Graduating While Black...

The graduation season has come and gone, a time of helium-filled balloons, celebratory brunches with extended family, bittersweet stock-taking of one’s student career, and the soupy mixture of fear and excitement about what unknown life chapters have yet to be written. For all students, but especially the ones earning advanced degrees, this yet-to-unfurl future means radically different things depending on whether or not there is a job option waiting on the other side of the ceremony.

One newly minted Ph.D., someone who should have been excited about her upcoming post at a liberal arts college, was busy pondering a colleague’s recent effort to place a purloined asterisk next to her procurement of that lucrative position.

The colleague, who was also a friend of hers, matter-of-factly stated, without any obvious displays of animus or contempt, that that aforementioned Ph.D. had only landed such an amazing job because of race, because she was African-American.

The argument is pretty straightforward. There are so few African-Americans getting doctoral degrees that the ones who do make it through the process have a relatively easy slide into the ranks of the professoriate.

First of all, this wasn’t the first student of color who admitted to such a seemingly dismissive response to her success from colleagues, and usually these responses are laced with a heavy dose of outward hostility. I remember finishing up at Columbia and having one of my peers, another graduate student in the department, finger-wavingly make the same point about my job prospects. I didn’t have a tenure-track job offer yet. I was headed to a postdoc instead. But the point was clear: My road would be paved with rose petals, because there are so few blacks in anthropology. The implication seemed to be that a grave injustice was being committed — and at this other student’s expense. Not quite reverse racism, but close to it.

Is that the end of the story? Really? Is that all the analytical work that need be done to explain how race operates in the academy today? I hardly think so.

On its face, this argument always struck me as peculiar, and decidedly self-serving, even as it also seemed undeniable, at least as one corner of a much larger political canvas. But most of the people who demonstrate recognition or melancholic resignation about the fact that students of color differently negotiate the academic job market always seem to stop just short of spending much time voicing the same amount of concern and righteous indignation about how few students of color are even admitted to prestigious doctoral programs in the first place — or ever end up teaching in tenure-track posts at American universities.

Can one really have it both ways? Flagging what seems to be but one of the many examples of how race informs people’s academic-job prospects while failing to link the job market’s racial dynamics to a larger story (bigger than just “supply and demand”) about the entrenched mechanisms by which past racial imbalances are effortlessly (and even unintentionally) re-animated?

(originally published as part of Brainstorm Blog for the Chronicle Review).

Howard Stern on Race

(from my chronicle brainstorm blog)

I can honestly say that I’ve just about given up on Broadcast radio. Well, not quite. I still (admittedly) feel as though my morning hasn’t quite started off on the right note until I happen to catch one of Tavis Smiley’s Southern-fried segments on Tom Joyner’s syndicated morning show. (I never quite remember when he’s supposed to be on). And I continue to listen to NPR at least a few times a week. I’m a big fan of several NPR shows, including the one offered up by our own Philly-based station, “Radio Times with Marty Moss-Coane.” And I make sure to check AM Radio from time to time, for the same reason that I regularly catch O-Reilly’s nightly spin on the day’s events — with all of its ideological histrionics and overdeterminism. But I am completely addicted to satellite radio.

For one thing, nothing beats commercial free music, which one of the two major satellite companies still provides. But there is something else I appreciate about satellite radio, something more compelling to me as a person interested in how people talk about race/racism today. And that compelling thing cuts both ways, positively and negatively: Subscription/pay/satellite radio may be the only space left in America where the fearless and the feckless can hear honest and ongoing discussions about race and racism — without much of the funhouse mirror racial excessiveness that the anonymity of the Internet helps to cultivate (though such over-the-top cyber-racialism is also a pretty good indication of just how much racial animus still animates people’s hearts).

If we want a productive conversation about race/racism in America, which only some of us do, it won’t be enough to cling to the safety net of intellectual arguments about race’s social constructedness. It will take more than a disgruntled pundit’s disingenuous parsing of other people’s grammar and word choice. And we certainly can’t imagine that it won’t get heated. Any dialogue on race worth having will consist of anger and tears, raised voices and the gnashing of teeth. It will probably entail some lightheadedness and hyperventilating, too. Such emotion-laden responses have to be part of the debate (in fact, already are), even, and especially, if we’d rather hide behind the protective cover of reasoned analysis, the pretending of political disinterest and colorblind postracialism.

Satellite radio is one of the few places where the discussions of race have some of that requisite affect, bluntness, and bite. Sure, HBO has the candor of Bill Maher (that is, unless his anti-religion commentary during the Pope’s recent U.S. visit gets him canned — again). But that is only one hour a week of gloves-off debating about race, religion, politics, and everything else under the sun. You might not agree with Maher on everything, but you’ll get a quick fix of real, heart-felt conversation — not just public niceties and bourgeois platitudes tailor-made for repressing the most complicated and troubling aspects of hot-button issues, sanitizing them good and clean for public consumption. But if you want more sustained and ongoing frankness (over 30 hours worth most weeks), nothing beats Sirius Satellite Radio and its biggest employee, Howard Stern.

There is at least one candid and ongoing public discussion about race in America today, and Howard Stern is moderating it. The characters in his broadcast stable break every single taboo in the book, trafficking in the most politically incorrect language you’ll find anywhere. He’s crafted an eclectic space where his motley staff feels safe divulging even their most perverse and narrow-minded predilections. But there is also enough space left over for other members of the crew to call people out on those same rhetorical gestures.

As a listener, you get the daily racist or sexist or homophobic screed followed by the flatfootedly genuine (or sometimes quite thoughtful) attempt at challenging it — even as the original perpetrators either dig in theirs heels or concede their own unreconstructed insensitivities. Again, this isn’t just for one or two hours a week — or even a day. Stern has set up a kind of 24-hour window into how seemingly sympathetic and ordinary folks can harbor some of the most insensitive and offensive beliefs, but he does this without demonizing them and ejecting them from the conversation altogether. There is still a bit of self-consciousness about race on the show, but without nearly the preciousness we get in most of our pop-cultural fare.

And part of the beauty of it actually stems from the fact that Stern hardly obsesses about race in some single-minded way. This isn’t a radio program “about” race. The issue just emerges, seemingly in a flash and almost out of nowhere. Listeners of color get a small glimpse into how you imagine white people talk about race and racism when non-whites aren’t in the proverbial room. What you hear isn’t pretty, even if it is still sometimes quite hilarious — and at the expense of those perpetuating the stereotypes as well as their intended victims.

If nothing else, the FCC absolutely must sign off on this Sirius and XM merger, which really shouldn’t be taking so long, anyway. America can’t afford to lose this small demonstration of honest race-based discourse — warts, idiocy, curse words and all. Honesty isn’t all we need to organize any conversations we have about race, but it is definitely an important prerequisite.

this weekend's broadcast on the Racial Paranoia book event...

Click here to check out the C-Span video from this weekend.

It aired on Saturday and Sunday.

I'll be talking about my new book, Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness, for an hour on C-Span 2’s BookTV this weekend. The segment is supposed to air on Saturday at 9pm and Sunday at 3:30pm. If you have time, check it out--and spread the word. Thanks.

Summer Reading...

Like every other academic, I have quite a lot of writing to get done this summer, but I do have a few books I want to make sure to read before September:

1. Richard Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post-Civil Rights Era
I've been waiting for this one for a while, and I know it will be useful for my own work. Iton's insights always are.

2. David Edwards, ARTSCIENCE: Creativity in the post-Google Generation
How can I be a PIK Professor at Penn and not get excited about this book.

3. Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War
I am trying to finish a piece on a Black sex magician who was in full swing at about this time. Plus, I just read Mothers of Invention and was completely blown away by its rigor.

4. David Levering Lewis, God's Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215
He has to be considered something like the scholarly gold standard at this point.

5. Noah Feldman, The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State
I am already 50+ pages into it. A razor-sharp intellect who makes things all look far too easy.

6. Anita L. Allen, The New Ethics: A Guided Tour of the Twenty-First Century Moral Landscape
I saw a review of it that has me totally intrigued.

7. James Baldwin, No Name in The Street
I want to make it through all of Jimmy B by the end of the decade. Just four more to go.

8. Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons and an Unlikely Road
Everybody I know seems to be talking about this one.

9. Chuck Klosterman IV, A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas
I like his writerly voice whenever I catch it in Esquire or GQ or something.

10.Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
I read up to chapter 10 when it first dropped and then got swamped.

11. William Jelani Cobb, The Devil & Dave Chappelle & Other Essays
His cultural critiques always seem to turn the analytical screw one more rotation than almost anybody else.

Just my list. Let me know if you know of something I should add--and why.

Talking Ethnography (even briefly)

(By John L. Jackson, Jr. First posted for The Chronicle Review's Brainstorm Blog on May 16, 2008)

The term “ethnography” describes a literary genre (writings that attempt to capture people’s cultural beliefs and practices) as well as a qualitative research methodology (a way of collecting social scientific data based on long-term, face-to-face interactions). But we are living in a hyperscientific moment now, a time when ethnographic analysis seems to have lost some of its authority, especially since human genomics and the statistical analysis of massive datasets are privileged as holy grails in the search for contemporary solutions to social problems. Ethnography is still alive and well. It just ends up packaged for the public in ways that look vastly different from how other social sciences get framed.

Anthropology and sociology are the two academic disciplines that traditionally cornered the market on ethnographic research, but other social sciences have become more interested in the kinds of nuanced information that gets gathered during intimate and ongoing interactions between qualitative researchers and their research subjects, interactions euphemized as “deep hanging out.” Ethnographers spend time drinking beers with the folks they study, eating meals at their dinner tables, and shadowing them on the job — all in an effort to figure out what people’s everyday lives actually look like and to determine how people make sense of those lives.

When they first start conducting research in a particular community, ethnographers stand out like sore thumbs, drawing attention to themselves and making their research subjects decidedly self-conscious, which means that they run the risk of witnessing things that probably wouldn’t have taken place at all without the conspicuous seductions of an outside audience. But as ethnographers spend more and more time observing and participating in the same community, among the same community members, they eventually begin to lose some of their distracting influence on people’s behaviors. They transform into proverbial “flies on the wall,” at least that’s what we tell our graduate students. The ethnographer is still there, asking questions and watching people’s daily reactions, but they are hardly noticed any more, eventually, not in ways that might compromise the reliability of what they see or hear.

Ethnography’s value is based on the kinds of intimate and unguarded data that researchers gain from extended contact with one particular social group. When the discipline first emerged, this meant relatively small-scale and remote societies. “Father of ethnography” Bronislaw Malinowski’s early 20th century work with Trobrianders is taken as a powerful marker for the birth of full-fledged ethnographic research within anthropology. He crossed the seas, pitched his lonely tent, and found a way to live among people whose cultural world seemed radically different from his own. Part of the point, of course, was about making it clear to the European audience back home that those foreign practices could be understood only with the fullest knowledge of how people’s entire belief systems fit together — even and especially when those cultural systems seemed spectacularly exotic to the Western eye.

Anthropology was traditionally about studying societies unsullied by the advances of modernity. From the romantic attempts at “salvage ethnography” among Native American tribes in the early 19th century (archiving cultural practices before they disappeared forever) to the constructions of primitive societies as examples of the modern Western world’s hypothetical pasts, anthropologists used ethnographic methods to study those populations most removed from the taint of modern living.

Sociologists also embraced ethnographic methods in the early 20th century, and people like Robert Park at the University of Chicago helped to institutionalize “the ethnographic imagination” as a method for studying not just faraway villages but modern urban life in a teeming American city. That dividing line (between the anthropological ethnographer who studies some distant community and the sociological ethnographer who focuses her eyes on the modern Western metropolis) still defines most people’s assumptions about how those two fields carve up the social landscape for qualitative examination (even though there are certainly sociologists who study small-scale societies and anthropologists who have been working in urban America for a very long time).

One thing that both fields seem to emphasize and value amounts to a premium placed on the scientific equivalent of roughing it. They each have the highest regard for the “gonzo” ethnographer, the kind of heroic or mythical figure willing to put his very life at risk for the sake of ethnographic access. The more remote, removed, and potentially dangerous the location of the fieldwork experience, the more explicit and awestruck are the kudos offered up to any ethnographer bold enough to go where few have gone before. This search for dangerous exoticism can lead you halfway around the world, or just to the other side of the tracks, the other end of town. But in either case, an added value is placed on access to the everyday lives of human beings and cultural perspectives that most middle-class Western readers know little about.

During the 1960s, anthropologists and sociologists in the United States wrote classic ethnographic offerings on the urban poor — specifically, the Black poor — who were struggling to make ends meet in America’s ghettos. Ethnographers were trying to explain the hidden realities of urban poverty, a tradition that continues today. Anthropologists and sociologists working in American cities still disproportionately study poor minority communities. That’s because it is harder to sweeten the deal enough for wealthier Americans to accept such scholarly intrusions. A crisp $20 bill might suffice as incentive for an unemployed urbanite to answer some open-ended questions about her life history, but it is hardly enough to compel more decidedly middle-class citizens into exposing their raw lives to an ethnographic gaze. Middle-class and wealthier Americans also sometimes live in actual gated communities or attend the kinds of restricted social clubs that can keep prying anthropological eyes at bay.

Of course, most ethnographers will tell you that any valuable ethnographic work must be based on respect for the people researched, and that the most powerful studies of the poor decidedly humanize them, fending off insensitive attempts at reducing poverty to the cold numerical instances of this or that pathology. These ethnographic researchers carry a double burden, however. Besides making sense of people’s daily lives and future life chances, they are also asked to continue impressing readers with their fearlessness, with their courageous forays into the heart of darkness, offering first-hand “thick descriptions” of poor and dilapidated minority communities, the kinds of places that terrorize mainstream America’s imagination. And that is part of the trap. This formula usually means that even as urban ethnographers try to challenge middle-class cultural chauvinism, arguing that ostensible “cultures of poverty” are sometimes little different from more mainstream cultural groups, they are also asked to justify the value of their work by claiming to provide access to otherwise inaccessible locations.

This is exactly what the authority of some memoirs (about former gangbangers or drug dealers or welfare queens) traffic in: proffering the learned public first-person renditions of the kinds of social existence that they have never experienced — and would not want to. But, unlike the memoirist, a social scientist is supposed to be objective, politically and personally disinterested, and so it is supposed to help the case for scientific legitimacy that you are not conducting research in your own backyard. You have no axe to grind, no biases linked to prior investments in that community.

In some of our most recent and highly popular versions of ethnographic research, we have suburbanites from southern California studying gangs in Chicago (Sudhir Venkatesh conducting research on the south side), middle-class journalists working side-by-side with low-wage service-sector employees (Barbara Ehrenreich modeling her undercover reporting on something akin to what George Orwell attempted in Paris), and white researchers studying the ins and outs of Latino drug culture (Phillipe Bourgeois moving his family into one of the most crack-infested parts of Spanish Harlem). These authors are examples of careful and holistic ethnographic research that is both rigorous and politically committed. The problem has to do with the way we sometimes read them, how we unconsciously tap into the expectation that what makes ethnographies valuable is not the scientific rigor and meticulousness that all three of these ethnographers (and so many more) duly demonstrate, but instead any ethnography’s singular ability to take us into what we still imagine as that “heart of darkness,” whether the jungles of the Congo or the sidewalks of South Central Los Angeles.

It isn’t enough for ethnographers to study the world. For anyone to care nowadays, they have to titillate us, too. Give us a window into “the other” that will blow our minds. To accept this double-standard is to enter into a Faustian pact with a sensationalist contemporary ethos that demeans the true significance of careful, honest listening as a powerful methodological tool for social analysis when chronicling the experiences of nerdy video gamers as much as the most violent of gang members. Ethnography works in either case, even if only the latter fully satisfies our collective predilections for sensationalist storytelling. Number crunchers are asked to stick to the facts. If ethnographers want anyone else to care, it seems that they had better shock us with them.

The Racial Impasse...

From The Chronicle Review's Brainstorm Blog
May 16, 2008

The Racial Impasse
By John L. Jackson, Jr.

I remember speaking to an auditorium full of 7th and 8th graders at a junior high school in Central Florida a couple of years ago. I was attempting to explain to them just what anthropologists do for a living, and I was having the hardest time.

I’d been brought down to lecture at a local university only a few miles away, and the person who invited me, a minister and activist in the community, wanted to make sure that I got a chance to learn about the local area, especially from residents of the all-black town a stone’s throw from campus. I’m used to speaking to academic audiences about my work (undergraduates, graduate students, and colleagues), but addressing an auditorium full of pre-teens and teens was a major challenge.

I decided to start off with an invocation of Indiana Jones, which felt a little bit like cheating (or just pandering), but I thought that they’d at least have heard of the pop-culture icon. Of course, that might have already been a bad jumping-off point, since some of the kids weren’t even born when the third installment of the motion-picture franchise was released — and there wasn’t buzz in the air yet about Harrison Ford and Steven Spielberg gearing up for this summer’s fourth installment. Even so, they seemed to listen, probably because any “special assembly” in the auditorium probably beats class-as-usual for most teenagers.

I wanted to give them their money’s worth and to make sure that they didn’t feel like I was speaking above their heads. I bounced around the stage like a prize fighter, making eye contact with kids, telling the worst jokes you could imagine, even singing a bar or two from some popular songs to help punctuate points — just hoping that my physical energy and inadequate grasp of contemporary teen culture might translate into something exciting and engaging to a few of them.

I then moved from a discussion about all of anthropology (in about five minutes) to a longer description of my work, ethnographic research on race and class in America. I asked them what they knew about “race” and how they’d define it. Some students defined it as “what you look like” or “people that look the same.” Others blurted out that it had to do with “your family being related to other families from before.” Still other kids declared that it had to do with “blood and stuff.” But the talk of “blood” was met with a series of hoots, with vocal objections and dismissals.

“It isn’t blood,” one girl said. “We all have the same blood.” Her friend, a chubby-cheeked young boy, nodded his head in agreement. Several rows behind them, another student added, “race is just made up.” Many of the students shook their heads to second that conclusion, even as some of those same students seemed unconvinced of their own position, scrunching their eyebrows quizzically and pursing their lips in disbelief at their own arguments about how race should be defined.

Most students, even junior high school students, have gotten the memo about “race” not being simplistically biological. They know to say that race is at least partially about culture, not just biology, even if they can’t necessarily marshal the specific evidence scholars use to challenge assumptions about race’s biological grounding. To say that race is “cultural” is usually to say that it doesn’t have the inflexible imprimatur of nature behind it. But the stamp of culture can feel just as
intractable.

There are at least two racial camps in the academy right now. One consists of biologists, geneticists, sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, and medical doctors who declare that “race” is not biologically based at all — and never has been. These are the social and cultural constructionists. They say that race is hardly reducible to biology. It is about power and exploitation, a way we fool ourselves into thinking there are natural justifications for the kinds of inequalities that plague us.

There is another group of biologists, geneticists, sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, and medical doctors who dispute that claim. They think that there is a kind of academic conspiracy afoot to pretend that race isn’t real when it is — a move to treat the biology of race as a taboo subject, too politically sensitive to analyze. Instead of taking it seriously, they say, the folks in the former camp use dogma and charges of racism to keep contrary scientists (still interested in thinking about the physical realities of race) in line.

Each camp sets the other one up as being more powerful — and dangerous. They make accusations about one another’s intentions and morality. And they both imagine the other to be a serious problem to the future of scholarship.

There is even a growing third category of scholars, mostly nonscientists, who argue that race isn’t real (the first group is right) but that even the people in that camp use race in ways that are similar to their rivals. In one of its strongest versions, scholars claim that the “culture” of cultural constructionism is really just a smoke-and-mirror trick that allows academics to have their racial cake and eat it, too — by just renaming that race “culture.” (Literary critic Walter Benn Michaels has made this claim most forcefully.)

Race’s complicated relationship to reality (real vs. unreal, there vs. not there) is exactly what has everyone so preoccupied. Of course, just as those junior high school kids in Florida could imagine that race is and isn’t biological at the same time, a little of both and a little of neither, racial experts are caught in the same quicksand — of accusation and innuendo, of charges and countercharges. Race is a social construction, but it is also more than that, and this complicated, contradictory notion of race is exactly what makes racism so tenacious, perched right atop the electrified fence between those racial camps.