Posts by John L. Jackson Jr.

May 27, 2008, 01:26 PM ET

One Version of Racial Fundamentalism

By John L. Jackson Jr.

The verdict came down last week on what to do with the children seized from that Texas compound, the one stormed by law-enforcement agents earlier this year. Although the Mormon-derived group didn’t receive the fire-laced treatment meted out on David Koresh’s Branch Davidianians in 1993, several hundred of the sect’s children were removed from the compound (and scattered across the state) because of concerns about child abuse. The recent decision (that authorities acted too hastily) has completely changed the nature of this story — and upped the chances that those families from the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints might get reunited in the very near future.

Of course, the media have been watching this close...

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May 22, 2008, 11:40 PM ET

The Importance of Howard Stern

By John L. Jackson Jr.

Howard Stern (Image from mediabistro.com)

I can honestly say that I’ve just about given up on Broadcast radio. Well, not quite. I still (admittedly) feel as though my morning hasn’t quite started off on the right note until I happen to catch one of Tavis Smiley’s Southern-fried segments on Tom Joyner’s syndicated morning show. (I never quite remember when he’s supposed to be on). And I continue to listen to NPR at least a few times a week. I’m a big fan of several NPR shows, including the one offered up by our own Philly-based station, “Radio Times with Marty Moss-Coane.” And I make sure to check AM Radio from time to time, for the same reason that I regularly catch O-Reilly’s nightly spin on the day’s events — with all of its ideological histrionics and overdeterminism. But I am completely addicted to satellite radio.

For one thing, nothing beats commercial free music, which one...

May 20, 2008, 02:08 PM ET

Race, Racism, and the Study of Religion

By John L. Jackson Jr.

I just got back to Philadelphia from a short trip up to Massachusetts this weekend, where I split time between plugging my new book in Boston and taking part in a panel called “Theorizing Race and Ethnicity in Theology and the Study of Religion” at Harvard University’s Divinity School. The Harvard panel proved to be one of those (sometimes rare) academic events that combined intellectual edification and soul-stirring inspiration.

Professor Ronald Thiemann, a scholar who studies the role of religious practices/beliefs in everyday public life, was our host, and he facilitated a discussion that ranged from a powerful “womanist” position on race and contemporary cultural politics (offered up by Texas Christian University Professor Stacey Floyd-Thomas) to a meticulous articulation of past and present scientific commitments to ideologically...

May 17, 2008, 12:42 AM ET

Some Thoughts About Ethnography ...

By John L. Jackson Jr.

I want to get back to the discussion about race/racism that my last post helped to instigate. And I will. But I have been thinking a lot about what Paul Willis once called, reworking and rewording Mills, “the ethnographic imagination.”

The term “ethnography” describes a literary genre (writings that attempt to capture people’s cultural beliefs and practices) as well as a qualitative research methodology (a way of collecting social scientific data based on long-term, face-to-face interactions). But we are living in a hyperscientific moment now, a time when ethnographic analysis seems to have lost some of its authority, especially since human genomics and the statistical analysis of massive datasets are privileged as holy grails in the search for contemporary solutions to social problems. Ethnography is still alive and well. It just ends up packaged for the public in ways that look...

May 14, 2008, 12:59 PM ET

The Racial Impasse

By John L. Jackson Jr.

I remember speaking to an auditorium full of 7th and 8th graders at a junior high school in Central Florida a couple of years ago. I was attempting to explain to them just what anthropologists do for a living, and I was having the hardest time.

I’d been brought down to lecture at a local university only a few miles away, and the person who invited me, a minister and activist in the community, wanted to make sure that I got a chance to learn about the local area, especially from residents of the all-black town a stone’s throw from campus. I’m used to speaking to academic audiences about my work (undergraduates, graduate students, and colleagues), but addressing an auditorium full of pre-teens and teens was a major challenge.

I decided to start off with an invocation of Indiana Jones, which felt a little bit like cheating (or just pandering), but I thought that they’d at least...