I’m stilling planning to get to my “Friday’s Flick” post later on today (probably a review of Kristy Anderson’s Zora Neal Hurston: Jump at the Sun, but I just wanted to send out a quick note this morning about Twitter.

I had lunch with Marc Lamont Hill yesterday. Hill, an anthropologist based at Columbia University’s Teachers College, did a very convincing job explaining the appeal of Twitter and its form of social community, a form predicated on pithy, punctuated (pseudo-intimate) interactions.

Hill is the kind of public intellectual who is always in demand. When he’s not lecturing at a college or high school somewhere, he’s giving as good as he gets on Cable TV, debating the likes of Fox’s Bill O’Reilly on the issue of the day. I put him in a category with John Hartigan, Mark Anthony Neal, Imani Perry, Eric Klinenberg, and Melissa Harris-Lacewell. These are some of the academic...

The New York Historical Society is highlighting the powerful Harlem photographs of Camilo José Vergara in an exhibit, Harlem: 1970-2009, scheduled to be up through mid-July.

As someone who has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Harlem since the mid-1990s, I have had one of the many front row seats to the massive changes that just recently transformed this section of northern Manhattan.

In the 1980s, many experts were still labeling Harlem “gentrification-proof,” so symbolically linked to African-American cultural difference that wealthier whites would never feel comfortable moving into the area, at least not in any significant numbers. The 1990s and 2000s have already proved that prediction absolutely wrong.

Vergara, a MacArthur “genius” and native Chilean who has been documenting urban life for decades, moved to NYC in 1970 and started photographing the city as soon as he a...

I read two very short books while I was in Kingston, Jamaica, earlier this month. One, a tattered copy of St. Clair Drake’s The Redemption of Africa and Black Religion (1977), I bought at a vending table set up for the Caribbean Studies Association Conference in New Kingston. I am trying to finalize a syllabus for a grad seminar in the fall, and I was planning to check a copy out of the library later on this summer.

The second book, Shelby Steele’s A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win (2007), I brought with me from home. I’m trying to write an afterward for the paperback 2010 edition of my recent book, Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness (2008), and it seems pretty clear that I have to address Obama’s election as a watershed moment in American history, one with clear implications for that book’s basic claims. So, I have...

I am attempting to institute a new feature on my blog this summer, a film review segment on Fridays. And anything is fair game: contemporary Hollywood fare, new independent features, online shorts, documentaries. Everything. For the most part, I’ll try to highlight films that I think Brainstorm readers may not already know, but I might also put my own spin on the much-hyped movie of the moment. Wherever the spirit moves me.

This week, I want to mention a documentary, Jamaica for Sale, produced by Esther Figueroa and Diana McCaula, two activists and media makers based in Jamaica. The film screened last week as part of the 2009 Caribbean Studies Association conference in Kingston, Jamaica. (I was down there both for the conference and as part of an ethnographic film shoot of my own.)

A low-budget feature-length documentary shot in mini-DV, Jamaica for Sale takes a critical look at...

I just finished watching Jon Voight’s recent speech at a fundraising dinner thrown by the National Republican Congressional and Senatorial Committees. Voight, an accomplished movie actor and father of megastar Angelina Jolie, reminds us all that Hollywood isn’t exclusively peopled by liberals and card-carrying Democrats.

Voight has been causing quite a stir with his harsh criticisms of Obama.

In the speech (YouTubed above), Voight berates his Hollywood colleagues (and mainstream media outlets) for buying the hype about Obama, and he denounces Obama for pretending to be a “moderate” on the campaign trail and turning out to be “wildly radical.”

He also implies that Obama’s campaigning techniques were illegal and that his backers inaccurately depicted Bush as a war-monger.

Voight states, quite emphatically and without qualification, that “everything Obama has recommended has...

National Review editor and syndicated columnist Jonah Goldberg has thrown down the gauntlet in a Philadelphia Inquirer op-ed published yesterday. Motivated by recent debates over President Obama’s nomination of Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, Goldberg has called liberals hypocrites on issues of race.

Liberals are always asking for honest discussions about race and racism, he says, but they don’t really mean it.

“They invite everyone to a big, open-minded conversation,” he writes, “but the moment anyone disagrees with them, they shout ‘racist’ and force the dissenters to figuratively don dunce caps and renounce their reactionary views. Then, when the furor dies down, they again offer up grave lamentations about the lack of ‘honest dialogue.’ It’s a mixture of Kabuki dance and whack-a-mole.”

I really don’t disagree with Goldberg on that point.

If we are going to be serious...

Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh have gotten all worked up about Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination, calling her a racist and demanding that she be held accountable for it.

By now, most people have seen the controversial Sotomayor comment:

I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.

Couple that with her claim that judicial decisions are tantamount to (have the material impact of) making policy, and you can see why some conservatives are agitated.

“Imagine a judicial nominee said ‘my experience as a white man makes me better than a Latina woman,’” blogged ex-House Speaker Gingrich. “Wouldn’t they have to withdraw? New racism is no better than old racism. A white man racist nominee would be forced to withdraw. A Latina woman racist should also withdraw.”

“...

Last week, I blogged about a short review of Spike Lee’s Kobe Bryant documentary, labeling the blog entry “Tillet on Spike on Kobe.”

One of the readers, Just Asking, wrote the following response:

Why does Jackson on Tillet on Lee on Kobe feel so removed from anything that really matters, even in popular culture? (Tillet needs a c.v. line for the tenure hearing?) Jackson should write about Kobe directly. Or Jackson should write about Lee’s movies directly. What is this, homeopathic academics?

Got to run. There’s a piece I want to read by a Prof. Smith, about what Prof. Davis thinks about William C. Rhoden’s opinion of SportsCenter’s coverage of what the tabs are saying about Michael Vick.

This isn’t the first time I received such a criticism. In April, I blogged about a Chronicle piece on “the gender of tenure” and received an arguably related (though not identical) response from ...

Obama is set to announce his replacement for Souter this morning, and insiders have indicated that he intends to nominate Sonia Sotomayor, a federal judge on the United States Court of Appeals, the Second Circuit. Democrats might like the pick, but some Republicans have already intimated that they might be gearing up for a filibustery fight.

Sotomayor represents one a version of a fairytale story, a kind of textbook example of what “The American Dream” is supposed to mean. She grew up in a public housing project complex in New York City and was raised by Puerto Rican migrants in the South Bronx just a few years before a Diasporic form of vernacular music, hip-hop, concretized into something globally marketable along that same neighborhood’s sidewalk space. Sotomayor lost her dad before she became a teenager, and her mother raised the family alone. Sotomayor still thrived.

She...

My Penn colleague Salamishah Tillet has just penned a piece on Spike Lee’s Kobe Bryant documentary, Kobe Doin’ Work, which ESPN aired this past weekend. I DVR’d the final section of the film, so I was able to catch a little bit of it.

Tillet and I co-taught a course on Spike Lee last semester, so we both got re-acquainted with all of his films. We even took our students to see (and critically engage) his latest theatrical release, Miracle at St. Anna. (I blogged about that course last year.)

Tillet’s article is a review of the Kobe film and the Kobe phenomenon.

“I’ve never been a Kobe Bryant fan,” she admits. “Maybe it’s because I’m still getting over the Lakers 4-1 deafening defeat of my mainstay, the Philadelphia 76ers in the 2001 NBA finals. Maybe I just don’t like his particular blue-chip swagger. Of his generation of athletes, I have always appreciated Serena Williams’...