This will probably be my final e-mail from overseas (via Blackberry), and I look forward to getting back to a real computer keyboard very soon.

I have been shooting video footage (oral histories) of Rastas in Jamaica, which has had me crisscrossing the island, mostly off the beaten path (and in “da bush” as some say).

That means that I missed the beginnings of the recent controversy surrounding Jesse Jackson’s comments about Obama. I just got caught up last night, and I’ll have much more to say about that flap next week (again, from a real keyboard).

I have also read the amazing comments people posted to the Madonna Constantine blog entry. Thanks for your honest and thoughtful feedback. Keep them coming! I’ll also read the links/references that people provided and follow up on all of that next week.

And I have my marching orders from blog readers, so I am putting Steve...

A Getty Images photo of Constantine at the New York magazine site

Since I’ve been on the road (and out of the country), I am still trying to find time to get to the bottom of the Madonna Constantine story. Some of the important facts seem hard to come by.

If you don’t remember, she’s the tenured Teachers College professor who found a noose hanging from her office door this past academic year, an event that seemed to spawn a string of copycat “hate” acts at that university and even some others (if I’m not mistaken).

We subsequently found out that the school had been quietly investigating accusations of plagiarism against her by a student and professional colleague. The blogosphere/media collectively pondered whether she had staged the racist act to paint herself as victim instead of perpetrator.

At the end of this past semester, noose hangings or not, Columbia University fired...

I am on the road, conducting some research abroad and unable to get myself to a proper computer. So, I just figured that I’d see if I could use my Blackberry to link-up and check-in. So far, so good.

As part of my road trip, I just finished giving a 30-minute presentation on my African Hebrews project for the 2008 ACS Crossroads conference (“Of Sacred Crossroads”) at the University of the West Indies (Mona campus) in Kingston, Jamaica.

The organizers put on a truly fabulous intellectual gathering, and I got a chance to reconnect with old colleagues over some Jamaican staples — ackee and saltfish in the mornings and Red Stripe beer at night.

There were many highlights during the event, but a series of sessions on Rastafari stood out as exceptionally compelling to me, especially since Rastafarianism’s Hebrew/Jewish iconography (including their purposeful deployment of the Star of...

It is an age-old debate within the academy, but I have been revisiting it quite personally during the first half of this year.

With my new book (my first “trade” book), Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness, just released in May, I am still trying to figure out if my writing experiment (away from a university-based publishing house) was worth it. Obviously, it is still early in the life of my new book, but I do need to determine how to make the most of my little foray into trade publishing — and decide how soon I want to do it again.

One thing is clear, I have attempted to get the word out about the new book much more forcefully than I ever did for the first two. I actively tried to get C-Span interested in covering a book reading. I emailed my favorite shows at National Public Radio. I responded to almost all of the journalists who called for my...

I’m in the throes of reading Mary Frances Berry’s biography of Callie House, a 19th century ex-slave and washerwoman from Nashville, Tennessee, who helped lead the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association.

I decided to pick the book up this week for two reasons: (1) My wife just finished going through it as part of a research project on contemporary Rastafarian calls for reparations vis-a-vis the Jamaican government. (2) The film I mentioned in my post last week, Traces of the Trade, ends with a pointed discussion of reparations in the United States.

Before Berry’s book, I had never heard of Callie House’s organized fight to procure “pensions” for newly-freed slaves, a fight predicated on an argument that asked for similar financial assistance to the kind that had already been provided to Union soldiers after the war.

House’s efforts were met with...

I DVR’d Bill O’Reilly’s “No Spin Zone” last week, specifically because a promo mentioned that Dennis Miller was going to have some choice words for Barack Obama on that episode. I was intrigued. And Miller didn’t disappoint. He even admitted that he took the initiative and contacted the O’Reilly folks himself, since he was so unhappy with some of Obama’s recent comments.

When I finally found the time to watch that segment, which was just last night, I got a large dose of Miller railing against Obama for being “tedious” and hypocritical — and all in Miller’s idiosyncratically high-octane and metaphor-riddled way: “[Obama] went back on that public funding promise more quickly than a Chinese acrobat checking themselves for cellulite.”

Miller was most angry at Obama for “Playing ‘The Race Card’ Card” in a June 20th speech at a campaign fund raiser in Jacksonville, Fla., where the...

I totally missed it (and had to get a heads-up late last night from other bloggers ), but Ralph Nader hasn’t been mincing words when it comes to his take on Barack Obama.

Some of his recent comments have caused a bit more of a stir than usual, mostly because he accused Obama of pandering to special interests (per the advice of his handlers) and even of trying to “talk white.”

Nader’s invocation of talking white seems to split the difference between (i) a critique of Obama’s policies and campaign priorities (i.e., not adamantly going after the issues that plague poor black communities, such as payday lending) and (ii) a take on the very way in which Obama carries himself (his walk, his talk, etc.), something that pivots upon popular and academic discussions of “acting white,” the notion that people of color can be delegimatized for not behaving in conspicuously (read:...

Has anyone gotten a chance to watch Katrina Browne’s documentary “Traces of the Trade” on PBS? I just caught it last night.

The film unfurls a nine-year story about the contemporary offspring of a wealthy slave-trading/slave-owning family (from 19th-century Rhode Island) that supposedly trafficked in more slaves than any other family in American history.

The descendants of those family members traveled from the United States to Cuba and Ghana (earlier this decade), revisiting important nodes of the trans-Atlantic circulations that organized “the peculiar institution.”

The documentary is also an attempt to examine what it might look like for whites to talk honestly with one another about racial history’s implications for contemporary American lives and life chances — as a precursor to more-sustained multi-racial conversations in the United States and abroad.

One poignant...

Now that a few more days have passed since the Celtics pummeled the Lakers in Game 6 of the NBA Finals, I can finally admit the extent of my massive resentment as a native New Yorker (a Brooklynite, no less) about being forced to root for the Boston Celtics (any Boston team) in a sporting event. And I blame the New York Knicks for putting me in this unthinkable position. But I must admit, I did end up rooting (at the edge of my seat) for the Boston Celtics over and against the Los Angeles Lakers, the latter being (in this fan’s idiosyncratic opinion) the lesser of two franchise-based evils.

Since my in-laws are from Minneapolis, a city I have grown to like a great deal, I was happy that KG could vie for a title — and that he ended up getting it, emphatically. But with Boston?! Ugh! (Of course, I wasn’t nearly as happy as KG showed himself to be in post-game interviews, wailing an...

I don’t know what to say about all the rumors of “whitey” talk vis-à-vis Michelle Obama this week. And I hear that McCain’s wife, who has so far been able to deftly avoid the white-hot media spotlight, has begun calling Michelle Obama on the carpet these last few days for her now-infamous recent comments about being proud of America for the first time. By the way, does such a statement necessarily mean that she is anti-American?

Journalist and cultural critic Juan Williams spent Wednesday evening generously speaking to a few Penn undergraduates about the extent to which Michelle Obama has turned herself into a political liability. He’s probably right, but I also think that we all might need to have a more serious conversation about what “patriotism” really means.

In many ways, this current controversy reminds me of the brouhaha that erupted in 2002 when the Ice Cube film...