This past semester, I was asked to give a lecture at Stanford University, a lecture based on my current research project, an ethnographic examination of global black Hebrewism, and it was advertised months ahead of time on the school’s Web site. A few weeks before my trip from Philadelphia to Northern California, I received a call from one of my research subjects wishing me luck on my West Coast swing and asking for more information about what I was planning to say about them in Palo Alto. The “them” in question is a transnational community of African-Americans who consider themselves descendents of ancient Hebrew Israelites, which means that some of my research subjects presently reside in Israel. The Israel community, about 3,000 in all, has resided in the Negev region of that country for the past 40 years. After leaving the United States in 1967 and enduring a stint in Liberia...

Shouting Fire: Stories from the Edge of Free Speech, directed by Liz Garbus, and Secrecy, directed by Peter Galison and Robb Moss, both provide challenging and even-handed debates about two very important topics.

The Garbus documentary, screening on HBO this month, chronicles several recent attacks on Free Speech from the Left and the Right (though mostly from the Right), and it links our precarious contemporary moment (precarious, it claims, in terms of Free Speech’s new vulnerabilities) to a massive power grab by the U.S. government after the attacks of 9/11. The filmmaker’s father, First Amendment lawyer Martin Garbus, one of the talking heads in the documentary, describes these newfangled vulnerabilities as “unprecedented.”

Where Shouting Fire highlights the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision (in 1971) on the publication of the “Pentagon Papers” as a huge victory for Free Speech ...

Everywhere I turn these days, decisions and discussions seem to hinge quite profoundly on the porous (and changing) fault-line between “racial” and “racist.”

When Marc Lamont Hill went at it with Bill O’Reilly earlier this week (over the media coverage of Michael Jackson’s memorial), the former tried to challenge the latter on just this very point.

O’Reilly wanted to short-circuit any distinction between the two (at least in his analysis of MJ), arguing that if whites are buying Jackson’s albums and dancing to his music then any discussion of “race” is irrelevant and disingenuous. Or, at the very least, he appears to argue that “racial” issues are insignificant except insofar as they manifest themselves in palpably racist ways.

Is that true? For many academics who spend time reading and writing about “Identity Issues,” the answer is probably a lot more complicated. But that ...

It is one thing not to seek re-election, but why would Palin resign? And before her first term is even done?

I have to admit, most of the answers I’ve heard to that straightforward question don’t sound particularly compelling, not even her own, the one she offered up at her press conference last week.

So, why did she call it quits?

It is ostensibly not because of any soon-to-be-announced federal indictment, contrary to what some news outlets had been speculating.

And if she wanted to end the media feeding frenzy on her personal life, making such a move seems like the exact opposite of what she needed. Finishing the term without incident and riding off into the Alaskan night would probably have been more effective.

Of course, there is also all this talk about her need to cut loose of Alaska altogether so that she can run free (and raise her profile) in the lower 48s. But...

I’ve been woefully undisciplined about my promise to talk film on Fridays. (Apologies to the one or two readers who might really have remotely cared.)

With my recent (and mercifully short) foray into fiction, the just-announced news of my promotion to full professor, and Michael Jackson’s very public and unexpected death, my head has been in many other places lately. And my body hasn’t been in a movie theater or checking out any DVDs, not even on computer. But I do want to be better about my Friday film segment for the rest of the summer, at least for my own enjoyment and sanity.

Since I’ve missed an installment, I thought I’d briefly mention (and recommend) three films this week. The first is a few years old and can be purchased on DVD. The second has just been completed and was recently aired (I think) on PBS. And the third is still in movie theaters.

Zora Neale Hurston:...

(Photo by, um, Flickr user Barack Obama)

“When Men Should Learn from Michelle” by Khadijah White

She’s the perfect woman, right? Tall, good-looking, well-educated, stylish and endlessly devoted to her family. Michelle Obama is The Cosby Show’s Clair Huxtable personified.

Especially important to the public’s obsession with Michelle Obama is her relationship with husband Barack. Between the couple’s affectionate photos on the cover of various magazines and the love story that warmed our hearts on the campaign trail, it’s hard to avoid getting wrapped up in the bigger-than-life fantasy of idealized black coupledom that the Obama union seems to represent. But while people are falling all over themselves to tell black women how to land a man like Barack, I rarely hear anyone talk about what Michelle had to give up to be with a man like Barack. What would make her eventually tell he...

I’m still trying to wake myself up from the groggy haze of Michael Jackson’s unexpected death — the coverage of which has become a global “media event” like none we’ve ever seen before. Not even Princess Di or JFK created this kind of immediate and mass-mediated mushroom clouding of fetishized televisual and cyber obsessions. That’s mostly because the media apparatus wasn’t nearly advanced enough to inundate us the way it can now: MJ updates through tweets and text messages and Internet pop-ups all day and night long. And then there are the 24-hour news cycles, the magazine covers, and the newspaper headlines. The saturation is surreal and science fictiony.

I’m one of the people who caught BET’s attempt to pay tribute to the “King of Pop” this weekend on its annual awards show. And maybe my expectations were pathetically low to start, but I wasn’t nearly as mortified by the...

Newcomers were told without solicitation: That’s where they found his brother, Craig Rey, you know. Right back there under that same diagonal dumpster behind Happy, before Happy was even Happy, what seemed like forever ago, when it was still the far-left corner of an awningless, signless Russian-American social club (Razborka-Razborka!) that splashed its heavily accented contents onto an otherwise deserted strip mall’s parking lot every Friday and Saturday night.

They found Tyrone’s brother’s dead body right back there, Alphebeters would remind one another, often with a fleshy neck-twist tacked to the back of the phrase, for emphasis. Or one of those sharp, hum-like grunts residents let out sometimes, especially when actual words felt too exacting and precise for the ambiguities of other people’s pain.

That’s the same grunt neighbors offered up when they described what Teetee’...

[For the folks who commented on my last post, scratching their heads and squinting their eyes with reasonable bewilderment, this is just me having a little bit of fun and taking some creative liberties with unused ethnographic fieldnotes. I’m running out of inspiration for this foray into fiction, so I probably won’t post too many more installments in this “Alphebet Houses” serial. Lucky for you all.]

All told, the first twelve years of Tyrone’s life, before that celestial visitation, were pretty standard as childhoods go, ignorable in their ordinariness. Little in Tyrone’s George Washington Elementary School days hinted at the faintest sliver of precocious exceptionalism. There wasn’t anything extraordinary about him. He wasn’t a loner or an outcast. He got along fine with most kids, well enough to swap Atari videogame cartridges and to get his name hollered up four flights of...

God first whispered to Tyrone from a rickety old dumpster in the alleyway behind Happy Liquors.

The same night day, when the 12-year-old told his mother about what had happened, she would hear none of it.

“You mustn’t say things like that,” Denise yelled, staring into the blackness of his blinking eyes. “You can never, ever, say things like that, Tyrone. Do you hear me? You can’t say that kind of thing. People will start to talk bad about you.”

Their neighbors in the Alphebet Houses already considered this skinny kid from Building 16 a little off. That’s the word they used. Off. The psychological equivalent of a burned-out light bulb or a stovetop’s ice-cold back burner.

What Alphebeters liked about the word, what made it different from crazy or cuckoo or other more flamboyant choices, was that it seemed to leave space open for sanity’s future return, for the possibility ...