If you haven’t already seen it, Paris Hilton is featured in a new spoof of McCain’s “celebrity” ad. Between that mock-ad and Obama getting heckled in Florida by some young black activists, this week might have provided us with two of our most conspicuous examples of the electorate/audience striking back.

That is probably just wishful thinking, but I’m sticking to it (for now).

Of course, the candidates are already well aware of the fact that they don’t totally control the terms of their own media representations. They try to “stay on message” and to redefine their opponent in unflattering ways, but none of that matters unless media outlets take the bait and concede to framing their stories within anything close to the parameters suggested by campaign spinmeisters.

What makes this all the more fascinating is the fact that broadcast and print journalists (as well as...

A lot of people have been discussing John McCain’s “The One” ad over the last week or so, dismissing it as a subtle pandering to evangelical beliefs about the Antichrist’s emergence in “the last days.” Of course, if you do just a tiny bit of searching on the web, you can find much more blatant comparisons drawn between Obama and the ominous figure of the Antichrist.

One of the most recent pop-cultural renditions of the Antichrist was the amazingly successful Left Behind book series written by Tim F. LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins. In that story, Nicolae Carpathia is a politician and humanitarian who transcends race, politics, and religion to unite the planet, triumphantly ushering in world peace. He is a much-beloved celebrity — warm, charming, intelligent, handsome. He’s good in front of a camera and more than capable as a tactician behind the scenes. As a testament to that fact, 172...

McCain’s camp went on the racial offensive this week, accusing Barack Obama of playing “the race card” in recent speeches and characterizing some of Obama’s statements as “divisive, negative, shameful, and wrong.”

The remarks in question pivot on Obama’s claim that Republicans might attempt to engage in race-based and xenophobic fearmongering to win the election against him — that they might point out his foreign-sounding name and subtly remind voters how much he “doesn’t look like all those other presidents on dollar bills” (a clear nod to his racial difference).

I’ve already commented on this kind of accusation before, when Dennis Miller went off on Obama for a similar statement back on June 20th.

Miller and McCain want to argue that Obama is calling McCain and the Republicans a bunch of racists and that unless Obama has explicit proof about some cabal of Republican...

It was 1997 when President Bill Clinton apologized to the eight remaining victims of “The Tuskegee Experiment.” Those eight survivors were non-consenting participants in a long-term medical study conducted during the 1940s, 50s, and 60s that denied black men available treatment for syphilis so that scientists could easily determine how the disease mutilated their bodies.

Earlier this month, the American Medical Association issued a formal apology for its organization’s past discrimination against black physicians, a form of purposeful racial exclusion that prompted black doctors to create their own parallel organization, the National Medical Association, at the end of the 19th century. (I didn’t even realize that the NMA still operates today.)

This week, the United States House of Representatives passed a resolution apologizing to all African-Americans “on behalf of the people...

I did a foolish thing last weekend. I performed a Google search on my new book — just to see if there were any references to it online that I hadn’t already seen. (Of course, I realize that the Web can be merciless on the thin-skinned, but most authors can sometimes be gluttons for such surefire cyberpunishment, pretending that the one gem they might unearth could ever outweigh the playa-hating hordes.)

I found quite a few references to the book, mostly in fairly obscure/specialty venues, the bulk of them positive. But I was blown away by one interesting dismissal of the work, a dismissal seemingly tethered (in the first instance) to my academic background as a cultural anthropologist. My training as an anthropologist was the first strike against me.

Why are people sometimes so dismissive of anthropology?

In the era of Franz Boas and Margaret Mead, anthropologists were public in...

Did anyone catch Soledad O’Brien’s special on CNN, “Black in America,” these past two evenings?

I watched it in a room full of academics, which probably explains why I was part of an audience that spent most of the night collectively (and very vocally) appalled by just about every single decision that the producers made: the spoken-word segues out of every single commercial break (delivered, it seems, from an indoor basketball court, no less); the under-reliance on black female talking heads as authoritative voices on the African-American experience; the too-easy partitioning of purportedly black men’s and black women’s social issues into separate broadcast nights.

Just to be fair, I should make sure to watch the entire broadcast again, but my initial expectations might have been too high, too unrealistic.

Did anyone else see it? If so, what did other folks think?

During the...

After spending about a decade as a Democratic Congresswoman in the 1990s and early 2000s (one of the U.S. Representatives who spearheaded the defeated bid to impeach President Bush), Cynthia McKinney recently announced that she has decided to accept the Green Party nomination for President of the United States.

For those who don’t remember, McKinney found herself at the center of a public firestorm in 2006 after allegedly hitting a Capitol Hill police officer for grabbing her in a Congressional office building. When that story first broke, McKinney maintained that the building’s guard had singled her out because of her race. As the details unfolded in the media, however, she was soundly thrashed by both right-wing critics and her usual Democratic allies, many people publicly reprimanding her for crying (racial) wolf.

McKinney was criticized for playing a version of that...

A friend sent me a link with an excerpt from ABC’s The View yesterday. It was a segment from the episode where Elisabeth Hasselbeck breaks down a bit during a discussion about race, specifically while debating Whoopi Goldberg on Whoopi’s use of the word “nigger” and over their divergent takes on the best path toward real racial reconciliation.

I would argue (and did, in that C-Span segment I linked to yesterday) that all of our conversations about race (if they are genuine and real and productive) will necessarily include such moments of emotional frustration, exhaustion and excess. They just have to. Anything else is just farce.

Race is not simply a cognitive category with more or less analytical power (as academics are prone to construct it). Race is also an emotionally charged topic/investment, and we suppress that fact at our own peril.

But the only way that such charged...

C-Span just sent me a DVD copy of my segment from BookTV last month on C-Span 2. Here’s the link. I’m speaking way too quickly (and don’t even get to a few major themes from the book), but it does lay out the beginnings of my point about “de cardio racism” and its difference from earlier modes of racial reasoning in American history.

Speaking of racism’s newfangled permutations, I finally read through the second Village Voice piece on the Madonna Constantine case. Clearly, if she did hang a noose on her own office door as a tactic to preempt the public exposure of her plagiarism case, she would represent one of the most dramatic and disingenuous versions of playing the race card in academic history. It would be the epitome of “Bluffing About Race,” as the subtitle to Richard Thompson Ford’s new book phrases the issue. (Of course, some people would argue that any invocation of race...

The trip back from Jamaica was far more harrowing than it should have been, and included an extra night’s stay at the airline’s expense. But I am finally back in Philadelphia, at a real computer keyboard, and ready to get the blog-ball rolling again. I’m also slowly catching up on everything I’ve missed these last two weeks or so — and trying to figure out what’s coming down the pike.

Let me get my suitcases unpacked and a few newspapers read before I start at it again, full-tilt boogie, on everything from Jesse Jackson to that infamous New Yorker cover to my play for The Colbert Report to the lunacy of an almost six-hour baseball game last night.

My number-one priority though, I think, is trying to figure out what to tackle first. Give me a couple of hours to sort things out over here. And I haven’t forgetten that we have an ongoing discussion afoot about Madonna Constantine.

I...