The Man of Steele?

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

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

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

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?

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

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...

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.