Search The Site
 
More options | Back issues
Home
News
Opinion & Forums
Careers
Multimedia
Chronicle/Gallup
Leadership Forum
Technology Forum
Resource Center
Campus Viewpoints
Services
The Chronicle of Higher Education
The Chronicle Review
A weekly special section
Brainstorm: Lives of the Mind John L. Jackson Jr.

July 4, 2008

Academic vs. Trade Publishing, Part One

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 reaction to the top news story of the day. I sent books to Tavis Smiley, Bill Maher, and even Bill O’Reilly. (I figured that I’d wait to see if any of them might be the least bit interested — so far, a resounding “no” — before I try to find an “in” to Oprah.)

I even started writing op-eds and blogging right here for The Chronicle, genres that demand quick turnaround times over and against the slow-burn of normal academic publishing deadlines.

I grew up a pretty shy and private kid (as I’ve already admitted in my previous books), so these gestures were real challenges for me — putting myself out there.

Indeed, I am trying to really figure out if my own current (and very minor) dance with the role of “public intellectual” has been worth it — intellectually, politically, and psychologically. Am I any good at it? Do I even want to be?

I know the book is brand new and that we have a long, hot summer ahead of us, a summer of election campaigning by a major party’s first black presidential nominee, which means that many of the arguments that I make in the book (about some of the newfangled ways in which race functions today) will be on explicit and high-charged public display all the way through November. It’ll be interesting to see how much people use the book as one of the many tools they deploy to make sense of this electoral season. If they don’t, I can’t take it personally, right?

Well, off to a family BBQ. (We start early!) I’ll have to continue this later…

Comment [6]

July 2, 2008

Callie House's Fight for Economic Justice

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 derision/dismissal by the Black middle class and concerted opposition (including concocted political witchhunts) by the United States government.

I don’t remember ever reading anything about House or the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association in any of my history classes. That isn’t because my teachers were purposefully trying to hide this historical tidbit from us. Many of them probably didn’t know anything about it, either.

How many of you all did?

Textbooked history often gets told in short, bold headlines, but the details of the actual stories sometimes get silenced in the process.

The point of bringing House’s story up shouldn’t be about fanning the flames of “white guilt” some 100 or so years later. It is about trying to figure out exactly where we have all come from as we embark on the 21st century iteration of where we are going.

Callie House’s story doesn’t corner the market on under-told tales of American history. Neither do African Americans.

If you have a second, share a little-known piece of American history with us right here. We’ll all be the better for it.

Comment [6]

June 30, 2008

Playing 'the Race Card' Card

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 presidential candidate said the following:

“We know what kind of campaign they’re going to run. They’re going to try to make you afraid. They’re going to try to make you afraid of me. … He’s young and inexperienced and he’s got a funny name. And did I mention he’s black?”

I have to admit, I don’t buy the easy dismissal of Obama’s statement as yet another example of someone “playing the race card.”

Are there ever legitimate ways to bring up race? Obama is invoking the fact that Internet rumor-mongering has already begun to circulate claims about him being a Muslim double-agent for Al Qaeda. And there is an obvious history of pre-Swift-boat media campaigns that have deployed African-American difference as a naturalized proxy for assumed categorical criminality (in the hopes of persuading white Americans to vote for Republicans out of racially inflected fear). That controversial 1988 Willie Horton TV ad mounted against Dukakis is only the most famous — and blatant — recent example. A subtler hinting at the threat of racial miscegenation organized the 2006 ad against a non-white senatorial candidate from Tennessee who allegedly met a white woman at the Playboy mansion. In the ad, she winks and tells him to call her.

Is it really unfair to ask voters to be wary of any potentially similar political tricks this campaign season? Is it playing the race card to tell people that you are worried others will play the race card? Or that you think it might be coming, especially given some of the aforementioned campaign history?

Every time someone brings up race/racism isn’t necessarily an example of playing of the race card. Is it? Obama didn’t call McCain a racist. He didn’t say Republicans are trying to defeat him because of his race. He’s just marking the fact that racial identity still gets mobilized to define some people as outside of the legitimate and law-abiding body politic.

If we are ever going to get around to having some serious conversations about these issues, I’ll have to be willing to hear Miller make his case for why Obama is wallowing in something that, according to Miller, stinks to high heaven of race-based insincerity. But Miller also can’t get livid every single time race/racism is ever invoked. When he does, it implies that race can be mentioned only in direct response to a blatant act of unabashed racism. As a last-ditch counterpunch — if that. Otherwise, any invocation of race is just another example of the disingenuous race card. If that is the case, should we simply never, ever talk about race (except, say, when Don Imus says something else semi-controversial)? And for some people, even those Imusian moments hardly merit any serious need to discuss race/racism.

Every white person who talks honestly about race isn’t necessarily a racist. And every time racism gets invoked (as part of America’s past or present) isn’t just another instance of disingenuous demagoguery.

Aren’t there better and worse ways to invoke race/racism? Or does any mention at all mean that one is trafficking in race cardology?

Comment [16]

June 26, 2008

Nader Goes After Obama ...

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: stereotypically) “black” ways.

I do think Nader wanted to emphasize the former interpretation over the latter one. However, looking at him make the comment, he did seem to leave a space ajar for the latter reading, too.

And of course, folks have pounced on that alternative with abandon.

Comment [12]

June 25, 2008

A Documentary on Slavery in the 'Deep North'

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 portion of the film revolves around those familial participants groping around for a language they might productively use to confide in one another (and in one of the film’s African-American producers) about their deepest fears and frustrations around issues of race. And this is one of the places where, as they say, the rubber hits the road. What kinds of dialogues are we usually having about race? Are they empowering or debilitating, sincere or hollow, real or canned? The film offers some answers.

It quickly moves on to a discussion of reparations and a decidedly religious (religiously-inflected) final sequence. The entire thing is worth watching and commenting upon. And it helps to demonstrate why many of the dialogues we have about race and racism in America are not robust enough, especially when the only forms of honest sharing vis-à-vis questions of race tend to happen under the feeble auspices of anonymous Internet comments or in exclusively private machinations/complaints aired only amongst friends.

What might it look like for us to really talk honestly about America’s racial history? Does anybody even want to do that?

Comment [36]

June 23, 2008

A New York Sports Fan Vents!!!



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 and howling with exhalation about tossing that ringless monkey from atop his back.

And not only was I bitter about having my stomach tied up in knots over the threat of a Kobe championship (and his further encroachment on what once seemed like Michael Jordan’s untouchable and incomparable basketball legacy), I also breathed (just this past week) an extra sigh of relief that my New York Giants somehow, miraculously, upset this year’s monsters of professional football, those New England Patriots, which allowed fans in the rest of the country to dodge the ultimate sports bullet: Bostonians vaingloriously claiming a championship-trifecta by coming out on top in the nation’s three most popular team sports. (I was anxiously checking on the scores from Boston Bruins games all December and early January.) New York would have had to relocate itself further south to get away from all the New England junk-talking that would have ensued. Not that I mind such antagonistic and spirited rhetoric, sports matches allow for one of the last great (and low-stakes) bastions for what literary theorist/critic Philip Fisher reminds us are the “vehement passions,” emotions (like anger and grief) that the Greeks once openly relished but that we’ve currently found a way to domesticate/tame into something close to public non-existence.

Of course, as Boston celebrates another championship, my lowly Mets lost their stoic manager and are trying to win some kind of trophy for rabid inconsistency. Good thing the Olympics are here to distract New York sports fans this summer.

Speaking of the Olympics, what do you think of my (mostly) tongue-in-cheek proposal about redefining sports in light of the Olympic games ?

And I have even more going on this week to keep me from thinking about the depressing state of professional sports in NYC: Jury Duty. That is, unless I get assigned to a case with some New York athlete gone wild. I hope not!

Comment [12]

June 20, 2008

Michelle Obama, Anti-American?



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 Barbershop caused such a stir by scripting the kinds of irreverent conversations that often define informal public discussions in the black community, conversations that are sometimes hypercritical of black and white Americans alike. The film demonstrated that nothing is sacrosanct and beyond criticism in such contexts — not Martin Luther King, Jr., not Jesse Jackson, not Rosa Parks — no matter how much they might otherwise be cherished.

Real versions of such self-critical Barbershop comments aren’t self-evident examples of racial self-hatred any more than Michelle Obama’s statements (even before she cleaned them up) are an open-and-shut case of anti-patriotism. Instead, both instances provide examples of the complicated and refreshingly self-critical impulse of vernacular African-American cultural criticism. Of course, this might not play as well “politically” as Mitt Romney’s head-scratching inability to come up with a single thing wrong about contemporary America (remember that), but it seems a lot more honest.

Of course, African Americans don’t corner the market on such tough-love self-criticism, or on the desire for honest public conversations about national and international issues. And, as I argue in my new book, they don’t want to be.

(An aside: To hear me talk a little more about that book, Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness, watch C-Span 2’s BookTV this weekend — Saturday at 9 p.m. or Sunday at 3:30 p.m.)

Comment [45]

June 17, 2008

Multiracialism as Panacea


Was Bulworth onto something?


Over the last two days, I’ve read six different op-eds celebrating the importance of multiracialism. Spurred on by Obama’s historic candidacy, the authors all seem to imply that the road to post-racial Americana is paved by the power of mixed-race relationships. They argue that “multiracial” children confound our traditional racial categories and challenge the very logic of racial reasoning.

A version of this same argument was popularized in 1998 by Warren Beatty’s political satire, “Bulworth.” Beatty plays the main character, an ultra-liberal Democratic Senator from California with a death wish and a hankering for the cathartic potency of hip-hop music.

Senator Bulworth gets more and more comfortable speaking his mind on the campaign trail (indifferent to the mandates of political correctness), and he proffers what he imagines to be a foolproof method for ending American racism: people should exclusively have sex with folks from other racial groups until all the color differences in the country simply fade away, leaving all Americans the same hue.

Although “Bulworth” was clearly an over-the-top romp, a lampooning of contemporary American politics, the main character’s response to racism (by arguing for the power of racial exogamy) seems to anticipate some of the “biopolitical” infatuations of these recent opinion pieces: The only way beyond the racial impasse is with recourse to newfangled biological interventions/normalizations; get rid of visible, color-coded epidermal differences, and the ghost of racisms past will no longer haunt us.

I can appreciate how compelling such a position might seem, but it underestimates the extent to which racism’s cultural and social significance exceeds isolated readings of pigment differences between human beings.

Offering multiracialism as an easy way out of racism’s entrenched clutches underestimates the extent to which racial thinking has already outstripped simplistic biological anchors — and without really losing much of its authority over us at all.

Comment [18]

June 16, 2008

The End of Checkpoints in a D.C. Neighborhood

As someone who spent his undergraduate years in Washington, D.C., I have been trying to follow the controversy around those police checkpoints in the Trinidad neighborhood of the city’s Northeast section. The community was put on lockdown for the bulk of last week while law-enforcement officers checked motorists to make sure that they had a good reason for driving through the area.

This was the city’s attempt to deal with a spike in violent crime, including drive-by’s. Police at those checkpoints required that people provided them with their names and the phone numbers of the places they were visiting in the community, a procedure that angered some residents and encouraged others.

The city believes that desperate times have called for desperate measures. Some residents felt that the process merely demonized everybody and insulted long-term community members.

As of this week, the checkpoint system is no more (at least for now). But cities like Washington are still trying to figure out how to deal effectively with a post-90s uptick in urban crime. Did the checkpoints go too far?

Comment [5]

June 12, 2008

One Los Angeles Judge's Ironic Obscenity Case



The Los Angeles Times just broke a news story about a well-respected judge, Alex Kozinski, chief judge of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, who has been operating a Web site containing some sexually explicit photographs.

The judge’s site was up and running — irony of ironies — even as he began presiding over the obscenity trial of Ira Isaacs, a filmmaker charged with distributing criminally obscene pornography, including shots that depicted bestiality. Another coincidence: the judge’s site also allegedly included some sexual images of people and/with farm animals.

The judge has taken the site down, but he also claims that he didn’t know it could be accessed by the public. His son had maintained it — and might have been responsible for some of the images found there.

However, the judge also admitted that he received those kinds of weird photos all the time — and that he thought they were sometimes pretty funny. He also doesn’t believe that the images on his particular site are obscene — even if they are a little odd and racy.

Now the issue seems to be whether Kozinski should excuse himself from the case. That’s probably an easy call, no?

His site was www.alex.kozinski.com and included much more than just sexual material. It isn’t up right now. He pulled it early this morning. But who knows? Maybe it’ll be back up soon — probably without its more controversial fare. Hopefully, he’ll keep the video from his past appearance on The Dating Game as part the site’s next iteration.

(Image from photobucket.com)

Comment

Previous

Copyright © 2008 by The Chronicle of Higher Education | Contact us
User agreement | Privacy policy | About The Chronicle | Site map | Help
Subscribe | Advertise with us | Press inquiries | RSS | Today's most e-mailed
Home | Chronicle Careers | The Chronicle Review