A couple of folks have asked me what I’ll do once I’m no longer blogging for The Chronicle (at the end of this month). Most people may not be all that interested in my answer, but I just thought I’d take a few minutes to respond.

1) I have to FINALLY finish my next book manuscript, which is loooonnnggg overdue to an ever-patient editor. That is my first order of business, and I hope to have some time time in early 2012 to get a draft completed. The book is an ethnographic examination of Africana Judaism. I actually took a chunk of the unfinished manuscript to Israel this summer and allowed some members of the community I’m working with (the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem) to read and critique the piece. It was tremendously helpful. And energizing! Now I just have to get the rest of the draft done.

2) Blogging for the Chronicle has meant neglecting my other blog, From the…

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Martha Marcy May Marlene is a film about a young woman trying desperately (and unsuccessfully) to recover from her traumatic stint as a member of a rural cult, sexual concubine of its charismatic spiritual leader. It is one of those “art house” movies that ended with surprisingly little warning. When the closing credits began, audience members gasped. “What?” “You’re kidding me!” “Is that really it?” That’s only what I heard in the theater seats nearest my own. And I laughed, because I knew exactly what they were reacting to.

The writer had taken us on a complex and nerve-racking journey with the film’s female protagonist (who, at different moments in the story, answers to each one of the names that make up the film’s title). By the “end” of the story, our filmmaker hasn’t really provided us with any resolution. There is no simple (artificial?) closure to the narrative, just a final…

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I have spent over three years working with Deborah A. Thomas and Junior “Gabu” Wedderburn on an ethnographic film that will make its Los Angeles premiere at a film festival this week. That film, Bad Friday: Rastafari After Coral Gardens, chronicles the history of violence in the country of Jamaica through the eyes of its most recognizable community, Rastafarians.

Bad Friday chronicles the story of several Rasta elders who vividly recount their own mid-century persecutions at the hands of the Jamaican government.  The story of Rastafari helps to shed light on Jamaica’s larger political and social order. It tries to show how these Rastas use their recollections of “the Coral Gardens incident” of 1963 (and several anti-Rasta campaigns before that) to imagine new possibilities for the nation’s post-colonial future.

For many around the world, Jamaica conjures up images of…

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I’m not following the lead up to 2012′s presidential election the way I hung on every Democratic and Republican candidate’s words in 2006 and 2007. Even still, it is hard to miss the major headlines, no matter how much one might try: Obama’s plunging poll numbers, critiques of Romney’s religious persuasion, Rick Perry’s n-worded family home, and the conspicuously growing journalistic indifference to anything at all Bachmann-related.

Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 tax plan might have gotten panned by several of his fellow candidates during last night’s Republican debate (including Bachmann’s likening it to a version of the Biblical “mark of the beast”), but it is the continued public “controversy” around Cain’s take on racism in America that seems to have everyone up in arms right now.

This all started when Cain dismissed racism as a significant cause for African-American marginalization. “I …

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image at LaVrai.com

Some people invoke the ancient Mayans to contend that the world’s expiration date is quickly approaching, but there are other arguments afoot these days about just how imminent such an end might be. You may have seen the billboards for one of them: Family Radio’s declaration that Judgment Day is “guaranteed” to begin (and quite conspicuously) on May 21st, 2011.

I have been completely fascinated by this proclamation ever since I first heard Harold Camping’s matter-of-fact declaration earlier this year (while surfing the FM dial on a drive up to NYC). Camping is a long-time Christian radio broadcaster who has been a mainstay at Family Radio since the early 1960s. Shuffling through broadcast options in my Saturn, I knew Camping’s voice as soon as I heard it, mostly because I grew up…

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Later this month, the International Communication Association is holding its annual conference in Boston. As part of that event (and I do realize that some readers view academic conferences as an irresponsible and illegitimate racket), I am taking part in what we hope will be a very frank and no-holds-barred discussion about tenure and promotion in the academy today.

Actually, this will be one of the pre-conference sessions, which are organized to provide more in-depth and substantive engagements for scholars and students alike.

Our session is slated for four hours and will include a (private) opportunity for junior faculty and advanced graduate students to get real one-on-one mentoring from people outside of their home institution. Such a perspective can sometimes be particularly helpful when the people at one’s home institution often have a more invested (and cathected) relations…

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Last week, a Penn undergraduate wrote an op-ed for the student newspaper that helped to produce a noticeable spike in campus discussions about racism, intolerance, and diversity. That op-ed chronicled the author’s recent run-in with several drunk students. The author of the op-ed is black. Those drunk students were white. And the interactions depicted in that op-ed included members of the latter group denigrating the author with the infamous n-word.

Part of what made the op-ed such a lightening rod for debate (besides specifics about the racial slur) was the fact that the column’s author, a graduating senior, felt tempted to tell prospective students of color (on a tour of the campus just that very week) not to attend Penn, to avoid the institution altogether, for fear of exposing them to similar slights and humiliations. “I wanted to stop them,” he writes, “and warn them. ‘Please…

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I hate jazz music.

I’ve always wanted to start a piece of writing with that one provocation—maybe a bit of creative nonfiction, maybe a would-be short story.

My purposefully dismissive declaration is meant to mark a two-fold resentment. First, not being a musician myself, I privilege jazz’s vocalists over its virtuosic drummers, saxophonists, and trumpeters, and for many jazz purists, that is my initial mistake: I want to hear Louis Armstrong sing more than blow his horn. Nina Simone, Arthur Prysock, Ella Fitzgerald, and Billie Holiday are towering figures, no doubt, with huge and loyal followings, but the Miles Davises and John Coltranes and Thelonius Monks undeniably define the music’s canonical core, especially for many would-be connoisseurs. And there begins my second complaint.

At its most pretentious, jazz music sometimes gets mobilized (by a few of those…

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House Republicans called an “emergency meeting” of the Rules Committee yesterday to consider cutting all federal funding to National Public Radio.

Politicians have been playing football with NPR for quite some time, but the ostensible urgency of yesterday’s meeting stems from new hidden-camera footage that allegedly depicts NPR executives railing against the Tea Party (calling them “seriously racist”) and listening passively as would-be Muslim donors (actors who were part of a sting operation aimed at exposing these execs as hyper-partisan) waxed on about Jewish domination of contemporary media outlets.

This all happened over a lunch that was secretly videotaped by James O’Keefe’s “Project Veritas,” most famous for similar undercover footage of ACORN employees talking abortion with a pimp (played by O’Keefe himself) and his supposedly underage prostitute. That video sparked even…

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Ten years ago, I gave a talk at a university (that will remain nameless) and nobody came out to see it except for the person who invited me. Actually, there was a second person there, but the organizer had dragged her into the event. We blinked at one another for a few giggle-filled moments, hoping against hope for some stragglers, and then, 20 minutes later, our hope decidedly dashed, we simply went out for drinks.

At the time, I didn’t know who should have been more embarrassed by the entire thing: me, because even despite all the flyers I saw plastered throughout the hallways, I couldn’t entice a single member of the school’s faculty, staff, or student body to hear my talk; or them, because they didn’t fulfill their unwritten obligation to get even a few warm bodies in those seats. I was ashamed, mortified, but my host was, too.

That was by far my lowest turnout as an invite…

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I wanted to take a second to acknowledge the responses to my most recent post (about complaints several senior black faculty have expressed to me about their treatment in the academy). I appreciate the discussion that it has sparked, and I definitely want to follow-up on some comments and questions.

goxewu thematizes one prominent (and very reasonable) response to my blog post: that it is just too doggone vague and ambiguous.  Mere “blind-quote journalism,” goxewu writes, wanting more specificity to be convinced that there’s anything close to a there there. “There is a middle ground,” he writes, “between complete vagueness and anonymity (which is what Professor Jackson has now) and blowing everyone’s cover.”

Responding to trendisnotdestiny’s question about whether bringing the topic up at all might be enough, goxewu responds: “I’m going to be a little more severe here: Prof….

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For the past year or so, I’ve been inadvertently collecting unpleasant and disconcerting stories from senior black faculty. These stories have come mainly (though not exclusively) from men, most of whom are incredibly accomplished and wildly influential in their fields. These academics are housed in several different disciplines across the humanities and social sciences, and their confidential disclosures demonstrate real unhappiness about their treatment in the academy.

If I had to use one word to describe how these aforementioned scholars feel, it would be disrespected, profoundly disrespected.

In these narratives, senior scholars of color describe themselves as under-appreciated by administrators, relatively marginalized (and even maligned) by fellow colleagues, and somewhat alienated from other experts in their fields.

The first time I heard such a tale, over lunch at a…

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This might be the most challenging semester of teaching that I’ve ever had. A colleague and I are collaborating on an ambitious pedagogical project that combines two separate courses and two seemingly distinct modes of filmmaking.

I’m teaching a graduate course, Ethnographic Film, which is really an offering about the philosophical presuppositions that ground qualitative social scientific practice. It is an attempt to engage the methodological and theoretical implications of capturing data and crafting social scientific accounts/narratives in images and sounds. I’ve asked these graduate students to put theory into practice by producing ethnographic films as their final projects. In service to that goal, students are (i) reading about ethnography (as a social scientific method and representational genre), (ii) watching weekly nonfiction films (to be analyzed for formal properties and i…

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I recently had a phone conversation with a colleague and friend at another academic institution, a scholar who wanted to know if I had ever advised white Ph.D. students. And how many.

Recently tenured, she has already served as the chair/adviser of several dissertation committees; and all of those dissertations were written by black students.

She wanted to know if I was having the same experience.

Not quite, I told her, but I understood the question.

I know several scholars of color who complain about feeling invisible to white Ph.D. students in their home departments.

These are students working on themes that I directly grapple with in my work, she argued, and it is as though it doesn’t even cross their minds to consider me as a potential adviser. If I’m “lucky,” she added, they’ll think about putting me on the committee, but even that isn’t a foregone conclusion. And it…

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1871 Mathew Brady portrait of Twain, from Wikimedia Commons

Should teenage students read novels filled with n-word references? Is that even appropriate for public school curricula? At least one publisher doesn’t think so.

New South has put together a volume of Mark Twain’s two most famous novels that bucks several publishing traditions. Here’s how they describe it:

In a radical departure from standard editions, Twain’s most famous novels are published here as the continuous narrative that the author originally envisioned. More controversial will be the decision by the editor, noted Mark Twain scholar Alan Gribben, to eliminate the pejorative racial labels that Twain employed in his effort to write realistically about social attitudes of the 1840s.

Gribben points out that dozens of other…

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