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

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

A summer youth program in Philadelphia provides the context.

Young people take the time to articulate their understanding of what violence has wrought on their lives and in their local communities. It is riveting — and even heart-wrenching at times. And definitely worth a look.

The film isn’t glossy. There aren’t any fancy, high-end special effects. But the piece’s unpretentious storytelling style allows us to see and hear things that might otherwise get lost in the gloss.

The six minutes of images and sounds don’t constitute the “final cut” of a documentary film. The filmmaker is still trying to structure her narrative. And this piece is just a “trailer” for that soon-to-be completed film. But it does provide a powerful sense of how teens (in this case, mostly Latino youth who live in an urban neighborhood) characterize the violence they have to negotiate in their everyday ...

One reader posted the following comment after my last blog entry:

Dear Professor Jackson,

I wonder if you would be willing to create a secondary post wherein you rephrase and unpack this one. I’m sorry to be obtuse. I would like to understand this issue but I don’t have the Foucaultian and critical-race-theory chops to connect the themes you’ve presented here. If not, thanks anyway, and I leave the discussion to your more learned readers.

Sincerely,

Anthony

In an effort to take Anthony’s suggestion seriously, let me just quickly try to respond, especially since there may be other non-Foucaultians out there with similar requests.

Here’s the original:

“Power is more complicated than imagined by simplistic and unidirectional formulations of oppression that traffic in fantastical worlds of self-evident good guys and irredeemable villians. Have you not read Foucault?...

Just this week, two graduate students (from two different disciplines and universities) expressed similar frustrations to me (unbeknownst to one another) about the ways in which some of their respective grad-student colleagues dismissed their understandings of contemporary racism.

The argument they both claim to be hearing goes like this:

“Power is more complicated than imagined by simplistic and unidirectional formulations of oppression that traffic in fantastical worlds of self-evident good guys and irredeemable villians. Have you not read Foucault? Don’t you get it?

“Power is circulatory and dialectial. It is actually constitutive of those very resistive efforts that imagine themselves in sharp and absolute contradistinction to the hegemonic workings of the powerful. Power is complicit with its own resistance. And the structure of the dance they do together is capillary...

Forbes Magazine just released its list of the 10 most miserable cities in America. Of course, most people are pretty skeptical about the subjective nature of such “top 10” offerings. You don’t have to be David Letterman to appreciate the laughable artificialities of any such list. But still, most of us can’t help but check out the picks — for corroborations of our preconceived impressions on the matter, or assaults on our assumptions.

The list of miserable cities runs the gamut, from big to small, from would-be Olympics contender Chicago to car-theft capital Modesto, California.

Chicago is attacked on several fronts. “Lousy weather, long commutes, rising unemployment, and the highest sales tax rate in the country are to blame for the Windy City being near the top of our list,” the editors write....

1) I was planning to write a short update on the film Push: Based on a Novel by Sapphire, which I discussed in a previous post, because I recently found out that Lionsgate has announced plans to distribute the film in North America — with Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry signed on to help promote it. But there seems to be a snag. A major one.

The Weinstein Company has sued over Breach of Contract alleging that they already had a verbal agreement from Lee Daniels and the producers of the film that granted them the right to distribute it. So, now the courts are going to have to figure this one out.

The first time I read this latest development with the controversial, Sundance-winning film, I thought of the old art imitates life imitates art discussion. That’s because I remember a recent episode of the HBO show Entourage that pivoted on a similar dispute. The filmmakers had verbally...

I just finished reading Amy Leal’s Chronicle piece on spirit photography, “Bringing Out the Dead,” and it was quite evocative. Leal makes it clear that photography has always negotiated an interesting tension between strict indexicality (as a semiotician might put it) and spectacular artifice.

Leal invokes theorist Roland Barthes and his contention that there is a “terrible thing which is there in every photograph: the return of the dead.” Barthes offered up one of the most mystical musings on photography’s power — even as he further canonized the medium’s claim to self-evidential and transparent “proof,” authenticating “what was there” over and against mere “representation.”

Barthes famously distinguishes between the studium (what a photo “objectively” reflects about any conspicuous social/cultural landscape) and the more romantic and subjective (and privileged) punctum,...

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 ...

Even many people who aren’t football fans sometimes find themselves excitedly gearing up for the string of oddball and massively expensive commercials unveiled during the Super Bowl broadcast. Of course, with the economy in a tailspin, some of that same game’s potential advertisers have been shedding jobs like crazy in an attempt to cut costs during this global recession.

Seattle was once thought recession-proof. But that has been proven wrong.

Retail chains (from Starbucks to Home Depot) are closing stores and/or announcing significant profit shortfalls.

Even still, NBC is requesting more money than ever for ad time during Sunday’s big game between Arizona and Pittsburgh. According to one Reuters report, a 30-second spot during this year’s contest will cost about $3-million. (Last year’s game, which my New York Giants won in storybook fashion, cost about $2.7-million per...

I’ve just started following the current high-school grading controversy in Fairfax County, Virginia. The video above highlights one high school student’s very public statement about the extent to which she feels unfairly penalized as a function of Fairfax’s grading policy (i.e., not accepted to her college of choice).

If I’m getting this right, Fairfax uses a six-point grading scale, which starts at a 64 (as the lowest possible “passing” grade) and culminates in an “A” at 94 or better. A 93 translates into a B-plus.

The student in the YouTube video above complains that colleges do not take this idiosyncratically weighted grading system into account when they assess Fairfax County students’ applications. Instead, she says, what might otherwise be an A or A-minus from another school system looks like a much less impressive accomplishment for her and her classmates, especially when...