One of the big news stories in Philadelphia this week has to do with the fallout from a series of controversial exchanges between a city councilman’s aide and a local broadcast journalist.

The controversy pivots on the fact that the aide, a black woman, held up a handwritten sign during a council meeting accusing the journalist and his station, Fox29, of racism. One of the makeshift signs read “Jeff Cole KKK.” Cole is the journalist in question, and he’d been targeting the aide, Latrice Bryant, as part of an ongoing probe into allegedly falsified time sheets at City Hall.

If you don’t know about the story, Fox29’s version of things (above) includes videotape of the two hastily made signs (ostensibly flashed to shame the cameraman into turning off the camera) and of Bryant’s boss, Councilman Wilson Goode, Jr., chiding Cole by telling him, “don’t you ever disrespect a black woman ...

1. Ragini Srinivasan, managing editor of India Currents, has crafted a powerful response to common deployments of too-narrow definitions of American identity. Here’s an excerpt from her opendemocracy.net op-ed:

“I am an American who has grown increasingly disenchanted with ‘the American story.’ Everyone seems to have one. As evidenced by the biography-laden speeches at the Republican National Convention, John McCain and Sarah Palin are running an entire campaign on the promise of the power of personal narrative: McCain’s tenure as a POW; Palin’s ‘hockey-mom’ origins and moose-hunting proclivities; and, of course, their opponent’s supposedly inferior narrative, his insufficiently American, American story.

“The Republican candidates’ crass deployment of identity politics is depressing; their attempt to lay claim to “true American patriotism” unsurprising at best. But we mustn’t forget...

This past Friday, theatlantic.com’s Andrew Sullivan and award-winning journalist Naomi Klein debated the ultimate cause of our current economic meltdown on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher. Klein argued that America has become the newest victim of a hard-lined and ideologically bankrupt kind of exploitative capitalism that seeks out (even purposefully creates) economic disasters as a pretext for saddling those still-wobbly countries with extreme forms of privatization and free marketism that wouldn’t “sell” during better times. She blamed this “disaster capitalism” (the subject of her latest book) for our current economic crisis. It is a function, she said, of unchecked and unregulated corporate greed let loose by a philosophy of financial fundamentalism. Ordinary Americans, Klein claimed, have become the latest victims of disaster capitalism’s devastating mandates.

Andrew Sullivan...

What impact will race/racism have on the Presidential election — and its outcome?

That seems to be the $64,000 question these days. And the answer is, simply put, we don’t know. Pollsters aren’t confident they can poll for it, and nobody is sure if the hundreds of thousands of new voters make that issue more or less “academic.”

There are clearly Americans who will use race as part of the justification (at least to themselves and in non-mixed social company) for voting the way they do this November, but nobody knows how to confidently quantify the tiny segment of the electorate that will allow race to be THE deciding factor for them — or even just one of several key variables they privilege.

There is a new poll out today that seems to add more fuel to this fire about the potential political significance of race/racism — and of racially divergent perceptions of race/racism in ...

Who are these undecideds? And what are they waiting for, anyway? Why are they still deciding?

At this point, are we just talking about a personality trait, one specific example of a more general indecisiveness? Are these the kinds of folks who have a hard time choosing anything, picking between all kinds of alternatives, no matter how different those options might be?

Is there really any good reason why some Americans haven’t made up their minds yet?

I just read a report this morning that Colin Powell is still not sure which candidate will get his vote. He is waiting for the debates. Fair enough, I guess. We have a series of head-to-head events that should give us even more data to work with, but do people really imagine that they don’t have enough already?

Of course, Powell knows that his particular choice, if made public, could be wielded by the media (and even his chosen...

If the presidential race has truly become a “culture war” (a claim that many pundits have been making since Sarah Palin’s emergence on the national scene), why not ask an anthropologist to weigh in, especially since that academic field (particularly in its American incarnation) was partially responsible for the definition of “culture” that now gets deployed in such talk? This is the notion of culture as a total way of life, as the everyday practices and unexamined beliefs that grease the wheels for commonsensical knowing.

If culture is “second nature,” the anthropologist is supposed to be a kind of second-order naturalist exposing all the many silent and profoundly powerful ways in which culture can pass itself off as biologically given.

But in this contemporary discussion of “culture wars,” anthropologists tend to have little real role to play. In the era of Franz Boas and...

Barack Obama went up to Harlem this week and lunched with former President Bill Clinton, their first meeting since the Democratic National Convention. But even as Obama seems to be focused on trying to win (or win back) certain white voters, the media have started to focus on African-American anxiety about the possibility of a McCain victory.

The Wall Street Journal ran an article today about how African-Americans might interpret an Obama defeat—as an example of continuing American racism, as a justification for violent outrage, as another reason to opt out of the political process.

I’m not a gambler, and I won’t even pretend that I can see where this wild election ride will end, but one thing seems clear. Unless there is another major plot twist between now and November 4th, McCain-Palin will win this election.

Obviously, even before the energy that Palin brought to the...

As a native New Yorker, remembering September 11th always stops me in my tracks.

Completely.

I’m transported back to that dark and murky morning, riding a Greyhound bus (or was it Peter Pan?) from New York City to Cambridge, Mass. I’m listening to a copy of Jay-Z’s new CD, The Blueprint. It was supposed to go on sale that morning, but I had gotten it the day before—thanks to a Manhattan-based mom-and-pop record shop that was known to sell copies of new music the night before their official release dates.

I had just spent a few days in New York, and I was headed back up to my temporary home across the street from Harvard’s Law School.

More than midway through the trip, a passenger in the front of the bus made a fairly nonchalant announcement about a plane flying into the Twin Towers. Most people shook their heads and kept sleeping—imagining, maybe, a small plane and a...

Let me take a minute to respond to a popular misreading of my new book, Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness. I should probably call it an under-reading, not a misreading, especially since I’ll be talking with my students just this very week about the extent to which readers always co-construct what they read.

Writers lose interpretive control of their cultural productions once those things start circulating, and most authorial attempts to sanction particular interpretations (while disqualifying others) represent the epitome of futility. Readers re-write books in (or against) their own ideological, emotional and political image. But that doesn’t mean that the author won’t have a stake in pushing back against certain glosses.

I just read a short review of my book in the magazine Color Lines. The reviewer, Julianne Ong Hing, tries to argue that I...

For the article, go to The Pennsylvania Gazette.

Anthroman is a character that I developed as part of my second book, Real Black: Adventures in Racial Sincerity (University of Chicago Press, 2005).

I might talk more about his origin story — and his connection to other superheroic cultural critics (MadLaw Professor, Brother Story, Fierce Angel, and Professor V) — in future blog posts.

For now, let me just say that the article connects Anthroman to a different set of academic characters. The piece features fascinating research from several of my colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania: bioethicist Jonathan Moreno, electrical and systems engineer Christopher Murray, criminologist Adrian Raine, medical anthropologist Philippe Bourgois, and molecular anthropologist Sarah Tishkoff.