I don't think Barbara J. Fields is right about everything, but her analysis of race as an ideology, and her call for historians to be clearer - indeed harder - about the ways they write about race are both very important. I think the contributors to this NY Times exchange on Black public intellectuals could have benefited from taking seriously some of the points Fields makes in her older essays, which have been republished in the book she co-authored with her sister, Racecraft.
Fields has a few main points to consider when thinking about and writing about "race" in America:
1) Race is an ideology, which is different from an idea and from propaganda and information. In essence, an ideology derives its meaning from everyday social interactions, and it is at that level of human interaction at which ideologies are made and remade. I tend to think of ideologies as frameworks through which people understand who they are, or maps that people use to navigate their social worlds. The clearest example of an ideology I can think of is religion, or a system of thinking and acting predicated on faith, and through which adherents order their lives and understanding of the world. Race serves a similar function. It is social and ideological; it is real, not because of science or biology, but because people make it real through social interactions and history.
2) Race has history. Fields spends a lot of time explaining this, but in essence, her main idea is that race is not metaphysical, ahistorical, or timeless. It came into existence at certain times for specific economic, political, and social reasons; and people made and remade it over time. Along these lines, race does not "have a life of its own," nor is it responsible for historical action. The best example Fields has of this is that race did not make slavery; slavery made race. If race continues to have meaning after slavery ended that is because people found new social practices in which racial ideology had meaning. In the US, Jim Crow segregation and ghettoization are the two most powerful social-historical phenomenon that have made and remade race over time.
3) For Fields, liberal and progressive intellectuals perpetuate a sloppy understanding of race and veiled sinister practices (her word is evil) when they insist on analyzing "race relations," which Fields rightly criticizes as an undefined system of social interaction, and when they push for diversity initiatives in curriculum and admissions. (I agree with her first point about race relations, but I disagree with her critique of affirmative action and multicultural education. Both do need to be much more specific with respects to how they deal with histories of racial ideology, but that does not mean that the mission of race-based affirmative action and multicultural pedagogy perpetuate the evils of racism.)
She makes many other provocative points, and this is a very rough summary, but I think the contributors in the above mentioned NYT exchange could stand to think more about what she says about racial ideology.
As I read the exchanges, only the scientists and the historian really wrestled with the socially constructed historical nature of racial ideology. (I am not sure exactly what the political scientist's and the religious studies scholar's point was.) Scholars who identify as Black - either because of their personal history or their political and personal ideology - have to fashion ways that their intellectual and professional work does or does not speak to that particular social ideology, and in what ways. While there is certainly not one way to "be Black" - as an intellectual or otherwise - there are certain socially and historically shaped ways - always multiple and always contested - in which Black people understand themselves and their wider world. Like Fields says, those frameworks are products of history and they exist in time and space. An intellectual who identifies as Black and who wants to connect particular social and political issues that some Black people experience to wider discourses and debates needs to be clear and conscious of the multiple communities she represents and addresses. I don't think this is anything new, and what that does or does not have to do with racial ideology depends on social context and history.
The problem with this NY Times exchange is that it made race a rarefied, metaphysical "thing" that Black public intellectuals either spoke to or ignored.
At their best, the participants in the exchange added context and specificity to their responses. They actually explained what it means to think about and make sense of racial ideology and who Black people are - politically, culturally, socially - in time and space.
(C) Brian Purnell, 2013
Tuesday, February 5, 2013
Monday, February 4, 2013
Rast Trent in a VW - Is It Racist When a White (American) Immitates Jamaican Patois?
I'll answer the above question in a real weak way - it all depends, but in this case, not really. Frankly, I think the VW add that has gotten so much attention is more silly than sinister.
Here's the premise: a predominantly white setting - an office park, perhaps in the American mid-West, which features what appears to be a nearly all white, all make work force. One man is perhaps American, perhaps of east Asian descent. A handful of white women work there too. A white man from Minnesota imitates Jamaican patois as he goes around, smiling and spouting funny sayings to encourage everyone to be push away their Monday morning doldrums. In one clip he tells a clearly frustrated female colleague to "turn that frown the other way." The character is goofy and when I see it, I don't see anything that remotely resembles Jamaican or West Indian people, or even an attempt to mimic Jamaican people. If the presentation of a clearly non-Jamaican person tried to do that - in satire or even in an exploitative way - that would be, as NY Times columnist Charles Blow said, "black face with voices." But I don't think that's what is happening here.
This commercial spoofs Americans and Westerners, mostly white, but perhaps of any color, who adopt a cartoon-like version of West Indian and Caribbean style and aesthetics as a means of stepping outside their own seemingly humdrum social and professional worlds. Think of the American tourists who spend a week in Montego Bay and braid their hair and burn their skin as a means of vacating from their everyday lives of work and kids and commuting. I think the ad makes fun of those people more than anything or anyone.
A clearly satiric - and I think hilarious - spoof of white Americans "playing Jamaican" is Andy Samberg's character, "Ras Trent."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcK0MYgnHjo
Samberg is much clearer about who is the butt of his parody: white privileged college students who play at being Rastafarian as a means of rebelling against class, religious and parental conformity. But Ras Trent and the character in the VW commercial are two sides of the same coin - privileged Americans with money who escape via what they imagine to be authentic, carefree, happy Jamaican culture. In truth, both the VW and the Ras Trent spook tell us more about the vapidness of those privileged Americans than about Jamaica or its people.
Before I saw the VW add, I heard about it on the Public Radio International radio program, "The World." The podcast is available here:
http://www.theworld.org/2013/02/is-it-racist-for-a-white-guy-to-speak-jamaican-patois/
The podcast features an interview with Karen James, a journalist in Kingston, Jamaica. Her analysis is smart and basically, without directly saying so, I think she lets-on that the reason many Jamaicans are not offended by this add is that they are laughing at silly Americans making fools of themselves wasting money getting high and drunk and what have you during their Caribbean get away.
There are real exploitative issues at work in Jamaica's relationship with the wider world, namely that a place like Jamaica faces problems of debilitating poverty while at the same time serving as an international playground for massive levels of conspicuous consumption through its tourism industry.
Unfortunately, the VW commercial has not prompted conversation about that type of economic exploitation and imbalance.
And this is where I part ways with Karen James's analysis. She welcomed the VW commercial as a positive presentation of Jamaica and Jamaican people. (She even made an interesting argument about how the commercial uplifts Jamaican patois as authentic language, although it is ironic that a white American male playing Jamaican becomes the international vehicle through which Jamaican linguistics attains legitimacy.) As a journalist beset with the everyday problems Jamaicans face - poverty in the midst of plenty, and crime, violence, economic segregation - she no doubt saw this commercial as a chance to embrace a lighter side of life in her home, the side in which Jamaicans promote positivity and happiness to the jet-setters, wedding parties, spring breakers, and middle and working class vacationers who come to the island's white beaches to spend a week or so forgetting about their first-world problems. Perhaps, for a change, a spoof of how silly vacationing Americans look when they bring back their sing-song West Indian speak to their banal office parks can offer beleaguered Jamaicans a respite from their troubles. I can't fault her for feeling that way.
But I wish that instead of debating whether or not the VW add is racist, Americans could have a serious talk about how economic exploitation shapes life Jamaica, and about how international trade policies and histories of colonialism make possible that inequality, as well as Americans' enjoyment of it via tourism. In short, let's have some intelligent national talk about the themes raised in the 2001 documentary film, Life and Debt.
Because just like VW will laugh all the way to the bank through this parody of Americans playing West Indian, someone is getting rich off all of the decadence American tourists experience during the sun fun weeks in Jamaica.
And it certainly isn't the vast majority of Jamaicans.
Here's the premise: a predominantly white setting - an office park, perhaps in the American mid-West, which features what appears to be a nearly all white, all make work force. One man is perhaps American, perhaps of east Asian descent. A handful of white women work there too. A white man from Minnesota imitates Jamaican patois as he goes around, smiling and spouting funny sayings to encourage everyone to be push away their Monday morning doldrums. In one clip he tells a clearly frustrated female colleague to "turn that frown the other way." The character is goofy and when I see it, I don't see anything that remotely resembles Jamaican or West Indian people, or even an attempt to mimic Jamaican people. If the presentation of a clearly non-Jamaican person tried to do that - in satire or even in an exploitative way - that would be, as NY Times columnist Charles Blow said, "black face with voices." But I don't think that's what is happening here.
This commercial spoofs Americans and Westerners, mostly white, but perhaps of any color, who adopt a cartoon-like version of West Indian and Caribbean style and aesthetics as a means of stepping outside their own seemingly humdrum social and professional worlds. Think of the American tourists who spend a week in Montego Bay and braid their hair and burn their skin as a means of vacating from their everyday lives of work and kids and commuting. I think the ad makes fun of those people more than anything or anyone.
A clearly satiric - and I think hilarious - spoof of white Americans "playing Jamaican" is Andy Samberg's character, "Ras Trent."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcK0MYgnHjo
Samberg is much clearer about who is the butt of his parody: white privileged college students who play at being Rastafarian as a means of rebelling against class, religious and parental conformity. But Ras Trent and the character in the VW commercial are two sides of the same coin - privileged Americans with money who escape via what they imagine to be authentic, carefree, happy Jamaican culture. In truth, both the VW and the Ras Trent spook tell us more about the vapidness of those privileged Americans than about Jamaica or its people.
Before I saw the VW add, I heard about it on the Public Radio International radio program, "The World." The podcast is available here:
http://www.theworld.org/2013/02/is-it-racist-for-a-white-guy-to-speak-jamaican-patois/
The podcast features an interview with Karen James, a journalist in Kingston, Jamaica. Her analysis is smart and basically, without directly saying so, I think she lets-on that the reason many Jamaicans are not offended by this add is that they are laughing at silly Americans making fools of themselves wasting money getting high and drunk and what have you during their Caribbean get away.
There are real exploitative issues at work in Jamaica's relationship with the wider world, namely that a place like Jamaica faces problems of debilitating poverty while at the same time serving as an international playground for massive levels of conspicuous consumption through its tourism industry.
Unfortunately, the VW commercial has not prompted conversation about that type of economic exploitation and imbalance.
And this is where I part ways with Karen James's analysis. She welcomed the VW commercial as a positive presentation of Jamaica and Jamaican people. (She even made an interesting argument about how the commercial uplifts Jamaican patois as authentic language, although it is ironic that a white American male playing Jamaican becomes the international vehicle through which Jamaican linguistics attains legitimacy.) As a journalist beset with the everyday problems Jamaicans face - poverty in the midst of plenty, and crime, violence, economic segregation - she no doubt saw this commercial as a chance to embrace a lighter side of life in her home, the side in which Jamaicans promote positivity and happiness to the jet-setters, wedding parties, spring breakers, and middle and working class vacationers who come to the island's white beaches to spend a week or so forgetting about their first-world problems. Perhaps, for a change, a spoof of how silly vacationing Americans look when they bring back their sing-song West Indian speak to their banal office parks can offer beleaguered Jamaicans a respite from their troubles. I can't fault her for feeling that way.
But I wish that instead of debating whether or not the VW add is racist, Americans could have a serious talk about how economic exploitation shapes life Jamaica, and about how international trade policies and histories of colonialism make possible that inequality, as well as Americans' enjoyment of it via tourism. In short, let's have some intelligent national talk about the themes raised in the 2001 documentary film, Life and Debt.
Because just like VW will laugh all the way to the bank through this parody of Americans playing West Indian, someone is getting rich off all of the decadence American tourists experience during the sun fun weeks in Jamaica.
And it certainly isn't the vast majority of Jamaicans.
Sunday, February 3, 2013
Amituofo - Blessings from the heart
This weekend my family and I drove to New York City to celebrate the 100 day naming ceremony for my niece, Zoe Amaez. My brother-in-law, Daniel Amaez, is a Buddhist disciple and student of Shi Yan Ming, the founder of the USA Shaolin Temple. Danny and his wife, Diana, held Zoe's naming ceremony at the Temple, and it was a beautiful event filled with good food, family, friends, and all-around positive vibes.
In this, my first blog post in a very long time, I wanted to share a meditation that I read posted on a wall in the Temple. I think it is a standard reflection in Chan Buddhism. When I read it, I found it so simple and inspiring.
"Before I was born, who was I?
After I am born, who am I?
Respect yourself, and everyone will respect you.
Understand yourself, and everyone will understand you.
There are mirrors all around you:
Strive to see and understand yourself.
Strive to have the heart of a Buddha.
Stop doing bad things, only do good.
Do whatever you can to help others.
In these ways you help yourself.
Help yourself, and you help the world."
During the naming ceremony, Shifu, which is the term for "Master," or even "Teacher," and is the title most people use when speaking with Shi Yan Ming, explained some principles of Chan Buddhism. "Amituofo," is a common term members of the Temple use in many difference scenarios: when greeting each other, or visitors; when entering or leaving the Temple; before they execute a Kung Fu form. Another disciple invited me to have a drink of Chinese "wine" with my brother-in-law and a few other members of the Temple. "Amituofo," can even mean cheers, or bottoms-up. When Shifu talked about Amituofo durint Zoe's naming ceremony he explained that all faith traditions are beautiful, and so are all people. "Jesus Christ is wonderful," Shifu said. "Christianity, is beautiful." In his explanation of Chan Buddhist philosophy, no hierarchy of belief existed. All Gods, all beliefs, all people were good and excellent, and all paths to peace were beautiful.
The entire spirit of the ceremony and the people just made me smile. "Do whatever you can to help others. In these ways you help yourself. Help yourself, and you help the world."
Amituofo!
In this, my first blog post in a very long time, I wanted to share a meditation that I read posted on a wall in the Temple. I think it is a standard reflection in Chan Buddhism. When I read it, I found it so simple and inspiring.
"Before I was born, who was I?
After I am born, who am I?
Respect yourself, and everyone will respect you.
Understand yourself, and everyone will understand you.
There are mirrors all around you:
Strive to see and understand yourself.
Strive to have the heart of a Buddha.
Stop doing bad things, only do good.
Do whatever you can to help others.
In these ways you help yourself.
Help yourself, and you help the world."
During the naming ceremony, Shifu, which is the term for "Master," or even "Teacher," and is the title most people use when speaking with Shi Yan Ming, explained some principles of Chan Buddhism. "Amituofo," is a common term members of the Temple use in many difference scenarios: when greeting each other, or visitors; when entering or leaving the Temple; before they execute a Kung Fu form. Another disciple invited me to have a drink of Chinese "wine" with my brother-in-law and a few other members of the Temple. "Amituofo," can even mean cheers, or bottoms-up. When Shifu talked about Amituofo durint Zoe's naming ceremony he explained that all faith traditions are beautiful, and so are all people. "Jesus Christ is wonderful," Shifu said. "Christianity, is beautiful." In his explanation of Chan Buddhist philosophy, no hierarchy of belief existed. All Gods, all beliefs, all people were good and excellent, and all paths to peace were beautiful.
The entire spirit of the ceremony and the people just made me smile. "Do whatever you can to help others. In these ways you help yourself. Help yourself, and you help the world."
Amituofo!
Thursday, May 24, 2012
A Game of Thrones - Brief Reflection
Confession: I have a weakness for well-written television shows that I can binge watch for hours and hours and hours. Subscribing to a premium cable TV network (which will remain nameless until I earn a check for dropping its name, but soon become self-evident) has not helped my addiction. Not only can I access the shows I crave on my actual television, but I can log on to an "on-demand" website and watch old episodes of dozens of great series. If a twelve step program for people who fiend these serial television shows does not exist it soon will. Given the amount of TV I've watched lately I am not sure how I've been able to work my job and pay attention to my kids. I need a sponsor and a meeting to get right.
Game of Thrones has become my latest high of choice. Like every fiend, a friend got me hooked. "Yo, you gotta watch Game of Thrones," another couple told my wife and I. "It is straight up sex and violence." Suspend speculating why we'd be so attracted to an hour-long visual orgy of quasi-soft porn and swordsmen hacking limbs and heads. While the description of Thrones was accurate, the show's characters, scenery, and story line rise above its trite licentiousness. The sex scenes are so common and ludicrous that I treat them as commercial breaks. The gore sometimes gets in the way of the story line. (The New Yorker published a good review of the series and an even better long article on the author, George R. R. Martin, whose 800-page books were the first drafts of the show's screenplays.) My wife and I became hooked. We took a week-long vacation to Westros, the show's medieval fantasy world setting, and watched the first season practically in one sitting. Family members visited for a long weekend and, like the good pushers we were, we made them sit in our living room and inject the first season - all 10 episodes. Now, on Sunday nights, after we put down our children, my wife and I get our fix of Game of Thrones and Mad Men. When our four-and-a-half year old daughter asked if she could stay up late and watch TV with us we told her that mommy and daddy watched grown-up shows on Sunday night. "Oh, you mean Game of Thrones," she said. It was like she found our works and white powder hidden in the sock drawer.
Martin certainly created an amazing fantasy universe filled with warring kingdoms, overgrown cerebral killer wolves, eunuchs, three baby dragons, one smart mouthed scene stealing little person, a seemingly endless amount of brothels and bastards, a giant bad-ass sword wielding woman, a teen-age girl who is impervious to fire, and the occasional pinch of sadistic torture and incest. I started reading the first book in Martin's series A Song of Ice and Fire (the television series takes its title from this book) and am half way through it. The television show is on its second season, which corresponds to Martin's second title in the series. The book is entertaining, but I doubt I will read the others. They are very long page turners and like the show, more akin to candy than literature. Some, of Martin's characters are captivating and complicated. Ned Stark, Lord of the North, around whom the first book's narrative revolves, is honor-bound and dutiful, which endears him to readers while at the same time enraging other characters. He also stepped out on his wife and sired a bastard son, Jon Snow, which adds a dab of dirt to his otherwise spotless character. Tyrion Lannister, the dwarf son of the book's version of the Bush family-meets the Saudi aristocracy, is by far the most entertaining and engrossing character in the television series and the book. He is an outcast who so clearly dominates every dialogue and scene. Similar to when I watched The Wire for the first, second, and fifth time, and I moved to the edge of the couch when I saw Omar coming, I can't help but smile when Peter Dinklage appears on screen. I also find Aria Stark, Ned Stark's youngest tomboy daughter, and his bastard, Jon Snow, to be captivating and complicated. As the review in The New Yorker observed, the show captures in a compelling way the pains of outsider status and the slippery ways pariah figures - dwarfs, bastards, women - seek and wield power.
I've had my fun. When I finish the book I will go back to reading Richard Price novels and monographs for work. I will continue to watch the series because, if indeed we are living through a new golden age of television, the network that gives us Game of Thrones is certainly at the forefront of this historic era. Game of Thrones is not The Wire (really, is anything?); nor does it illicit the grotesque sympathies that drew people into The Sopranos and Mad Men. But thanks to George R. R. Martin's ability to weave together an entire fantasy continent - several actually - and the network's ability to shoot on location in some pretty amazing places, the television series does exactly what good television should do: it entertains and enlightens. Beyond the brothels and the blood here are a few reasons to get hooked on Game of Thrones:
1) The show depicts how bad politics and society can become when sons inherit power and fortune from fathers. In fact, the entire sub-theme of outsiders like the bastard Jon Snow, the dwarf Tyrion Lannister, and nearly every woman in the show, who are trying to establish themselves as individuals and to attain some stature beyond their station is a subtle argument against hereditary and class-based domination of social and political power. The show has two words for why the practice of giving the same positions of power and privilege to the same people (and the practice of incest) is just plain bad: Joffrey Baratheon. In the real world, when we promote policies that create diversity - all kinds of diversity and especially racial and gender and class - we diminish the ability of someone like that to constantly rise to power (and sadistically torture people).
2) The show has powerful women characters, some of whom are stereotypically despicable (Cersei Lannister seems a bit like a photo copy of every wicked step mother witch) but others (Aria Stark, Catelyn Stark, and Daenerys Targaryen) who, while not without flaws, possess depth and humor and tremendous courage. Clearly, given the show's predilection for gratuitous female nudity, it does not have feminist leanings. But the women characters give a dynamic and varied depiction of women who want and possess power and use it, or seek to use it, in multiple, complicated, contradictory ways. Anyone who thinks the world would instantly be better if women ran politics should consider some ideas presented in this show.
3) The fantasy world of Westros issues a strong critique of possessing political power for power's sake. Unfortunately, the politics that drive conflict in Game of Thrones is wrapped up on familial bloodletting and feuding and disconnected from the engine that historically drives wars for possession of power: economics, trade, and land possession. Clearly, some form of labor and taxation fills the coffers of the Seven Kingdoms, but viewers don't see that side of the politics. Instead, the game of thrones is a game of personalities and entitlement and honor. Common people either serve dutifully or don't appear, and on one occasion rioted uncontrollably in a very disorganized, depoliticized way. None the less, politics, even if it is a watered-down-made-for-TV version of politics is at the center of this show. And Game of Thrones does show how, except for those who operate the levers of power, greed, corruption, and manipulation turn everything to shit. Eventually, those kings and queens who posses power, or those people who don't understand it, also wind up with their heads on spikes. The show invites viewers to ask, what of the masses of people whose daily lives are constantly effected by the missteps of the few? That is always an important question to consider.
Game of Thrones has become my latest high of choice. Like every fiend, a friend got me hooked. "Yo, you gotta watch Game of Thrones," another couple told my wife and I. "It is straight up sex and violence." Suspend speculating why we'd be so attracted to an hour-long visual orgy of quasi-soft porn and swordsmen hacking limbs and heads. While the description of Thrones was accurate, the show's characters, scenery, and story line rise above its trite licentiousness. The sex scenes are so common and ludicrous that I treat them as commercial breaks. The gore sometimes gets in the way of the story line. (The New Yorker published a good review of the series and an even better long article on the author, George R. R. Martin, whose 800-page books were the first drafts of the show's screenplays.) My wife and I became hooked. We took a week-long vacation to Westros, the show's medieval fantasy world setting, and watched the first season practically in one sitting. Family members visited for a long weekend and, like the good pushers we were, we made them sit in our living room and inject the first season - all 10 episodes. Now, on Sunday nights, after we put down our children, my wife and I get our fix of Game of Thrones and Mad Men. When our four-and-a-half year old daughter asked if she could stay up late and watch TV with us we told her that mommy and daddy watched grown-up shows on Sunday night. "Oh, you mean Game of Thrones," she said. It was like she found our works and white powder hidden in the sock drawer.
Martin certainly created an amazing fantasy universe filled with warring kingdoms, overgrown cerebral killer wolves, eunuchs, three baby dragons, one smart mouthed scene stealing little person, a seemingly endless amount of brothels and bastards, a giant bad-ass sword wielding woman, a teen-age girl who is impervious to fire, and the occasional pinch of sadistic torture and incest. I started reading the first book in Martin's series A Song of Ice and Fire (the television series takes its title from this book) and am half way through it. The television show is on its second season, which corresponds to Martin's second title in the series. The book is entertaining, but I doubt I will read the others. They are very long page turners and like the show, more akin to candy than literature. Some, of Martin's characters are captivating and complicated. Ned Stark, Lord of the North, around whom the first book's narrative revolves, is honor-bound and dutiful, which endears him to readers while at the same time enraging other characters. He also stepped out on his wife and sired a bastard son, Jon Snow, which adds a dab of dirt to his otherwise spotless character. Tyrion Lannister, the dwarf son of the book's version of the Bush family-meets the Saudi aristocracy, is by far the most entertaining and engrossing character in the television series and the book. He is an outcast who so clearly dominates every dialogue and scene. Similar to when I watched The Wire for the first, second, and fifth time, and I moved to the edge of the couch when I saw Omar coming, I can't help but smile when Peter Dinklage appears on screen. I also find Aria Stark, Ned Stark's youngest tomboy daughter, and his bastard, Jon Snow, to be captivating and complicated. As the review in The New Yorker observed, the show captures in a compelling way the pains of outsider status and the slippery ways pariah figures - dwarfs, bastards, women - seek and wield power.
I've had my fun. When I finish the book I will go back to reading Richard Price novels and monographs for work. I will continue to watch the series because, if indeed we are living through a new golden age of television, the network that gives us Game of Thrones is certainly at the forefront of this historic era. Game of Thrones is not The Wire (really, is anything?); nor does it illicit the grotesque sympathies that drew people into The Sopranos and Mad Men. But thanks to George R. R. Martin's ability to weave together an entire fantasy continent - several actually - and the network's ability to shoot on location in some pretty amazing places, the television series does exactly what good television should do: it entertains and enlightens. Beyond the brothels and the blood here are a few reasons to get hooked on Game of Thrones:
1) The show depicts how bad politics and society can become when sons inherit power and fortune from fathers. In fact, the entire sub-theme of outsiders like the bastard Jon Snow, the dwarf Tyrion Lannister, and nearly every woman in the show, who are trying to establish themselves as individuals and to attain some stature beyond their station is a subtle argument against hereditary and class-based domination of social and political power. The show has two words for why the practice of giving the same positions of power and privilege to the same people (and the practice of incest) is just plain bad: Joffrey Baratheon. In the real world, when we promote policies that create diversity - all kinds of diversity and especially racial and gender and class - we diminish the ability of someone like that to constantly rise to power (and sadistically torture people).
2) The show has powerful women characters, some of whom are stereotypically despicable (Cersei Lannister seems a bit like a photo copy of every wicked step mother witch) but others (Aria Stark, Catelyn Stark, and Daenerys Targaryen) who, while not without flaws, possess depth and humor and tremendous courage. Clearly, given the show's predilection for gratuitous female nudity, it does not have feminist leanings. But the women characters give a dynamic and varied depiction of women who want and possess power and use it, or seek to use it, in multiple, complicated, contradictory ways. Anyone who thinks the world would instantly be better if women ran politics should consider some ideas presented in this show.
3) The fantasy world of Westros issues a strong critique of possessing political power for power's sake. Unfortunately, the politics that drive conflict in Game of Thrones is wrapped up on familial bloodletting and feuding and disconnected from the engine that historically drives wars for possession of power: economics, trade, and land possession. Clearly, some form of labor and taxation fills the coffers of the Seven Kingdoms, but viewers don't see that side of the politics. Instead, the game of thrones is a game of personalities and entitlement and honor. Common people either serve dutifully or don't appear, and on one occasion rioted uncontrollably in a very disorganized, depoliticized way. None the less, politics, even if it is a watered-down-made-for-TV version of politics is at the center of this show. And Game of Thrones does show how, except for those who operate the levers of power, greed, corruption, and manipulation turn everything to shit. Eventually, those kings and queens who posses power, or those people who don't understand it, also wind up with their heads on spikes. The show invites viewers to ask, what of the masses of people whose daily lives are constantly effected by the missteps of the few? That is always an important question to consider.
Friday, May 11, 2012
Fiction II
On nights when the breeze was just right, the smell of the bay filled the streets. It hung, like signs of high tide along the concrete wall that surrounded the water and skirted the southern edge of the neighborhood. The water came in from the Long Island sound, and before that, from the Atlantic, cold and greenish brown. It carried small fish, blue bellied crabs and odd collections of garbage that boat riders chucked overboard on lazy summer afternoons: pieces from styrophoam coolers, aluminum foil, and empty cans of Bud. A greasy gasoline film coated parts of the bay's skin, and if the sunlight hit just right, the oil slick made murky rainbow colors. When the tide went out it coated the retaining wall with a wave shaped outline of grime. The bay gave off a mixed scent of ocean, brine, fish guts, and sewage, but it had its own beauty, its own charm, especially on evenings in the summer. People strolled along Emmons, or stopped and rested their elbows on the rails of a pier or the East 27th street promenade or the wooden bridge that crossed the bay and connected Sheepshead to Manhattan Beach, hands clasped together in a lazy prayer position or cupped around a cigarette, staring out at the water. Crews from charter boats with names like "Dorothy B IV," "Brooklyn III," "Happy Ours," and "Fugetaboutit!" scrubbed down the decks while fishmongers hawked fresh Blues, Striped Bass, Flukes, and boys trolled the pillars with nets at the end of seven foot polls and white plastic buckets in search of crabs clinging to the wall or pier pillars. Smells of baked clams and fried shrimp and oysters mixed with the bay. Teenagers hung out. Nine-to-fivers walked briskly from the station at the Bay Road to attached homes and apartments. The large highrises at the edge of Coney Island dotted the western horizon. Manhattan Beach's mansions sat quietly to the South. The Sheepshead side, the Emmons Avenue side, was dotted with piers and restaurants and cafes and bars apartments and bungalows and the occasional empty lot. Beyond the Bay facing East loomed the Marine Parkway Bridge, Breezy Point, and Rockaway. Sheepshead was its boats and bay and stores, and a crusty mix of people that made a home in this southern edge of Brooklyn.
Thursday, May 10, 2012
Why the Naomi Schaefer Riley/CHE Media Storm Has Nothing to do with Black Studies
The hubbub that brewed in the aftermath of Naomi Schaefer Riley's blog post slamming Black Studies proves why news, commentary, and facts - information itself - in the digital, internet age is, at best, shadowy and shallow. At worst, they are nonexistent. Welcome to the new normal.
One writer does a decent but still somewhat stereotypical piece on the current state of Black Studies - stereotypical insofar as Stacey Patton can't help but situate this academic field in a one-dimensional understanding of the "swaggering" political context of the 1960s. The PhD students Patton profiled are different from their predecessors in Black Studies, she opens, because these new scholars were "not baptized in the fire of racial politics." To be fair to Patton, there is much more to her original article than cliches about dashikis and identity politics. She actually does research and interviews some of the top scholars in the field, namely Kahlil Gibran Muhammad, Director of the Schomburg Center; Mark Anthony Neal, Professor of African American Studies at Duke; Darlene Clark Hine, one of the Deans of African American History; and Martha Biondi, whose book on the 1960s-era, student rebellion origins of Black Studies academic programs is due out this summer. Overall, Patton gives readers a dynamic portrait of some of the exciting new scholarship coming out of Black Studies. Still, the article is slightly flawed because it can't help positing the contemporary scholarship as a progression, indeed a maturation, away from highly politicized 1960s era from which Black Studies supposedly originated.
Colleges and universities - correction, historically white colleges and universities (HWCUs) - may have developed what we now call Black Studies (Africana Studies, African American Studies) after the late-1960s, and PhD programs grew in the decades that followed, but Black Colleges and Universities and Black scholars have been engaged in an academic field of that is easily recognizable as "Black Studies" for many, many years. George Washington Williams published the pioneering history of people of African descent in the 1880s. Journalist activist Ida B Wells conducted investigative reporting in the late-nineteenth century that overturned arguments about Black male licentiousness, challenged myths about Black rapists, and indicted America mores that justified lynch law. Carter G. Woodson started the Association of the Study of Negro Life and History, and the Journal of Negro History, in the 1910s. W.E.B. DuBois initiated a series of studies of Black life from his position at Atlanta University. John Hope Franklin's book, From Slavery to Freedom, first published in 1947, made the African American experience central to US history. Dozens of other examples of Black Studies existing before the 1960s exist. And yet the story often still begins with campus take overs and nationalists and identity politics. As Martha Biondi, Ibram Rogers, Peniel Joseph and others have shown, cultural nationalism was an important part of the late-1960s political, intellectual and artistic movements, but Black Power was about much more than an Afro pick.
As well-intentioned as Patton's article was, I am not surprised that Naomi Schafer Riley, the latest right-wing wunderkind to become a leading voice slamming liberal arts education, tenured professors, and everything to the Left of Ronald Reagan, used it as fodder for her own conservative claptrap. In Riley's CHE blog post, she uses Patton's PhD students to take aim at the entire field of Black Studies, calling it everything but a child of God. Now, after a groundswell of outrage from the PhD students themselves to Black pundits like Melissa Harris Perry, the CHE has fired Riley, Riley has shot back from the protective conservative cover of the Wall Street Journal, and round and round the brouhaha goes. By next week, people will have moved on to the next controversy, wracking up tweets, hits, blog posts, and a whole lot of smoke with very little intellectual fire.
As a professor in an Africana Studies program at a liberal arts college, these conversations (if you can really call them that) irk me to no end. First, they are often initiated by people who know very little or nothing about Black Studies. Patton's piece came from a good place, but is it really newsworthy to write about PhD students defending their dissertation? If the CHE wanted to highlight a significant story about academic work on Black Studies, isn't there something out there to cover more substantial, more advanced than dissertations that are just-out-the-printer? Riley's blog post had absolutely nothing to do with Black Studies, and everything to do with her own personal axe grinding. While Riley's rant generates a lot of buzz, if people really want to know and discuss and debate the merits and deficiencies of Black Studies - which is certainly a worthy debate to have - Riley's water-cooler diatribe is a poor way to go about that. Second, when media outlets privilege blog traffic and tweets above comprehensive investigations and deeper frameworks for informative stories, than intelligent debate and knowledge about a subject are very difficult if not impossible to generate. If the CHE wanted to do an informed piece on Black Studies there are a dozen scholars who are also good writers, some of whom work in Black Studies and some of whom do not, who could have written that piece. Or perhaps the CHE could have given Patton more time, space, and resources to produce a more comprehensive, well-rounded portrayal of the past, present and future of Black Studies programs. Instead, Patton's piece centered on one side of Black Studies - its political origins as an academic field - and gave readers nothing about its other sides - its long standing position as an intellectual critique and field of study rooted in Western, modern thought. When Riley saw Patton's piece, as a smarter, more polished Anne Coulter, she couldn't help but write something incendiary and ignorant.
Riley is not a racist. She should not be pilloried for picking on graduate students. I do think it is sloppy that she commented vehemently about things she did not even read, but that is not totally her fault. Riley's blog piece should be attacked as a simplistic, cartoonish critique of Black Studies, but Riley was just responding to another piece that had its own minor problems with superficiality. When one reads Patton's original piece, though, given her interviews and variety of comments from contemporary leaders in the field of Black Studies, it raises the question: did Riley even read that piece in its entirety, or did she stop at the dissertation titles and load up her right-wing six-shooters, go to her laptop, and blaze away at symbols of her imaginary liberal-Left cancer destroying intellectual life?
The real danger here is media outlets and editors who care more about speed and sensationalism and less about thorough, smart, well-worked stories. The CHE should seriously rethink how it reports stories. It should not cut corners and stoop low if its mission is to spark debate about higher education.
One writer does a decent but still somewhat stereotypical piece on the current state of Black Studies - stereotypical insofar as Stacey Patton can't help but situate this academic field in a one-dimensional understanding of the "swaggering" political context of the 1960s. The PhD students Patton profiled are different from their predecessors in Black Studies, she opens, because these new scholars were "not baptized in the fire of racial politics." To be fair to Patton, there is much more to her original article than cliches about dashikis and identity politics. She actually does research and interviews some of the top scholars in the field, namely Kahlil Gibran Muhammad, Director of the Schomburg Center; Mark Anthony Neal, Professor of African American Studies at Duke; Darlene Clark Hine, one of the Deans of African American History; and Martha Biondi, whose book on the 1960s-era, student rebellion origins of Black Studies academic programs is due out this summer. Overall, Patton gives readers a dynamic portrait of some of the exciting new scholarship coming out of Black Studies. Still, the article is slightly flawed because it can't help positing the contemporary scholarship as a progression, indeed a maturation, away from highly politicized 1960s era from which Black Studies supposedly originated.
Colleges and universities - correction, historically white colleges and universities (HWCUs) - may have developed what we now call Black Studies (Africana Studies, African American Studies) after the late-1960s, and PhD programs grew in the decades that followed, but Black Colleges and Universities and Black scholars have been engaged in an academic field of that is easily recognizable as "Black Studies" for many, many years. George Washington Williams published the pioneering history of people of African descent in the 1880s. Journalist activist Ida B Wells conducted investigative reporting in the late-nineteenth century that overturned arguments about Black male licentiousness, challenged myths about Black rapists, and indicted America mores that justified lynch law. Carter G. Woodson started the Association of the Study of Negro Life and History, and the Journal of Negro History, in the 1910s. W.E.B. DuBois initiated a series of studies of Black life from his position at Atlanta University. John Hope Franklin's book, From Slavery to Freedom, first published in 1947, made the African American experience central to US history. Dozens of other examples of Black Studies existing before the 1960s exist. And yet the story often still begins with campus take overs and nationalists and identity politics. As Martha Biondi, Ibram Rogers, Peniel Joseph and others have shown, cultural nationalism was an important part of the late-1960s political, intellectual and artistic movements, but Black Power was about much more than an Afro pick.
As well-intentioned as Patton's article was, I am not surprised that Naomi Schafer Riley, the latest right-wing wunderkind to become a leading voice slamming liberal arts education, tenured professors, and everything to the Left of Ronald Reagan, used it as fodder for her own conservative claptrap. In Riley's CHE blog post, she uses Patton's PhD students to take aim at the entire field of Black Studies, calling it everything but a child of God. Now, after a groundswell of outrage from the PhD students themselves to Black pundits like Melissa Harris Perry, the CHE has fired Riley, Riley has shot back from the protective conservative cover of the Wall Street Journal, and round and round the brouhaha goes. By next week, people will have moved on to the next controversy, wracking up tweets, hits, blog posts, and a whole lot of smoke with very little intellectual fire.
As a professor in an Africana Studies program at a liberal arts college, these conversations (if you can really call them that) irk me to no end. First, they are often initiated by people who know very little or nothing about Black Studies. Patton's piece came from a good place, but is it really newsworthy to write about PhD students defending their dissertation? If the CHE wanted to highlight a significant story about academic work on Black Studies, isn't there something out there to cover more substantial, more advanced than dissertations that are just-out-the-printer? Riley's blog post had absolutely nothing to do with Black Studies, and everything to do with her own personal axe grinding. While Riley's rant generates a lot of buzz, if people really want to know and discuss and debate the merits and deficiencies of Black Studies - which is certainly a worthy debate to have - Riley's water-cooler diatribe is a poor way to go about that. Second, when media outlets privilege blog traffic and tweets above comprehensive investigations and deeper frameworks for informative stories, than intelligent debate and knowledge about a subject are very difficult if not impossible to generate. If the CHE wanted to do an informed piece on Black Studies there are a dozen scholars who are also good writers, some of whom work in Black Studies and some of whom do not, who could have written that piece. Or perhaps the CHE could have given Patton more time, space, and resources to produce a more comprehensive, well-rounded portrayal of the past, present and future of Black Studies programs. Instead, Patton's piece centered on one side of Black Studies - its political origins as an academic field - and gave readers nothing about its other sides - its long standing position as an intellectual critique and field of study rooted in Western, modern thought. When Riley saw Patton's piece, as a smarter, more polished Anne Coulter, she couldn't help but write something incendiary and ignorant.
Riley is not a racist. She should not be pilloried for picking on graduate students. I do think it is sloppy that she commented vehemently about things she did not even read, but that is not totally her fault. Riley's blog piece should be attacked as a simplistic, cartoonish critique of Black Studies, but Riley was just responding to another piece that had its own minor problems with superficiality. When one reads Patton's original piece, though, given her interviews and variety of comments from contemporary leaders in the field of Black Studies, it raises the question: did Riley even read that piece in its entirety, or did she stop at the dissertation titles and load up her right-wing six-shooters, go to her laptop, and blaze away at symbols of her imaginary liberal-Left cancer destroying intellectual life?
The real danger here is media outlets and editors who care more about speed and sensationalism and less about thorough, smart, well-worked stories. The CHE should seriously rethink how it reports stories. It should not cut corners and stoop low if its mission is to spark debate about higher education.
Thursday, May 3, 2012
Fiction I
"I'd say the nightmare is always the same, but that'd be a lie. People say that shit in movies. Every night I have the same bad dream. Bull fucking shit. I live a nightmare. It ain't when I'm sleeping. What happens if I sleep, that shit is just a dream. Parts feel real. I can seem'im clear - not really his face - but I can see the parts of him I saw - and it feels real. I can feel the blast, but not see it, cause I never saw it. But I know all of it is fake. It is all fake. When I have it, the dream, I know it's bull shit Because when I wake up - that's when the real nightmares begin."
___
My keys. I need my keys. Got my ruck sack. Got my water - my keys - need my keys - my d-tags. Got my gifts for my niece - my grand niece - wait - wow - "Hey! What is Joey's grand daughter - what am I - I ain't yelling! Whose yelling! I'm just projecting my voice, Mair. Hey, what's Joey's grand daughter - what am I to Kayla, and I her grand uncle, in-law? What does it matter?! Mair, all I'm doin' is askin' - I can't ask a question! Ah Jesus Mair, whuthufuk! Yeah, I'm goin', don't worry aboudit." Got my ruck sack with the gifts. Got my water. Got my disc man with my Hank Williams. Got my - my great grand niece I guess. I'll be dipped in shit. What is she - what am I to her - let's see - Joey is my wife's brother and she's his granddaughter so I am her - Got my wallet - got my - ha! That Hank Williams boy, he can sing boy - There's a tear in my beer - got my ruck sack - Where's my keys?
___
I hate finding him passed out - or asleep - because this is the only way he does sleep. He's always in the most uncomfortable positions. Tonight, he passed out slumped over at the kitchen table, his arm holding a mug half filled with now-warm Meister Brau. His head never hits the table, just rests on his chest, which barely raises and lowers, so he looks dead. A layer of stubble covers his face. His glasses, a thick plastic tortoise shell colored frame pair of old school Buddy Holly type glasses, are still on his face. His portable CD player was on the table too, next to scattered cards and envelopes, the family address book, its black plastic cover and red tattered spine, splayed out in front of him, open to Aunt Michelle's latest address. Older ones, all written in the old man's block printing - the man writes like a second grader taking a spelling test - have been crossed out in pen and practically take up the entire page. That woman moves more than I don't know what the fuck. He had managed to write a few cards before going out cold: to two of his God children, my cousins, Kevin and Michael, one to my brother, Sean, and his two kids. He passed out in the middle of a note to his sister who lives in California. "Dear Mich, how are you lass! Top of the morning to you on this fine Saint Patty's day. I hope this note finds you well and in good spirits. Me? I am fine. Hey, here's a Saint Patrick's Day joke for you: What is left out on the lawn all summer and is Irish? No, its not your brother, Chris. Give up?" That's where it ends. God, Pop - how many times you gonna tell that same fuckin' joke? No wonder you passed out when you did. At least you took of the headphones. Should I help him to bed? Let'im sleep. Don't know when the last time the old man actually kept his eyes closed for more than twenty minutes. If I mess with him he'll probably start doing dishes or vacuuming or some shit and go until he crashes again, if he crashes again. Let the fucker sleep. Probably the best thing for him. How the fuck were Sean and I conceived if he can never make it to his own God-damn bed room?
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