara, a MacArthur "genius" and native Chilean who has been documenting urban life for decades, moved to NYC in 1970's and started shooting the city as soon as he arrived. This ongoing work has periodically congealed into several award-winning books of his photos. The themes of those books include many different aspects of urban life, focusing, in turn, on urban cemeteries, the re-ethnicization of American inner cities, the everydayness of religious experience, and the iconography of New York City's subway system.

He spoke at MIT last month, and MIT has a link to it online as part of that school's OpenCourseWare program, making it accessible via YouTube. I've provided the video above. It is a relatively long program (about an hour and a half), but it really provides a detailed (even inspiring) look at Vegara's approach to urban photography.

Shelby Steele on Obama and Sotomayor

2009-06-16T13:14:00.001-04:00

I read two very short books while I was in Kingston, Jamaica, earlier this month. One, a tattered copy of St. Clare Drake's The Redemption of Africa and Black Religion (1977), I bought at a vending table set up for the Caribbean Studies Association Conference in New Kingston. I am trying to finalize a syllabus for a grad seminar in the Fall, and I was planning to check a copy out of the library later on this summer.

The second book, Shelby Steele's A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can't Win (2007), I brought with me from home. I'm trying to write an afterward for the paperback 2010 edition of my recent book, Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness (2008), and it seems pretty clear that I have to address Obama's election as a watershed moment in American history, one with clear implications for that book's basic claims. So, I have been galloping through recent book-length commentaries on Obama (including Gwen Ifill's The Breakthrough, Richard Wolffe's The Renegade, and Chuck Todd's How Obama Won) just to make sure that I'm not simply repeating what everyone else is saying about his victory and its implications for the future or racial and electoral politics in the United States.

Soon after I got back to Philadelphia last week, Steele penned an op-ed on the Sotomayor nomination that is a summary of his book's basic argument. Steele thinks that Obama is "bound" by the myopic and misplaced mathematics of race, a math of one-drop-rules and too-easy invocations of would-be racial impurity-by-addition ("black" plus "white" equals inauthentically "bi-racial").

According to Steele, Obama is bound in two ways. First, he is forced to play the conciliatory role of "bargainer" in contradistinction to the more hard-lined racial "challengers" (the Jesse Jacksons and Al Sharptons) who use "white guilt" as their political weaponry. This means that he has to come off as post-racial, as not hostile or bitter toward whites, an optimistic racial politics that doesn't necessarily stand him in good stead with the more cynical/skeptical strands of African-Americans thinking on race. In other words, the very traits that make him palatable to many liberal white voters potentially estranges him from black ones. His electoral coalition is split right down the middle.

Steele also argues that Obama is bound by his own misplaced attempt to actually embrace a gentler (more open-minded) form of racial politics (as opposed to eschewing it altogether and declaring its complete bankruptcy), which Steele would prefer, even as Obama gives lip-service to the idea of his own post-raciality. And Steele blasted Obama's nomination of Sotomayor this past week for just that very reason.

"The Sotomayor nomination commits the cardinal sin of identity politics," Steele writes. "It seeks to elevate people more for the political currency of their gender and ethnicity than for their individual merit. (Here, too, is the ugly faithlessness in minority merit that always underlies such maneuverings.) Mr. Obama is promising one thing and practicing another, using his interracial background to suggest an America delivered from racial corruption even as he practices a crude form of racial patronage. From America's first black president, and a man promising the 'new,' we get a Supreme Court nomination that is both unoriginal and hackneyed."

University of Maryland Law Professor Sherrilyn A. Ifill just wrote a response to the Steele op-ed that dismisses his critique as so much-more "stale, tired and now proven-wrong theories" of black neo-conservatism.

Obama won the election, and Ifill thinks it weird that Steele would have the audacity to say anything other than that he was flat-wrong on that prediction. Of course, Steele was not just implying an electoral defeat for Obama. The other point was that Obama couldn't win (even if he actually won the election) because of America's racial logic and his unwillingness to denounce it.

I'm off to a morning meeting, but I just wanted to make sure that folks were up to speed on this before I had a second (hopefully) to write a more substantive response to this dispute.

Jon Voight on President Obama

2009-06-12T15:21:00.001-04:00

I just finished watching Jon Voight's recent speech at a fundraising dinner thrown by the National Republican Congressional and Senatorial Committees. Voight, an accomplished movie actor and father of megastar Angelina Jolie, reminds us all that Hollywood isn't exclusively peopled by liberals and card-carrying Democrats.

Voight has been causing quite a stir with his harsh criticisms of Obama.

In the speech (YouTubed above), Voight berates his Hollywood colleagues (and mainstream media outlets) for buying the hype about Obama, and he denounces Obama for pretending to be a "moderate" on the campaign trail and turning out to be "wildly radical."

He also implies that Obama's campaigning techniques were illegal and that his backers inaccurately depicted Bush as a war-monger.

Voight states, quite emphatically and without qualification, that "everything Obama has recommended has turned out to be disastrous." But he doesn't just blame Obama. America's problem is the Democratic Party.

"We can blame Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Chris Dodd, George Soros, David Axelrod and their ilk," he maintains, "for the downfall of this country."

But Voight's big concern is that the modern state of Israel continue to be a "safe haven forever" for Jews. And he has been genuinely invested in Israel for quite a long time.

According to Voight, Obama doesn't understand the Middle East. Our new president is foolish enough to think that Palestinians are sincere about peace, but Voight knows better. And he dismisses Obama for mere utopianism and self-aggrandizement.

"He thinks he can conquer the world with his soft-spoken sweet-talk," Voight says, "and really thinks he's going to bring all the enemies of the world into a little playground where they'll swing each other back and forth."

I recognize that he is giving a kind of motivational speech at a party fund raiser, so it stands to reason that he'd deploy such a confrontational tone. But is our only mode of politics, on the left and right, this register of self-assured certainty and dismissiveness?

Jamaica for Sale

2009-06-12T15:20:00.001-04:00

I am attempting to institute a new feature on my blog this summer, a film review segment on Fridays. And anything is fair game: contemporary Hollywood fare, new independent features, on-line shorts, documentaries. Everything. For the most part, I'll try to highlight films that I think Brainstorm readers may not already know, but I might also put my own spin on the much-hyped movie of the moment. Wherever the spirit moves me.

This week, I want to mention a documentary, Jamaica for Sale, produced by Esther Figueroa and Diana McCaula, two activists and media-makers based in Jamaica. The film screened last week as part of the 2009 Caribbean Studies Association conference in Kingston, Jamaica. (I was down there both for the conference and as part of an ethnographic film shoot of my own.)

A low-budget feature-length documentary shot in mini-DV, Jamaica for Sale takes a critical look at the impact of tourism, Jamaica's most lucrative industry, on that island's social, economic and environmental well-being. In the spirit of another relatively recent filmic critique of tourism in Jamaica, Stephanie Black's Life and Debt, the movie depicts the country's all-eggs-in-one-basket dependence on tourism as a kind of Faustian pact, a self-defeating commitment to the inevitabilities of globalization, and on terms that are hardly beneficial to the island and its inhabitants.

The film juxtaposes the luxuries of high-end tourism with the everyday exploitation of Jamaican workers, some of whom are asked to spend more than eight-hours a day constructing hotels for about $1 an hour in US currency. (The depreciation of Jamaican currency over the decades is another vital part of this tragic storyline.)

This documentary about the oft-hidden downsides of globalization and "unsustainable development" attempts to deconstruct the tourism-based imagery of Jamaica as sandy beaches and smiling natives (see the Youtubed commercial above), replacing it with a bifurcated landscape of elite, privatized and cosmopolitan leisure propped up by the grinding details of local poverty, a poverty exploited by employment policies of big businesses with transnational interests and by large and small governmental complicities that exacerbate such material deprivation.

The film allows some of the workers to speak for themselves (in a few of its most riveting scenes), and it asks experts to help audience members to make sense of the historical context that laid the foundation for the Caribbean's current predicament.

Some of this stuff you've probably heard or seen before, but a good deal of this narrative (and the specific cases chosen by these filmmakers) will be completely new to a lot of viewers.

Jonah Goldberg on Liberals and their Racial Hypocrisy

2009-06-08T16:45:00.000-04:00

National Review editor and syndicated columnist Jonah Goldberg has thrown down the gauntlet in a Philadelphia Inquirer op-ed published yesterday. Motivated by recent debates over President Obama's nomination of Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, Goldberg has called liberals hypocrites on issues of race.

Liberals are always asking for honest discussions about race and racism, he says, but they don't really mean it.

"They invite everyone to a big, open-minded conversation," he writes, "but the moment anyone disagrees with them, they shout "racist" and force the dissenters to figuratively don dunce caps and renounce their reactionary views. Then, when the furor dies down, they again offer up grave lamentations about the lack of 'honest dialogue'. It's a mixture of Kabuki dance and whack-a-mole."

I really don't disagree with Goldberg on that point.

If we are going to be serious about calls for honest race-based conversations, we have to be prepared for everyone's two-cents, including the Limbaughs and the Gingrinches (the two public figures most clamoring for a discussion about Sotomayor's putative racism). In many ways, that is one of the reasons why I have grown to appreciate the blog as a public platform. The anonymity readers can embrace allows them a kind of cyber-courage to lash out in all the politically incorrect (and sometimes downright hateful) ways that few people would be willing to proffer if their actual names were attached. We have scrubbed the public sphere so clean, it is sometimes useful to get a dose of un-euphemistic reality. We can see exactly where we collectively stand.

The conversations we need to have about race, the truly honest ones, won't just be genteel performances of decorum and mutual respect. There will be some of that, thankfully, but talking across racial tracks will also be about anger, rage, resentment, and much gnashing of teeth. The conversation won't just be a battle of reason and objective argumentation, no matter what pundits on the left or right might imagine. Indeed, our "public sphere" was never simply saturated by Habermasian hyper-rationalities. It is equally constituted by longstanding commitments to irrationality and unreasonableness. Our contemporary commitments to race and racism are affect-laden, self-interested and decidedly reason-proof. But we probably need to talk them through anyway, and publicly, even if the cynics would call it all a waste of time.

Obama to Nominate Sotomayor

2009-05-26T10:13:00.000-04:00

Obama is set to announce his replacement for Souter this morning, and insiders have indicated that he intends to nominate Sonia Sotomayor, a federal judge on the United States Court of Appeals, the Second Circuit. Democrats might like the pick, but some Republicans have already intimated that they might be gearing up for a filibustery fight.

Sotomayor represents one a version of a fairytale story, a kind of textbook example of what "The American Dream" is supposed to mean. She grew up in a public housing project complex in New York City and was raised by Puerto Rican migrants in the South Bronx just a few years before a Diasporic form of vernacular music, hip-hop, concretized into something globally marketable along that same neighborhood's sidewalk space. Sotomayor lost her dad before she became a teenager, and her mother raised the family alone. Sotomayor still thrived.

She went to Princeton and then Yale Law School. She received her first important judgeship in 1991, nominated to the the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York by President George H. W. Bush.

CNN has been representing this choice as a pretty smart pick that "should" sail fairly easily through the nomination process. She has the right pedigree and is an important demonstration of ethnic inclusion (not to mention a Supreme Court first) as a Puerto Rican woman.

But detractors are calling her an "activist judge" and linking that label to some comments she made at Duke University in 2004, when she allegedly claimed that "the United States Court of Appeals is where policy is made." She is also supposed to have said that she "can't disregard ethnicity or gender as a judge." All this, and Obama made those "cryptic" statements about wanting a judge with "empathy." For some, these are some serious red flags.

I've already tried to push back (here on Brainstorm) against the nonsensical and decidedly political claim that some judges are activists while others are not. That strikes me as a spurious and disingenuous distinction. Usually, such accusers want to consider certain judges inappropriately activist simply because they don't agree with the accuser's politics.

We are sure to get an extended round of debates about Sotomayor's nomination, debates that will surely be organized around this discussion of judicial activism. But let's not get caught up in this silliness. All judges actively interpret the Constitution. It is not a self-evident document that simply and eloquently speaks for itself, a sentient being that some judges passively overhear, listening for its oracular declarations, while others distortingly ventriloquize. The distinction is nonsense. And it is always an unabashedly political move to call the other side exclusively political. For folks on both sides, it is always about what a nominee's politics are, not whether or not she has them.

John Legend's Graduation Speech

2009-05-20T15:23:00.000-04:00

The Grammy-winning singer-songwriter John Legend spoke at the University of Pennsylvania yesterday, delivering this year's graduation speech for the College of Arts and Sciences, a school he graduated from in 1999. (You don't see me, but I'm seated two rows behind him on the stage. I was one of the faculty members responsible for shaking the hands of graduates as their names were announced.)

Legend crafted a thoughtful and heart-felt speech that was clearly both personal and political. He talked about his first trip on an airplane, a trip his 16-year-old self took to Philadelphia to start his stint at the University of Pennsylvania.

He argued for the academic conceptions of "truth" that he learned as an undergraduate, conceptions he considers a lot more rigorous and weighty than what gets passed off as truth in the contemporary public/political sphere.

Legend invoked sociologist Patricia Hill Collins's notion of a "politics of empathy" to flesh out his own commitments to social justice.

He challenged the students to hold fast to the methodological and epistemological lessons they learned in their Penn courses. He dared them to think internationally by putting their own relative luxuries in conversation with the material disadvantages of human beings in other parts of the world. He asked students to redefine "soul" as a framework for operationalizing more holistic engagements with our social world and more empirically verifiable/falsifiable truth claims based upon such engagements.

Legend proffered soul as an apt scaffolding for the substantive stuff that truth should be made of. He thinks of soul and truth as directly related, even mutually constitutive.

As a soul singer, people sometimes ask him to define soul. And according to Legend, it isn't reducible to race or a conventional genre of popular music. Anyone can be soulful, he says in the speech, just as long as the person is "authentic," "real and pure," trying to find fleeting but fecund moments "when silence and sound come together" so profoundly and unpredictably that it might bring tears to one's eyes. And those eyes will always see the world just a little bit differently as a result.

Anthropologist Kathleen Stewart has a short book that tries to describe a similarly soulful or soul-filled conception of life/truth, and she would probably argue that the fleeting moments that Legend describes, moments she considers saturated with "ordinary affects," are everyday occurrences that usually go unnoticed or underappreciated. They are moments that some of us have to train ourselves to see. If not, we glimpse examples of Legend's existential truths for a brilliant second only to have them vanish into irretrievable and inarticulable oblivion just as quickly.

I would probably call what Legend's really going for here, the form of soulful truth he's suggesting, a logic of (and plea for) sincerity, not authenticity, though the two are (as Lionel Trilling once put it) cognate ideals, related attempts at accessing reality. I have my own quirky formulation of things, granted. And it is different from Trilling's. But that discrepancy (which I won't unpack now) doesn't change my take on Sunday's speech. Legend demonstrated an example of just what he was trying to recommend. It was a speech filled with soulful truth. And he didn't have to sing a single note.

The Gender of Tenure

2009-04-27T21:49:00.000-04:00

Berkeley Law Professor Mary Ann Mason has written a Chronicle article on some of tenure’s hard-wired biases. It is worth a read.

Based on research that Mason and her colleagues conducted at the Berkeley Law Center on Health, Economic & Family Security, she maintains that “women with children across all disciplines are twice as likely as men with children to work in part-time or non-tenure-track positions.” And this ghettoization, she says, isn’t just happenstance.

How fair, Mason asks, is a promotion system based on the career trajectories and lived experiences of a 19th century academic moment “when only men were professors and their stay-at-home wives cared for the children?”

Mason situates this argument within a larger discussion about the corporatization of academia and the ongoing threats to tenure. Highlighting a decline in the percentage of tenure or tenure-track faculty teaching undergraduates (vs. adjunct faculty with usually little job security or health benefits), Mason doesn’t think it is an arbitrary coincidence that the uptick in part-time/adjunct instruction has coincided with an increase in the number of women getting Ph.D’s. However, this isn’t the result of a sexist conspiracy hatched by some purposeful Patriarchy. According to Mason, it is the substantively gendered byproduct of a formally gender-neutral process.

The current ticking of the academic tenure clock pits child-rearing and professional promotion against one another. “Certainly the timing of tenure is terrible for women,” Mason writes. “Today, the average age at which women can expect to receive a Ph.D. is 34. That puts the five to seven years of racing the tenure clock squarely at the end of the normal reproductive cycle. Those are the ‘make or break’ years for female academics, in terms of both career and childbearing, not to mention the demands of raising young children. Difficult choices must be made.”

Mason doesn’t call for an end to tenure. She would push back against any talk of turning academics into another category of “part-time and contingent employees who could be hired or fired at the will and whim of the full-time corporate administrators.” Instead, she offers suggestions (including, say, extending tenure to excellent part-time faculty) that she believes might further level the tenure playing field and allow it to better foster the success of all faculty members.

The Audacity of John Hope

2009-04-06T15:45:00.001-04:00

I still can't believe that John Hope Franklin is gone. I met him a handful of times, and each encounter was awe inspiring. He was the scholar’s scholar, always working, thinking, writing. His research was decidedly political without being polemical, an example of rigorous scholarship that changed the world with little need to self-righteously proclaim as much.

I only had one really substantive conversation with John Hope Franklin. It was about five or six years ago, on a plane ride from Tennessee to Durham, North Carolina. We had just spent a weekend on the same “advisory panel,” two of several scholars brought down to talk about the future of the prestigious Race Relations Institute at Fisk, Franklin’s alma mater.

I’m a Howard grad myself, and I’d never even visited the Fisk campus before that weekend. But I learned a great deal about the place as a function of listening to Franklin and others talk about their sense of where the Institute had been and where it should be headed in the future. (The event also featured my only meeting with former Vice President Al Gore, who served as a special adviser to the group. He was already out of public office and had not yet re-emerged on the international scene with his global-warming documentary. He seemed equally awed by Franklin, which moved me, too.)

But Franklin and I really didn’t get a chance to talk at length until the plane ride back to Duke University, where we were both located at the time. It just so happened that we were seated next to one another, and I got a chance to ask him about his past teaching stint at Howard University. His response had me buckled over in the aisle, laughing uncontrollably, but maybe "just to keep from crying" (as the saying goes).

Usually, when contemporary Howard students talk about their beloved institution (and we do love HU), they have two related ways of describing the place. There is a kind of hushed reverence for bygone eras (during and immediately after segregation) when luminaries such as Franklin roamed Howard's Yard. We wonder how different the place must have been back then. The same, but different.

For one thing, there was less competition for pioneering black faculty from the likes of Harvard, Duke, or Yale. So Howard and other HBCUs had something close to a monopoly in that area. At the same time, Howard students also trafficked in a plaintive discourse about how tough it could be negotiating the institution on a daily basis. It didn’t seem very student-friendly to us. If anything, we imagined that the school’s aim was to toughen us up (and prepare us for the real world) by making our day-to-day lives more difficult than they needed to be. Tough love. Howard didn’t kill you, we said. It only made you stronger. We loved our school, don’t get things twisted. And I most decidedly still do. But we agreed with one another (when not in mixed collegiate company) about Howard sometimes making our daily lives a living hell.

Our best example was registration week. My first year, we would queue up at the beginning of semesters to register for classes on the main yard at 7 or 8 a.m. And it wasn’t unprecedented that we still wouldn't actually get to register by late that evening, when the lines closed and we headed back to our respective dorm rooms committed to waking up even earlier the following day for round two. Of course, this all predated online registration, so I’m sure current Howard undergrads don’t have to endure such an ordeal. But we kind of embraced it as a badge of honor, an example of how Howard made its graduates hardier than most, ready for anything the world might subsequently throw our way.

At the same time, we imagined that such antics were a negative byproduct of integration: that the school must have had a different ethos before then. Howard probably had more resources for staffing registration lines, we thought. It definitely could boast the most famous African-American faculty in the country. So, it probably had a different mentality vis-à-vis its constitutive community members. It must have felt (and operated) so much differently back then. Or so we thought. During that one plane ride back to Duke, Franklin disabused me of that romantic assumption before the plane took off.

He regaled me with memories about his years teaching at Howard, and he laughed about how difficult the administration made his everyday life. His funniest line was about how they made him feel like he had the unbridled “audacity” (his word) to actually want his checks from payroll. He joked about having to consistently march to the administration building in search of them, stopping in office after indifferent office, inquiring humbly about where his money might be. And all the while, he said, they acted like he was being a nuisance, a pain in the butt, for needing to eat and pay bills and maybe even squirrel the little remainder away for later.

As someone who obviously matriculated through Howard much, much later than Franklin taught there, it was hilarious to hear him wax comedic about his tenure at the place. In many ways, his experience struck me as quite authentically Howard, and not all that different from the kinds of hazing processes that we lovingly complained about in the 1990s, especially if we had successfully run the gauntlet and made it to that graduation stage.

photo courtesy of dukenews.com

Obama on Holder...

2009-03-17T10:05:00.001-04:00

Holder
(image at Newsday.com)

One Brainstorm reader, gh, says that "Obama threw Eric Holder under the bus a few days ago for race-baiting."

This weekend, The New York Times published an article that represented Obama's take on Holder's "nation of cowards" comment. Obama says that "if I had been advising my attorney general, we would have used different language."

Obama did concede that Americans are "oftentimes uncomfortable with talking about race" and "probably [need to] be more constructive in facing up to sort of the painful legacy of slavery and Jim Crow and discrimination."

Here's how the article ends:

Mr. Obama was asked whether he agreed with Mr. Holder. He hesitated for five seconds before responding.

“I’m not somebody who believes that constantly talking about race somehow solves racial tensions,” Mr. Obama said. “I think what solves racial tensions is fixing the economy, putting people to work, making sure that people have health care, ensuring that every kid is learning out there. I think if we do that, then we’ll probably have more fruitful conversations.”

Indeed, to read Obama's books carefully is to anticipate just such a response. Such a position served as one of the very organizing principles for his election campaign.

In the LIFE coffee-table book The American Journey of Barack Obama, published earlier this year, I describe Obama as a "racial optimist," someone with the "audacity" to "hope" that we can transcend race by listening carefully to one another and finding points of commonality. His early exploits in Chicago demonstrate his capacity to do just that. He intends to show Americans that we can believe in one another, to convince us that trusting across racial lines is well worth the risk.

But he does believe that dealing with health care, putting people to work, and improving our schools are the first orders of business. Does that imply that he considers America's racial issues epiphenomenal, mere byproducts of these more decidedly material realities? Is that a fair characterization? Is he right, or is there something sui generis about the logic of racial reasoning that makes it irreducible to these other issues (even as it clearly intersects with them)?

Moreover, does his take on how we should deal with race/racism imply that he has thrown Holder under the bus and derailed the new Attorney General's attempt to provoke more explicit cross-racial dialogues?

Linda Jones in Pain

2009-02-26T09:52:00.003-05:00

Duke University's Mark Anthony Neal discusses "the greatest singer you've never heard," Linda Jones.

In 1967, at the tender age of 22, Jones recorded a powerful song titled "Hypnotized." Jones died in the early 1970s, but her singing style made quite an impression on subsequent generations of vocalists.

Neal wrote an intriguing essay on her ability to represent physical and emotional pain through her stylized and sophisticated vocalizations. Jones suffered from diabetes and painful diabetic seizures, and Neal uses Elaine Scarry's Bodies in Pain as his inspiration for an argument about the extent to which Jones's "harsh" and hypnotic sound represents her concerted attempt to render that pain acoustically and aesthetically.

Her singerly choices (her skillful attempts to "bend and break notes"), he says, demonstrate a profound recognition of language's inadequacy as a mechanism for capturing otherwise inexpressible pains. "There was no language for [her] pain," he claims, and so Jones used the non-semantic and phonetic materialities of language to articulate "heart aches and pains" that outstrip language's semiotic/representational powers.

Neal's essay can be found in the new book Best African American Essays, edited by Debra Dickerson and Gerald Early.

And you can hear him talk about Jones during a recent WUNC interview. The interview is short. And its worth a listen. Neal makes a compelling case for Jones presages contempoary figures like Keisha Cole and Mary J. Blige.

(Photo from Chancellorofsoul.com)

My op-ed on the "nation of cowards" comment

2009-02-24T11:44:00.006-05:00

Lately, I have been trying to write about the kind of heavy-lifting that understanding race/racism actually demands of contemporary Americans. I used the Holder comment as an excuse to enter the fray again, and publicly, with an op-ed in today's Philadelphia Inquirer. I try to flesh-out a bit of Holder's argument, and I link it to that controversial chimp-shooting cartoon.

In the op-ed, I do say that we are all cowards. I think that Holder got that part right, even as I agree with the claim that any invocation of cowardice runs the risk of alienating more people than it brings to the multiracial table.

Still, Holder isn't just singling out white Americans, and negotiating our fear is an inescapable part of what it means to be human.

So, why are we so afraid of being called out for being afraid?

Don't Let the "Deal or No Deal" Suitcase Fool You!

2009-02-17T15:16:00.002-05:00

I didn’t know anything about her before the end of last year, and I still haven't seen her do stand-up. But I listen to Claudia Jordan every Friday evening on Jamie Foxx’s Sirius/XM radio show , The Jamie Foxx Show, and she is one of the funniest things about the program, especially when Foxx is off shooting a movie or recording/promoting a new album.

At first, I just wanted to listen to the Foxxhole show so that I could catch Jamie Foxx strutting his comedic stuff. I’ve been laughing at his crazy antics ever since his days on Fox’s In Living Color sketch comedy show. Listening to Foxx live and uncensored was worth the cost of Satellite radio all by itself. (And I have to admit that I am closely following the breaking story about Liberty Media trying to save a cash-strapped Sirius XM with a $530-million investment, especially with the future of the Foxx show hanging in the balance.)

Even now, I get most of my black popular culture from Foxx and his comedy crew. Who knew that Katt Williams angrily challenged “King of Comedy” Steve Harvey to a New Year’s Eve battle royale? Where else would I hear an Oscar-winning superstar tell Tavis Smiley that he was acting like the kind of antebellum slave that would have gotten killed by other slaves before they executed their escape plans (because Foxx considered Smiley an early “playa hating” against Obama). I even had the nerve to get some of my inauguration coverage from the crew. They took the historic moment very seriously, but some bursts of comedic brilliance were sprinkled throughout the festivities anyway.

Foxx and his no-holds-barred crew (including Johnny “M...F...” Mack, Felicia “O.G. Poetess” Morris, Speedy, Lewis Dix, Chris Spencer, and Michael Collier) go at each other (and the day’s top stories) with reckless abandon. You should have heard them deconstruct Chris Brown's alleged assault on Rihanna. And everyone gets some gut-busting zingers in there.

Of course, it isn’t for the kids, or the faint of heart. They can get quite “blue” and explicit about things. This is pay radio, remember. But Jordan always seems to hit the hardest. They constantly offer up a “joke of the day” award, and as far as I can tell, she’s usually the recipient.

Jordan’s problem, however, is that she also boasts a model’s physical beauty, which might be a kind of death sentence for any serious comic. Her movie-star looks landed her a spot as eye candy on NBC’s Deal or No Deal. And she’s probably going to gain a ton more fans after her stint on this season’s Celebrity Apprentice, also on NBC . If the producers let her do her thing, she will be hilarious amidst the competitive chaos of that reality TV show.

Of course, you can’t see her on the radio. But what you hear, consistently, are some of the funniest unscripted one-liners and witty rejoinders anywhere. Trust me. Don’t let the Deal or No Deal suitcase fool you. Claudia Jordan is one of the quickest comics in America.

_(Photo from Photobucket.com)_

The Man of Steele?

2009-02-06T06:51:00.000-05:00

The Republican National Committee chose former Maryland Lieutenant Governor Michael Steele as its new chairman. Steele is the first African-American to hold the post and, arguably, yet another beneficiary of the “change” in electoral politics that Barack Obama’s historic victory signifies.

Steele beat out five other candidates after six rounds of voting and backroom dealing, which culminated in a late come-from-behind victory over South Carolina’s Katon Dawson.

With the GOP still reeling from its loss of the White House and several more seats in Congress, Steele is being asked to radically redefine the Party for a decidedly new electorate. Many pundits have been arguing that Republicans need a massive transfusion of new blood after the thumping they took this past November. The choices of Sarah Palin as McCain’s running mate and “Joe, The Plumber” as a kind of last-minute (and decidedly misguided) Hail Mary signaled, for detractors, a desperate attempt to appeal to a “base” that no longer exists -- or that represents a smaller portion of the American electoral pie than ever before given both our country’s much-discussed demographic “browning” and Obama’s massive voter registration efforts.

Obama beat McCain with respect to just about every ethnic group in the country, including African-Americans, Jewish-Americans, Muslim-Americans, and Asian-Americans. He didn’t win the white vote, but he didn’t need to, especially since his campaign made a point of helping to get those newly registered voters to the polls on Election Day.

America’s days of all-white-male Presidential/Vice Presidential tickets is over -- at least for the foreseeable future. People say that we have a lot more “firsts” on the political horizon (and that’s whether or not Hillary Clinton runs in 2016). We’ll see if such talk proves prescient, but one thing seems sure. The RNC’s decision to entrust Steele with its top spot means that they probably see the “writing on the wall” vis-à-vis “old school” political tactics that now alienate many more Americans than they attract.

I don’t know much about Steele, and most of what I think I know comes from hearing bits and pieces of his punditry during national news programs. I’ll start to listen more closely now. But the unscientific impression I have based on what I’ve already heard is that Steele might actually represent the same commitment to thoughtfulness and open-minded debate that Obama seems to embody on the other side of the aisle. Neither figure is post-partisan, but they both appear to privilege ideas over ideology, careful consideration over cultivated inattention, and healthy skepticism over blind faith. Indeed, Steele could turn out to be the perfect political foe in an Obama era. If President Obama has become a kind of otherworldly political superhero for the Democrats, Steele might just be up to the task of playing an equally matched archrival.

Coming of Age in Economia

2009-01-27T21:13:00.000-05:00

I am helping to plan this year’s American Anthropological Association conference, and the title for the meeting is “The End/s of Anthropology.”

That is not simply meant as a cheeky way to argue that the field has outlasted its usefulness. Not at all. If anything, it is a call for anthropology to recast itself as an important perspective from which to engage some of the most pressing questions of the day. For example, as Congress votes on Obama’s choice for Treasury Secretary today, I’ve been trying to think about all the many reasons why anthropology could be a useful voice in the deafening debates about a “global economic crisis” that he is being enlisted to help fix.

Anthropologists aren’t highlighted or invoked in such conversations, at least not as much (or as often) as they could be. Economists debate the merits of various fiscal vs. monetary policies, and our new President has assembled an experienced team of them to help him figure out the government’s next few moves. But where are the anthropologists?

There are many reasons why President Obama didn’t initially think about an anthropologist or two for his economic team. Indeed, anthropology has long been lampooned as an obscure and eccentric academic discipline with little practical purpose. Truly academic (in the rather dismissive sense). However, many anthropologists have always been sleeves-rolled-up scholars. And some of its practitioners have been pushing to expand definitions of “the economic” in ways that might prove useful today, offering definitions that more properly and accurately contextualize economic transactions with respect to differently configured cultural and political domains. Anthropologists proffer cogent critiques of reductionist treatments of economic actions/relations, treatments that too easily decouple economic logics from the cultural logics within which they are embedded -- and that provide the semiotic/interpretive engine for their permutations.

Why are important anthropological insights often marginalized in such debates, and would a robust reincorporation into such larger political and intellectual disputes be a turn of events that anthropologists should condone or condemn?

The field continues to grapple with some volatile and complicated subjects, from structural violence to neogenomic ideologies, from indigenous rights to cosmopolitan subjectivities, from questions of “war and peace” to invocations of post-raciality. And all of these themes provide valuable points of entry into potential strategies for dealing with a global recession by way of its inescapably and robustly localizable manifestations.

The Oakland Shooting and Its Aftermath

2009-01-14T00:08:00.001-05:00

Oakland ushered in 2009 with a controversial police shooting. Officer Johannes Mehserle shot and killed a 22-year-old African-American, Oscar Grant, while taking him into custody on a BART station platform January 1st. This would have been a tragedy no matter what, but the stakes were raised enormously as a consequence of one relatively new technological innovation: the cellphone video camera.

As Mehserle and his fellow officers were handcuffing Grant, nearby straphangers decided to use their cellphones to videotape the arrest. What they captured, now available all over the Internet, is the actual moment when Mehserle fires his gun. Nuanced details are out of focus and hard to make out. It is a low-quality video image. But the broad strokes are pretty clear.

The officers had Grant face-down on the ground when Mehserle’s took out his gun and discharged a bullet into his body. (The youtubed news report above contains two different cellphoned video recordings of the incident, along with a reporter’s blow-by-blow discussion of what is transpiring on screen.)

Speculation is that the Mehserle might have thought that he had taken out some kind of stun gun or taser (not an actual gun), which the reporter‘s abovementioned reading of the video seems to imply.

The BART police have almost concluded their initial investigation into the shooting. They’ve interviewed many of the witnesses, including the other officers on the scene. Mehserle, however, has yet to be interviewed and actually resigned from the force last week.

Many Oakland residents are extremely upset about the shooting of this unarmed young man, and they read the event as yet another indication of more structural and systematic disregard and hostility (or maybe just reckless indifference) for poorer African American communities. Protesters quite explicitly describe Grant as just the latest vulnerable victim of excessive law enforcement.

Given how much we are all focused on our Great Recession, the Gaza conflict, America’s first black president, and the ongoing threat of global terrorism, the Oakland issue might seem relatively inconsequential to some, a throwback to some bygone (pre-Obama) era when Jessie Jacksons and Al Sharptons controlled the terms of America’s racial debates and turned such shootings into national news. But that is completely the _wrong_ way to think about what is happening in Oakland right now. It is not some vestigial holdover from the 1980s and '90s, the last gasp of antiquated and dying racial logics in a quickly postracializing world.

Race is a global issue, but it is lived/experienced locally. And the local is still political. It has implications for how we might address larger national and international questions. Moreover, "the local" is much more likely to go global with the advent of more compact mechanisms for capturing the tiniest crevices of social life, crevices that can be subsequently broadcast (and virally Webcast) for all the world to see.

Saltsman's "We Hate the USA" CD

2008-12-29T10:39:00.001-05:00

As one of the many Americans considering a descent on the inauguration ceremonies next month, even without any actual tickets in hand (and nary a perfunctory response to my queries about possibly obtaining some from my local Congressman), I have been following the "transition" fairly closely. And I'm not just talking about the president elect's cabinet picks. I also mean his decisions for the ceremony itself. The brilliant choice of poet Elizabeth Alexander; the more controversial decision to ask Rick Warren to offer up the day's prayer.

Obama is certainly trying to demonstrate his commitment to an inclusive political conversation that allows for many different ideological positions. Frank Rich persuasively challenges the limits and contours of that move vis-a-vis the Warren choice in today's New York Times. But it is clear why Obama feels he has to make such massive gestures in the direction of political inclusion. To his opponents, he represents the unassimilable anti-American. He is the butt of jokes. The threat from within.

Just think about Chip Saltsman's version of holiday gift-giving this year. Saltsman was national campaign adviser for Mike Huckabee during his failed presidential run, and Saltsman is now one of the people vying for head of the RNC. This weekend, we also found out that he sent a CD out to RNC members (as a Christmas gift) that included the song youtubed above, "Barack, The Magic Negro."

But the CD didn't just showcase that gem. According to Rebecca Sinderbrand's CNN report, the CD itself was titled "We Hate the USA," and boasted tunes that poked fun at many other political figures.

According to Sinderbrand and The Hill, the CD included the following song titles: "John Edwards's Poverty Tour," "Wright place, wrong pastor," "Ivory and Ebony" and "The Star Spanglish Banner."

The Star Spanglish Banner?

Saltsman has dismissed the controversy out of hand, describing the CD as a harmelss spoof. "I think most people recognize political satire when they see it," he said. "I think RNC members understand that."

But it is clear that Saltsman comes close to trafficking in the very forms of small-minded xenophobia, race-baiting, partisan hypocrisy, and fear-mongering that helped cost John McCain the 2008 election. To many critics, such a CD looks like political pandering (and scapegoating) at its worst -- and doesn't nearly imply the kind of forward-thinking sensibility needed to take the Republican party where it needs to go. If anything, it appears to be a surefire recipe for many more electoral defeats at the hands of a browning electorate.

However, Saltsman's holiday gesture can also help to explain some of what Obama is up against -- and why a few of his picks (for cabinet and the inaugural dais) can leave many of his supporters unsatisfied.

Saltsman demonstrates the context Obama must negotiate, a politicized landscape where some Republican operatives think that disagreeing with them on substantive policy issues means that you must just "hate the USA."

But Obama can't get caught up in proving himself to these intractable naysayers, even as he tries to embrace those rivals serious about talking honestly (and in good faith) across deep ideological divides.

A Racist Grim Reaper?

2008-12-17T11:36:00.000-05:00

The election of Barack Obama is supposed to signal (according to some pundits) the beginning of the end for race talk (i.e., publicly expressed concerns about racial discrimination) in contemporary America. However, such predictions underestimate the continuing significance of “race” as a socially salient category that allows pseudo-science to bolster folk empiricism. They also misread the contemporary subtleties of racial discrimination by vulgarizing them. But one comedian's anthropomorphic rendering of Death as a racist reaper helps to showcase the ridiculous nature of such positions.

David Alan Grier’s most recent episode of the comedy show Chocolate News lampoons a certain overly simplistic characterization of racial disparities in health outcomes. Grier’s opening rant reduces those race-based differences to the racist biases of a single personified figure, Death himself.

In his best performative version of “angry black man” meets “Fox News commentator,” Grier asks why White celebrities such as Grammy-winner Amy Winehouse and comedian Artie Lange (both famous for chronic drug abuse) are still alive and successful (Lange’s memoir was actually No. 1 on The New York Times best-seller list at the start of this very month) even as a too-young comedian like Bernie Mac was killed by a relatively obscure disease earlier in the year.

Of course, Bernie Mac and Artie Lange are poor stand-ins for the general and systematic inequities between blacks and whites vis-a-vis health-related concerns today. In many ways, however, Grier still successfully captures the unreasonable nature of certain dismissive responses to contemporary invocations of racism, invocations often rejected out of hand as simply playing The Race Card, especially if the accusing party cannot produce a black-hatted culprit as the hyper-intentional source of the problem.

If there is a difference in health outcomes, it must be because of a purposefully prejudiced (and decidedly sentient) being such as Death. Or at least a secret cabal of closeted KKK MD's -- maybe slipping toxins into black patients’ IV's.

Without such clichéd smoking guns conspicuously placed at the scene of supposed racial crimes (and in the absence of any recognizably racist “bad guys” to scapegoat), some people would demand that we all automatically assume racism has little part to play in markedly different health outcomes between racial groups. If anything, such racial differences must have to do with genetics (with evolutionarily dissimilar capacities for, say, salt retention).

In many ways, current debates about racism in American culture have backed us all into a Death-as-racist corner. Without a sinister, animus-filled, and self-proclaimed racist to publicly demonize, we are relegated to only a quietist acceptance of our country’s imagined racial transcendence.

Death isn’t some supernatural creature disproportionately targeting blacks. But that isn’t nearly the only way that race/racism might serve as a productive analytical scaffold for making sense of continued racial disparities in an ostensibly "post-racial" moment.

Spike on Spike

2008-12-06T11:07:00.000-05:00

This was the final week of classes for an undergraduate course on Spike Lee that I co-taught with Professor Salamishah Tillet here at the University of Pennsylvania, and Spike Lee was gracious enough to cap off the semester by visiting the class a couple of days ago and answering the students’ questions.

The course, Race Films: Spike Lee and his Interlocutors, was an examination of Spike Lee’s films from a variety of critical perspectives. The syllabus tried to frame our approach:

“This course requires students to think critically about historical and contemporary cinematic representations of race, class, gender, sexuality, and the urban landscape. The class will examine various Spike Lee films for their aestheticization of broader social and cultural phenomena as well as their engagement with larger theoretical and political concerns. Students will be asked to watch the films closely, placing them in explicit conversation with the concepts and arguments that emerge from assigned readings and classroom discussions. By the end of the semester, students should have a richer understanding of not only Spike Lee’s oeuvre but also of how his filmic offerings are ‘read’ from a variety of analytical and political vantage points—as well as across a wide range of genres and disciplines.”

Tillet and I initially wanted the course to be a seminar or small lecture (12 to 25 students), but there was such interest in the topic that we decided to open it up—to almost 100 undergraduates.

We asked students to read across the humanities and the social sciences, using the work of an eclectic group of scholars (such as Guthrie Ramsey, Laura Mulvey, bell hooks, William Julius Wilson, Wahneema Lubiano, Roland Barthes, Barbara Smith, Michael Eric Dyson, Manning Marable, Oscar Gandy, Mark Anthony Neal, Renee Romano, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Taylor Branck, and Kara Keeling) to provide different contexts and subtexts for our engagements with Spike Lee’s films.

We also asked outside speakers to assist us in unpacking specific themes. For example, Kenneth Shropshire helped us to make sense of Spike Lee’s deployments of professional sports. Marc Lamont Hill unpacked Lee's representations of urban violence. Imani Perry offered a poignant interpretation of Lee's political investments in Southern history. Jason Sokol gave us the critical tools to dissect Lee's rendition of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the 1960s. Gwendolyn Dubois Shaw asked students to look at the controversial debates about art and aesthetics that often serve as a subtle, but important, backdrop for Spike’s films. And Aishah Shahidah Simmons deconstructed Lee's filmic renditions of homosexuality. The entire semester was quite an ambitious intellectual ride.

Spike Lee also happened to released another film this September, Miracle at St. Anna, which was based on a James McBride novel about at a group of Black soldiers trapped in an Italian village during World War 2. (The students are writing their final papers on some aspect of that film.)

But the highlight of the semester had to be Spike Lee spending two hours with the undergraduates this week, answering their questions and responding with a few of his own.

The students pushed him on a lot of themes, including his much-criticized treatment of female sexuality/subjectivity (from Nola Darling in She’s Gotta Have It to Renata in Miracle at St. Anna), his fascination with professional sports (conspicuous in just about every single “Spike Lee Joint” ever made), his spat with Clint Eastwood earlier this year about representations of race in World War 2 films, his portrayal of white ethnic communities, and on and on.

When it was all done, I kept telling Lee how great a job he did. He laughed, and asked me if I thought he was going to be terrible. I didn't, but sometimes celebrities don’t take such events very seriously. Or they get defensive when students ask hard questions, when students do anything but genuflect obsequiously. But Lee didn’t ask for that.

The students challenged him, respectfully, and he tried to answer them without mincing words or dodging potentially controversial issues—and without simply defending himself or his work from “attacks.” The students really appreciated that. And so did their professors. Spike Lee, thank you.

Kanye Sings...

2008-12-06T11:06:00.000-05:00

Kanye West has just released his latest CD, 808s and Heartbreak, an instrumentally pared-down and techno’d-up attempt to voice disillusionment about his recent breakup with his fiancée (several months ago) and the unexpected death of his mother during elective plastic surgery last year.

West if probably best known (especially to folks who aren’t big hip-hop fans) as the celebrity who blasted President Bush during a national telethon because of the government’s slow initial response to Hurricane Katrina. “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people,” he said. The comment caused quite a stir, and even compelled him to lampoon himself on a subsequent episode of Saturday Night Live.

Kanye’s newest offering is an introspective (some might say, solipsistic) attempt to articulate his sense of dissatisfaction with the spiritual/emotional vacuity of commercial success and all its material trappings.

It is also a hip-hop emcee’s attempt to sing and not just rap. That might not seem like such a big deal to people who don’t follow hip-hop music. But it is an incredibly bold move given the internal logics of hip-hop.

Lauryn Hill and and Queen Latifah are examples of hip-hop emcees who move easily between rhyming and singing. But they are exceptions to the rule. They are also women. And hip-hop polices female emcees much differently than their male counterparts.

For hip-hop’s male emcees, singing is a definite no-no. They only ever approach that domain gingerly and self-consciously. Hip-hop singers generally don’t try to rhyme. And hip-hop’s rappers don’t sing -- not sincerely. If anything, they approach that dividing line with a kind of self-parodic anti-virtuosity, a satirical tone immortalized by the likes of 1980s hip-hop pioneer Biz Markie:

There are dozens of male emcees who have deployed this anti-singing trope in their work. Ol’ Dirty Bastard is probably the closest to Biz Markie’s canonized status in that genre, but everyone from 50 Cent to Flava Flav have used it in some of their music. For hip-hop emcees, singing is usually relegated to catchy hooks during a song's chorus -- and sung by other artists. Anything else seems to confound implicit assumptions about how hip-hop masculinity performs itself in public.

There are a few male emcees who have tried to traverse that performative division of labor within hip-hop musical production without tongue-in-cheek inflections -- and without their hip-hop authenticity/reputation taking a public beating, figures such Mos Def, Michael Franti, and K-OS most immediately come to mind.

Kayne West’s latest studio effort attempts to vocalize his hurt and angst. And it does so through singing as much as rhyming. For hip-hop, that is a pretty radical intervention for an emcee to make. Of course, West has always been out there on an idiosyncratic and iconoclastic island all by himself somewhere -- for better or worse. We’ll see how his fans respond to this latest aesthetic mix of bold-faced egotism and would-be genius.

Are We Entitled to ALL Our 'Opinions'?

2008-11-18T16:08:00.002-05:00

Pastor James Manning is a Harlem-based preacher (born and raised in North Carolina) who has become something of a youtube phenomonen this election season. Clips from his controversial sermons describing Barack Obama as “evil” and calling him “a long-legged Mack Daddy” who simply “pimps white women and black women” have gone viral this year, turning him into something of a media sensation. He even got a chance to do the national talk-show circuit, including an extended segment on Fox News that actually found right-winger Sean Hannity genuinely mortified by Manning’s demonizations of Obama (and his dismissals of Obama’s mother and father as “whoring trash”).

As someone who has conducted ethnographic research in Harlem, New York, I can say that Manning is quite recognizable to me as part of a vibrantly counter-cultural “Black Public Sphere” that often uses spiritual and religious narratives to make socio-political arguments about contemporary American life.

I’ve already written about some of his interlocutors on those New York City streets. They constitute an eclectic culture of street-corner debate that includes members of the Nation of Islam, the Five Percent Nation, various versions of Black Hebrewism (Manning’s church also worships on Saturdays), and more Gnostic/obscure forms of socio-spiritual collectivity such as the Nuwaubian Nation of Moors and the Egyptian Church of Karast/Christ. A lot of those groups have curbside vending operations, tabletops where they sell books about their beliefs, CD's, DVD's, artwork, and various health-related items.

I only bring Manning up because I had listened to his homiletic rants during the months leading up to the election, but I only recently got a chance to hear him respond to Obama’s victory. Manning gave an interview on Howard Stern’s radio show this week where he defended his claim that Obama is profoundly “evil” and only pretending to be a Christian. He argued that Obama and Oprah represent the “two beasts” prophesied in the Bible, dismissing Oprah as a “Babylonian Whore.”

When challenged on these contentions, Manning maintained that he really believes what he’s saying in his heart of hearts (which I’m sure he does), and that all people are entitled to their beliefs -- except, evidently, Obama, Oprah, and Jeremiah Wright, the latter also being dismissed as little more than a liar and faux-Christian.

What an interview -- and on so many levels. I am trying to move beyond the desire to simply chalk up all of Manning’s rants to sour grapes and “playa hating.” This isn’t just about someone with a civil-rights era sensibility trying to beat back a young turk, at least one that the Civil Rights veterans didn’t have the power to vet themselves. Ask Newark Mayor Cory Booker about what that looks and feels like.

Ironically, Manning and Jeremiah Wright also share some of the very same religious mentors, including one of the fathers of black liberation theology, James Cone. This could be a “familiarity breeds contempt” issue. Indeed, the aforementioned spiritual groups on Harlem’s sidewalk spaces share some foundational presuppositions, but they usually seem most adamant about loudly highlighting the aspects of their cosmologies and world views that separate them from everyone else out there.

But what was most troubling about Manning’s post-election position was that he wanted to offer up his Obama “beliefs” as similar to any other opinions people might disagree on. The problem is that his evidence is so non-falsifiable. Manning is most concerned with the fact that African-Americans seem to think about Obama as a kind of messianic figure, and he likens Obama to Hitler. But the Harlem preacher seems to ignore the fact that Hitler’s ideology was explicit and clear. Listen to his Nazi speeches and you hear the hate that Hitler turned into social policy. Manning has to read between the lines to find Obama’s evil. He has to claim that the President-Elect is lying—that you can’t actually trust what he’s saying as an indication of what he really believes and represents.

But what do we do with political beliefs that are so unwaveringly anti-empirical. Manning’s evidence is Biblical, and he reads Obama as an instantiation of prophesy. Of course, he isn’t the first person to make that move. But just because you can characterize the defamation of someone else’s character as your “opinion” doesn’t mean that it is as reasonable as other positions we’d label personal opinions. Some things are actually “opinions” (and can be open to dispute). A non-falsifiable theory about another person’s intrinsic (even genetic and pre-ordained) evil and demonic nature is something else entirely, no? Doesn’t it stretch the definition of opinion beyond all usefulness.

An Election Irony

2008-11-18T16:08:00.001-05:00

Obama was supposed to be the racial candidate. He has the Kenyan father. He spent all of those years in an "Afrocentric" Chicago church. He was the student celebrated for being the first "Black" editor of Harvard's Law Review, a first that served to push him onto the national stage even before he finished law school. (The contract for his memoir came as a function of this singular accomplishment at Harvard.)

But McCain lost this election because he was able to turn himself into the racial candidate.

Many analysts have written about the so-called "browning of the America," the relative shrinking of this country's white population as a function of demographic shifts linked to immigration and differential birth rates among racial/ethnic groups.

Obama ran his "post-racial" campaign with full appreciation of how such demographic shifts have also changed the makeup of the electorate. He registered more people of color, and he made sure that they got to the polls. He told them that this was their America, too. Obama was careful not to overemphasize race in his public speeches and media interviews, but his campaign mobilized America's multi-racial realities (in terms of its highly praised "ground game") to catapult the Chicago senator into office.

In contrast, every decision McCain seemed to make this campaign season reflected a profound under-appreciation of America's diverse body politic, a denial of it, or even something bordering on nostalgia for myths about American racial homogeneity.

For instance, he chose a charismatic vice presidential running mate who did nothing to demonstrate any explicit recognition of America's changing ethno-racial composition. She did a fantastic job energizing "the base." But for those who didn't already unequivocally consider themselves to be part of that Republican base, she also gave the (false?) impression that the base was constituted by the intransigent sameness of race, by a euphemized whiteness.

Even the campaign's late-game deployment of "Joe the Plumber" seemed to traffic in the same denials about America's changing demographic makeup. Joe the Plumber was supposed to stand in for average Americans, but he probably just ended up further alienating many of the new black and brown voters who saw his support of McCain (and his discussion of Obama's "socialism") as another attempt to play a white version of "the race card" without explicitly invoking race at all.

This isn't to say that McCain should have pandered to black and brown voters by finding a Mexican version of Joe. But he was silently making a statement (whether he wanted to or not) about his definition of America by trucking Joe out as his quintessential example of the everyday American. It was a definition that came off as decidedly less inclusive and eclectic than Obama's. And that was the beginning of the end for McCain. He relegated himself to being "the white candidate" even as Obama tried to transcend his designation as simply the black one.

Waiting for Chappelle

2008-11-14T22:49:00.000-05:00

D. L. Hughley has gotten a lot of heat for his new CNN comedy show, D. L. Hughley Breaks the News. The show is a combination of zany, over-the-top comedy sketches and humor-filled one-on-one interviews with pundits. The interviews are fine, even funny and provocative at times. But the sketches have really pushed some people’s buttons.

The YouTube excerpt above is from one of the show’s sketches, the one that has received some of the most vehement criticism. Hughley has Donnell Rawlings, a former Chappelle’s Show regular, playing a colorful pimp, Freddie Mac, trying to respond to public scorn about the government’s bailout of his operation. Rawlings can be a funny comedic actor, and I loved him on Dave Chappelle’s now-defunct Comedy Central show. But that’s part of the problem. Scenes like the one above come off as less-funny derivatives of Chappelle’s classic antics. That might not be totally fair, but that’s how the above gets read. Chappelle would have asked Rawlings to don a cap and a cane for a skit just like this one, detractors argue, but it would have been much funnier.

The other problem people have with the show stems from the fact that it is on CNN. (And that might also be part of the reason why the skits can sometimes feel a bit watered down or straightjacketed.) The interviews work well for a venue like CNN, but the skits seemed to “jump the shark” from the show’s premiere broadcast.

I was listening to an irate caller on a local radio talk show as she vented about the CNN program this morning. She flagged the venue -- “a serious news channel” -- quite explicitly as inappropriate, even offensive. If the show was on Comedy Central, where it belongs, there would be little controversy. Comedian David Alan Grier (of In Living Color fame) has a new sketch comedy show on Comedy Central right now, Chocolate News, and it started at about the same time that Hughley’s program began. Grier’s new offering can sometimes feel like a simple rebroadcasting of that earlier cult hit from the 1990s, but some of his show's skits are definitely funny -- and its racy comedy hasn’t caused nearly the backlash that Hughley has stirred.

Social critic Salamishah Tillet has a wonderful new essay on comedy and the 2008 election season (at theroot.com). She longs for the comedic voice of Dave Chappelle to help us find productive ways to laugh about our contemporary political moment. “I can't help but wonder what kind of cathartic laughter Dave Chappelle would have been able to provide for us this year,” she writes. “Imagine what he would have done with Jeremiah Wright or Barack's unannounced visits to the home of white undecided voters in Ohio. It's not that Barack and Michelle aren't funny; it's just that those who have been able to thrive in a predominantly white comedic universe will now have to hire more writers and actors (and hopefully producers and directors) who know how to work with the material that Barack and Michelle will serve up.”

Of course, Hughley is trying to step into that televisual void opened up by Chappelle’s hasty departure from his hit cable show in 2005. Chappelle walked away from the show (and tons of money) because he started to fear that some of his provocative racial humor was possibly reinforcing American racism, not challenging it through parodic excess. Hughley’s new CNN show is operating on that same racial terrain, and he hasn’t quite found the right balance between biting satirical commentary and the threat of a more vapid reinforcement of our worst racial stereotypes.

HBCUs and the White World

2008-11-07T11:32:00.001-05:00

Does graduating from Howard University, one of America's historically black universities, put someone at a racial disadvantage? It is an old question, but some of my students are still asking it. To find an answer, I'd probably have to go back even farther than my college days -- at least back to high school.

I graduated from Brooklyn Tech in the late 1980s. At the time, it was one of New York City's three "specialized" public high schools, and students took a test to get in. Tech was (and still is) one of the largest public schools in the city. During my stint, we had about 5,000 students combined in all four grades -- and a little under 1,000 in my graduating class.

Tech was an engineering/technical school, so most students were supposed to be preparing for jobs in some version of the hard sciences or their more practical occupational offshoots. We even had to choose majors; mine was electrical engineering. I don't know how many students went on to work in fields associated with their chosen majors, but I left Tech hoping never to see another ohm or ampere ever again.

More than any other school I had previously attended, Tech was ethnically and racially diverse. I had friends from all five boroughs and from many different cultural backgrounds: West Indian, Chinese-American, Jewish, Italian-American, Dominican, African-American, you name it. Most of them fit snugly into one of two camps: (i) underachievers like me who were smart but inconsistently invested in their school work and (ii) AP-course-takers poised to translate their straight-A high school record into a spot at any of the most prestigious colleges in the country.

I was also something of an underachiever in high school. I did pretty well, I guess, and even found myself in a couple of "honors" classes during my junior and senior years, but I was also an FM radio disc jockey at the time (91.5's The Jackson Attraction Radio Show), so I was devoting much more energy to that part of my daily life -- my burgeoning (and short-lived) stint as a would-be media celebrity. As a function of that prioritizing, my grades were decent, but they were far from stellar.

When I graduated, Tech boasted something like a 95-percent college placement rate. Some of those folks were going to community colleges. Others were going to Ivy League schools. The two groups were discretely tracked, so there wasn't much substantive contact between them during class time (even if the under- and over-achievers crossed paths a bit more at lunch and after school).

As one of the Tech's many straddlers (middling students poised between those two scholastic tracks), I realized that I received two drastically different responses to my college choice. Some of my friends were excited by the fact that I'd gotten into Howard University, an important historically black university in Washington, D.C. The higher achievers, however, wondered whether I had simply missed the deadlines for better places. They also warned me that attending a black college wouldn't prepare me for life in "the white world." It wasn't a realistic environment for learning, they said. "Plus, D.C. is so dangerous," I can still remember one classmate warning, "you'll get killed down there, man. You must have a death-wish."

It is an old argument, but I know that HBCU undergrads must get some retooled versions of it these days.

I ended up loving Howard, and I learned a ton. When I was there, some of the students joked that Howard purposefully made our everyday lives so incredibly difficult (in big and small ways) only and altruistically to prepare us for the slings and arrows of real-world hardships. We were being funny, but we also imagined that making it through Howard meant that we could take anything the world might throw our way.

Every once in a while, I do think about what kind of weird adjustment it was to go from Howard to Columbia's graduate program in anthropology, from classrooms full of black students (usually taught by black faculty members) to classes where I was sometimes the only black person in the room. Truth be told, I have always been very shy, and I didn't talk much in my classes at Howard. But I definitely felt the added pressure of that proverbial (and implicit) racial ambassadorship.

But when my Penn undergrads ask me if Howard put me at a disadvantage in the real world, I say, definitely not.

I still sometimes marvel at the atypicality of my collegiate experience. I was able to increase my self-confidence as a thinker and writer -- all in a supportive environment that lacked any hint of the kinds of racist rhetorics of assumed intellectual inferiority that sometimes predetermine people's expectations about the lone black student in their midst, expectations those targeted students can sometimes feel the need to actively (and over-actively) counter. Of course, that impulse can boomerang around to become just another factor making it even more difficult to speak freely in mixed racial company. But my years at Brooklyn Tech and Howard gave me powerful counterpoints to some of the experiences I'd have later on (as both a graduate student and a faculty member) in the sometimes scandalously non-diverse world of the academy.

[The video above shows Hazel O'Leary, President of Fisk University, discussing her own school (and the current state of HBCU's) at a recent Congressional hearing.]

Beyonce's Privacy

2008-10-28T22:19:00.001-04:00

I had a long conversation with Essence magazine’s Jeannine Amber last month. She was working on a cover story about Beyonce Knowles, and she wanted to chat a bit about how celebrities negotiate fandom, its commonsensical expectations and its worst excesses.

Clearly, we obsess about celebrity, and we've been doing so for a long time now. But that erstwhile preoccupation has changed its features quite a lot in recent years. Reality TV, for one, has rewired our presumptions about citizens (famous or not) and their rights to privacy. It has also confounded some of our traditional assumptions about access to reality itself.

There are no conventional screenplays in Reality TV, few pre-fabbed lines for actors to memorize and recite. Scenes are supposed to be spontaneous, unscripted, and they are imagined to be all the more “real” as a consequence.

The current proliferation of Reality TV programming (usually chalked up to the bottom line of lowered production costs and credited, in one recent book, to the radio antics of Howard Stern) can be seen as a replacement of actorly virtuosity with purportedly non-acted, unfiltered access to people’s sloppy, vulnerable, and sincerest insides.

These days, acting is considered a kind of faked sincerity, and faking sincerity, no matter how stellar the performance, is hardly enough anymore. We want “the real thing,” not its well-performed simulation: real tears, real anger, real oddity, real sex. The fact that these non-actors on our Reality TV offerings could be faking their own depictions of sincerity is something to be carefully ferreted out -- exposed and expunged. But the normative claim about that difference (between "acting" and "being" on TV) seems beyond dispute. The success of these shows is an outgrowth of their ability to display seemingly untainted sincerity, not a masterful imitation.

It is this unquenchable thirst for “the really real” that drives paparazzi’s flashbulb frenzies. Celebrity is predicated on it, this backstage access, this pretending of transparency.

Of course, most media analysts readily concede that there is little more “real” about Reality TV than conventionally scripted fare, but the genre does reconfigure our beliefs about the kind of access we should have to the rich and famous.

Part of the point of that Essence article, which has just hit newsstands, was to discuss Beyonce’s attempt to maintain a modicum of privacy in an age of Reality TV’d hyper-access. She is known for being pretty cagey about the most basic facts of her personal life, including her marriage to hip-hop mega-star Jay-Z.

Fans can feel a sense of entitlement about being privy to unfettered backstage info on their favorites celebs. The generous way to frame this is to say that we actually grow to care about the superstars we admire. We want to know that they are just real people, like us, folks that we can identify with and understand (not untouchable icons standing above and beyond us). We want to know the tiniest details about these people because we love them. And they should simply be flattered.

The more cynical read would emphasize the point that we sometimes mistakenly believe that celebrities owe us this kind of panoptican-like access. We try to make Beyonces look like the crazy ones when they don’t share all of their most private experiences. But that’s hardly fair. I’m not sure that we, the legion of everyday fans, aren’t really the crazy ones, especially as we’ve cultivated this almost fiendish need to know anything and everything about everybody else’s darkest secrets.

And we’ve even become markedly more prone to indiscriminately divulging our own secrets, too. Youtube can make us all celebrities, at least for a few news cycles, and it allows us to practice what we preach by proffering all of our dirtiest laundry items, appropriate or not, for anyone willing to sift through them.

This very sensibility helps to explain the kind of gossipy access we think we deserve when it comes to politicians’ bedrooms and closed-door familial conflicts. In some ways, we’ve all youtubed ourselves out of real privacy. (And that was before any Patriot Act put a final nail in privacy's coffin.) Given such a backdrop, it actually might be laudable for Beyonce to push back against these societal demands for full disclosure, especially when acceptance can lead one down a slippery slope to Flavor-Flav’d forms of self-parody.

Vamping 'Til November 4th

2008-10-26T21:19:00.001-04:00

A vampire film comes out tomorrow, Let the Right One In, and everybody seems to be talking about it. The award-winning feature is a Swedish offering about a 12-year-old boy, Oskar, the sympathetic victim of some merciless bullying by mean-spirited classmates, who meets and befriends the new girl in town, a goth-looking pre-teen named Eli. And from the trailer, it would appear that Eli is a waif-like, pre-pubescent vampira on the prowl -- both in the playground and beyond its chain-linked fence.

I've always had a fascination with vampires, but I seem to be particularly intrigued with them lately, which (if I wanted to push real hard) might still be chalked up to the election-season zeitgeist. Why wouldn't I have a renewed preoccupation with could-be bloodsuckers who sometimes pretend to be something they’re not, potential threats that we have to invite into our homes (with our votes) before they can do us good or harm? Let the right one in, indeed!

That isn’t just it though. HBO’s new vampiric oblation, True Blood, is not quite The Wire, but it has my vote, so far, for the best new show on television.

Like many of HBO’s cult and popular hits, this one starts with an infectiously macabre theme song, Jace Everett’s “I Wanna Do Bad Things With You.” Unforgettable. I have to diligently police myself from singing its hypnotic chorus in front of my mimic-ready toddler.

The story, based on Charlaine Harris's mystery series, is set in an exotic and everyday Louisiana at a time when vampires have come out of the closet -- trying to “mainstream” themselves into public respectability. They have advocacy groups. Community activists. Their own late-night bars. You name it. They also drink a special synthetic blood beverage that allows them to get their nourishment without feeding on actual mortals. Even if some vampires don't like the concoction's faux-blood taste (and prefer humans anyway), this is still a far cry from Dracula's Transylvania.

The show does have the same unjustified conceit that X-Men made famous, which is part of what (I think) has turned fans off to NBC’s Heroes this season: an absurd plot device that has superpowerful beings somehow cowering from the potentially oppressive powers of the State. Again, this was X-Men’s basic problem, but it was still a suggestive allegory, so you let the narrative off the hook. The first time.

With Heroes and True Blood the device seems pathetically derivative, which gives the audience a little less patience for the thing. True Blood does a better job negotiating this overwrought terrain by demonstrating -- quite early in the season -- just how profoundly vulnerable vampires are to silver. (One of the few popular myths about vampires that the show offers up as accurate. The rest -- crosses, holy water, mirrorless reflections -- were all rumors started by vampires to keep humans off their scent.) Even the smallest amounts of silver effectively render vampires hapless and helpless. So, you might imagine global scientists working away in a bunker somewhere on all manner of techniques for deploying silver projectiles or liquids or gels or nets or whatever just in case they have to drop the hammer down on these undead creatures.

Few people have the same powers on Heroes -- or anything close to the same vulnerabilities. So, they aren't nearly as easy to beat with the shot from, say, a silver-bulleted smoking gun. Some of them can’t even be physically harmed at all. Others run at lightening speed. Still others throw flames or read minds or see the future or control time or create black holes that swallow people up. And the list of amazing abilities goes on and on. In fact, it seemed as though one of the heroes had the best powers of all, which should have made everyone else feel cheated: absorbing other people’s powers by osmosis. They don’t lose their abilities. He just has them, too. So, it looked like he was the one who had drawn the best straw of all. That’s before this week's episode, when his father came back from the dead and sucked all of his powers from him with a single hug. Cold-blooded.

And that is the other big problem with Heroes -- and might be another part of the reason why it has “jumped the shark” for some of its fans. Just as the narrative appears to settle on the ontological realities of its universe, realities that seem otherworldly but organized, the writers have the science-fiction luxury (or laziness) of simply inventing some new and unprecedented thing that completely rewrites their world's macro- and micro-physics in one fell swoop. There's a potential Deus ex Machina in almost ever episode, which can get tiring after a while. I'm still hooked on Heroes myself, and loving this season, but I can see why other viewers might be frustrated.

In Alan Ball’s True Blood, we get the added bonus of not having the allegorical flurries completely displace (and erase) actual discussions/renditions of race-based differences. The allegory doesn’t swallow actuality whole. This is a Louisiana landscape where racial identity and sexual orientation aren’t super-powered out of explicit existence. Ball does some odd things with their inclusion (one part stereotyping-on-steroids, one part deconstructing audiences’ pre-fabbed expectations), but the show forces you to think about fanciful and factual forms of difference and discrimination at one and the same time, which is a powerful way to structure a TV tale about vampires and humans trying to just get along. But then again, it isn’t simply TV. It’s HBO.

New Book on Barack's Journey--and an addendum to my essay in it

2008-10-11T08:52:00.001-04:00

The editors at LIFE Magazine have just published a beautiful new book of intimate photographs depicting Barack Obama's life story, LIFE: The American Journey of Barack Obama (Little, Brown). The book, officially released today, includes a foreword by Senator Edward Kennedy and original essays penned by Melissa Fay Greene, Gay Talese, Charles Johnson, and Brainstorm blogger Regina Barreca, among others.

I also have a piece in the volume, an essay that examines what I call Barack Obama's "racial optimism," and I just want to take a second to provide an alternative ending for it.

The LIFE editors did a great job with my piece (authors can be so sensitive about how they get edited, and that definitely includes me), but they reworked the ending in a way that recasts my final point in a way that changes its political valence a bit. To read the entire essay (and the others), you can pick up the book, but I just wanted to offer up (for what it's worth) the version of my final paragraph that they published in the volume along with the draft of the final paragraph that I submitted.

The published paragraph reads as follows:

"Obama may well believe all that he says, but to some black Americans it sounds as if, to satisfy a white audience, he is 'talking out of both sides of his neck,' as it is colloquially labeled. This skepticism makes honest racial dialogue impossible."

My submitted paragraph (some of which is in the penultimate paragraph of the published version) reads like this:

"There is something healthy and productive about Obama's recalcitrant racial optimism, about the utter audacity of his hope, but it might only make some blacks all the more skeptical about America's contradictory commitments to racial equality. Why else would we celebrate the first black presidential nominee from a major party but demand that he be post-racial? It is the same tension that has haunted race relations since the birth of our republic, and even before. It is colloquially called 'talking out of both sides of your neck,' and it makes honest racial dialogue impossible."

I don't really disagree with the published version, but I do think that it places the onus on black Americans to get over their racial skepticisms before honest racial conversations can begin. What I wanted to argue, however, was that America writ large (not Obama) sometimes engages in forms of double-speak when it comes to race -- and that such conflicted commitments to race fuel the fires of race-based skepticism in the African-American community. My point was that America needs to address its racial doublespeak/doublethink before honest racial conversations can take place, before blacks' racial skepticisms subside. The rewording replaces that emphasis with a critique of black American obstinancy. I might be splitting hairs a bit (and getting into an unproductive version of the chicken-or-egg debate), but I just thought I'd clarify.

I can also say that I have read the other essays in the stunning book, and I learned a great deal about Obama through the authors' provocative interpretations of his meteoric rise.

How NOT to Read a Book

2008-09-08T13:52:00.002-04:00

Let me take a minute to respond to a popular misreading of my new book, Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness. I should probably call it an under-reading, not a misreading, especially since I’ll be talking with my students just this very week about the extent to which readers always co-construct what they read.

Writers lose interpretive control of their cultural productions once those things start circulating, and most authorial attempts to sanction particular interpretations (while disqualifying others) represent the epitome of futility. Readers re-write books in (or against) their own ideological, emotional and political image. But that doesn’t mean that the author won’t have a stake in pushing back against certain glosses.

I just read a short review of my book in the magazine Color Lines. The reviewer, Julianne Ong Hing, tries to argue that I mistakenly privilege a psychological reading of racism over a structural one. However, she then goes on to claim that “by keeping it light” (a euphemism, I think, for not writing the book more polemically), I ignore “the deeper psychological impacts of a lifetime of racial micro-aggressions.” She claims that I emphasize “personal interactions as the crux of the racial impasse plaguing U.S. society in the 21st century.” This is the heart of her critique:

“The realm of personal relationships may be the most accessible for folks to begin to discuss race, but too often the conversation stops at the personal, as it does in this book. Jackson misses the point by equating the frustrations of people of color with those of whites. There are sharp differences between a group that’s imprisoned at disproportionately high rates and one that is not, between a group whose members own the vast majority of the country’s wealth and the groups with the highest poverty rates. Jackson does a disservice to his readers by limiting his analysis to the “he said-she said” between people of color and whites without delving into the structural roots of racism that permeate our daily interactions and our social, political and economic institutions. Even though Jackson acknowledges larger, structural racisms and recognizes the danger of his argument, he nevertheless persists.”

This is a reading of the book’s argument that Hing brought with her to its pages.

Of course, that’s part of why race and racism are such thorny issues. We are all already tangled up in some ideologically sticky webs of our own (and others’) spinning when it comes to this topic. We are on the defensive, overly sensitive to the potential of Trojan-horsed attacks -- or of the other side’s cold-blooded disinterest.

As reviews go, I think Hing's is nicely written (even funny in spots), but it is also predicated on only a partial understanding of what the book actually claims. And I do think that Hing actually took the time to read most of the book, which isn’t always the case. One of the first reviews of Racial Paranoia, published by Kirkus, was far more problematically misleading and inaccurate, and I honestly believe that its author didn’t even bother to read the book. They read the opening section, jumped to the concluding chapter and then jumped even farther to their own conclusions. It was (as I said then) a “wildly irresponsible” review. But I understood why it was even possible. People think they already know everything they need to know about what other people are going to say when it comes to race/racism, so why even bother listening?

As I said, I do believe that Hing read the book, but she had some typical blinders on:

1.
I am not arguing for a “personal” reading of race and racism at the expense of a structural one. As explicit forms of racist rhetoric are suppressed in public discourse (and potentially repressed by certain whites who don’t want to be considered racists), our conversations across racial lines get less and less trustworthy. “De cardio racism,” which I define in the book, stands in for the idea that one of the ways in which African Americans (especially) try to square an egalitarian and explicitly inclusive public discussion about race with the perpetuation of just the kinds of structural inequalities that Hing lists is by mining everyday inter-racial exchanges for subtle expressions of hidden bias, for racial wolves trying to pass themselves off as color-blind sheep.

Hing says that I want to stop at these personal readings. That isn’t true. I just want to maintain that it is unproductive to simply dismiss these readings (between-the-lines of social life) as hypersensitive or ridiculously paranoid, which is how people responded to comedian Dave Chappelle and former congresswoman Cynthia McKinney (just tw examples from the book). I argue that McKinney and Chappelle are responding to structural transformations in America’s racial landscape, and that what detractors pooh-pooh as paranoia might represent an appropriate (if incomplete) response to how “plausibly deniable” and potentially euphemized commitments to racism function today.

That is a controversial claim, I know. And I don’t think that a lot of people want to hear it -- on the left or the right (though for different reasons). But it isn’t about arguing that these “personal” readings (these “paranoid” readings) are some kind of analytical endgame. They represent one starting point for cultivating a new language about race that captures its unprecedented contemporary manifestations. For most of America’s history, racists could be unabashed with their racial venom. Up until the 1960s, for instance, politicians ran on explicitly racist platforms. Championing, say, segregation could help get you elected. Today, any whiff of explicit racism can damage a politician’s career.

2.
Moreover, I don’t just “equate the frustrations of people of color with white people.” I do claim that racial skepticism isn’t just “a black thang.” Whites can also be racially skeptical, racially paranoid, but I am far from arguing that white racial paranoia and black racial paranoia are the same -- or are even equally justifiable. I make those differences clear in the book.

3. Hing says that I develop my argument “without delving into the structural roots of racism that permeate our daily interactions and our social, political and economic institutions.” This is a patently false claim -- so much so that I don’t even know where to begin with a response. My entire book is a refutation of that position. I argue that “the structural roots of racism” are precisely what set the stage for our current post-Civil Rights dilemma. I spend several chapters trying to make that clear. From what Hing’s review emphasizes and omits, I can only imagine that she must have skimmed those chapters too quickly.

Indeed, one thing that I think helps to explain Hing’s reading (and one fair critique of the book that she doesn’t offer) has to do with the fact that it talks about contemporary America, a multiracial America, in decidedly bi-racial terms -- blacks and whites. It is surprising that Hing doesn’t mention that point in her review, but she opens with a discussion about how differently whites get treated in Chinatown restaurants, which seems to implicitly gesture toward that general vicinity. I think that this latter point is the reason why my definition of racism’s “structural roots” doesn’t mesh with hers. It seems that she really wants to ask me to open up the discussion of racism to include other racialized communities, which is a fair point. Race is structured differently in a browning America, in ways that are hardly reducible to the mostly bi-chromatic make-up the Old South. I under-played that hand in the book, but I did so because I wanted to talk about a different “structural” reconfiguration of race relations, a reconfiguration that starts with the profoundly formative history of chattel slavery in the United States and reads subsequent developments (histories of immigration and multiracialization) with that founding premise as starting point.

A reader can take issue with that emphasis. I’m not sure I think it is totally justified -- intellectually or politically. But Hing should have made THAT case—as opposed to criticizing me for not dealing with structural realities. The book is completely about the structural transformations of racism in America, and it mines the micro to explain how macro changes impact even seemingly innocuous interactions across class lines. (This is key, I think, because the mass-mediated stories we hear about race pivot, disproportionately, on how we dispute accusations of racism during exchanges that usually aren’t as explicit as what our collective past produced.)

Of course, I wrote an entire book that tried to explain all this, so these few extra (and hastily penned) paragraphs probably won’t help to clarify things for those who already think they know the two or three alternative tracks that every argument about racism must take. Even still, I couldn’t help myself.

(cross-posted at the Chronicle's Brainstorm blog)

Anthroman Makes Magazine Cover...

2008-09-05T13:08:00.007-04:00

For the article, go to The Pennsylvania Gazette.

Anthroman is a character that I developed as part of my second book, Real Black: Adventures in Racial Sincerity (University of Chicago Press, 2005).

I might talk more about his origin story -- and his connection to other superheroic cultural critics (MadLaw Professor, Brother Story, Fierce Angel, and Professor V) -- in future blog posts.

For now, let me just say that the article connects Anthroman to a different set of academic characters. The piece features fascinating research from several of my colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania: bioethicist Jonathan Moreno, electrical and systems engineer Christopher Murray, criminologist Adrian Raine, medical anthropologist Philippe Bourgois, and molecular anthropologist Sarah Tishkoff.

Postdoc or Tenure-Track Job?

2008-09-05T13:08:00.006-04:00

The semester has begun; I had my first course yesterday. And I am happy to say that I’ve started to reconnect with colleagues this week, including a few that I haven’t seen all summer.

We mostly had the usual conversations about respective summers (and about this unprecedented election season), but I also got into a longer (and more substantive) discussion with a faculty member (in a different field, an important variable) about the relative value of postdoctoral fellowships and tenure-track jobs for new Ph D ‘s.

He advises his students to focus on jobs, not postdocs. He’s skeptical of the entire postdoc thing for several reasons: the way it can be deployed by universities as an almost exploitative cost-cutting measure and at the expense of more secure tenure-track offerings (my fellow Brainstorm blogger, Marc Bousquet, could say more about that), and because it runs the risk of trapping some people out of the job market and into a secondary track of consecutive postdocs and adjunct positions.

I was arguing that a postdoctoral fellowship can actually increase one’s value on the market in subsequent years (which he grudgingly conceded, a little), and that two- or three-year postdocs give people a kind of head-start in the tenure-track rat-race. My dissertation adviser was a proponent of the postdoc (at least as a potentially viable option), and she’s made me one, too.

I was fortunate enough to have a three-year postdoc that allowed me to turn my dissertation into a book, start research on a second project, and even dabble in some orthogonal intellectual interests — and all that before I had to serve on my first thesis committee, teach a single course, or attend monthly faculty meetings.

Even the right one-year post doc (without unreasonable teaching expectations) can get that dissertation housed at a publisher and a little more ready for prime-time.

I thought I’d made a compelling case, but this colleague still walked away skeptical, which made me wonder. Am I overstaing my case? Might it work differently for different fields in the humanities and the social sciences? For different kinds of academics? Are there other factors at play?

(Cross-posted with The Chronicle of Higher Education's Brainstorm Blog)

Do politicans and pundits think we're stupid?

2008-09-03T11:12:00.002-04:00

I’m tired of seeing pundits support their particular political party the way rabid fans root for sports franchises -- or even worse, the way players themselves sometimes engage in such sporting events, with a kind of ruthless amorality. Truth and falsehood don’t matter. Only the bottom line. The win.

This is a mentality that seems to plague many of our athletes, even if the stakes are much lower. Think of those scrappy basketball players who inadvertently knock loose balls out of bounds and instinctively -- misleadingly -- blame nearby opponents for the infraction. Anything to get the ball back. Anything for the victory.

The Democratic and Republican talking points exemplify this same sensibility: victory at all costs, even if the price is the truth, or when it comes at the expense of an even-handed reading of contemporary political debates.

These folks must think we’re stupid.

To hear the Republicans tell it, Sarah Palin has all the “experience” she needs to be vice president, more “executive experience” than Barack Obama, and it is simply partisan politicking to question her readiness -- even in an age defined by global challenges that demand a rigorous handle on world affairs. Does circling the red wagons around a wild-card pick from Alaska (so that your party can "energize the base" and go after disaffected Clinton backers) really mean “Country First”?

According to Democrats, Obama represents “change,” and an African-American president would embody a massive change for America. No doubt. But just because he gives good speech, which is pretty clearly the case, doesn’t mean that Obama’s potential election will necessarily change the way politics work in Washington. If there was anything really damning in that New Yorker issue with the controversial drawing of Michelle and Barack on the cover, it was the article inside, an article that painted Obama as a fairly straightforward political operator who does little more than master the rules of the game so as to play his hand better than everyone else. An Obama presidency is change, especially symbolically, which is important in and of itself, but it probably will translate into far less than the transformational sea change that the Democrats are overconfidently selling.

Of course, deciding the next iteration of the Supreme Court is incredibly serious business. And the two candidates deploy radically different litmus tests for prospective judges. But does the end game of stocking the jury with “liberal” or “conservative” judges justify ramping up partisan spin-doctoring on all the issues of the day? Do we have to insult people’s intelligence with blatant double standards on how we read our candidates plusses and minuses vs. the other party’s ticket: the one with soft shoes, the other with steel-toed boots?

Haven't we had enough of the political double standards that allow us to read our own party's plights generously while treating the other party with ruthlessly self-interested stinginess?

We've turned American society into a collegiate forensics society where we all argue for the side of the debate we've been deputized to offer -- regardless of what truth and fairness might actually entail.

Does the political end justify the rhetorical means, even if the latter include too-easily institutionalized attempts to trick voters into giving your team the electoral ball even when you know you’ve done something -- maybe inadvertently -- that you would never allow your opponents to get away with? Is there any possible way to reverse our longstanding ability to trap our Constitution into the straightjacket of hyperpartisan politics? This is a fervent partisanship that our founding document isn’t necessarily equipped to mitigate -- or even address.

(Cross-posted with the Chonicle of Higher Education"s Brainstorm Blog)