Obama to Nominate Sotomayor

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

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

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

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...

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

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

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?