Shame On You, Joyce Joyce!

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

"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!

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

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

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

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

"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.