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ebogjonson's October 2006 archive

October 31, 2006

like crying n-word in a racist theater

Uh-oh, Oakland! Our new blogger friend Kai needs help at the old mill!

Paging ebogjonson, paging ebogjonson, logic-flow decision-support is urgently needed over at Whiskey Bar...

Oops, too late. [full post]

Too late, indeed. Kai wasn't dialing 911 for me personally so much as calling attention to my "Should I use blackface on my blog?" decision chart, this following the application of blackface to CNN's Wolf Blitzer by liberal blogger Billmon.

Although the image above is certainly a fine display of photoshopping skills, Billmon's use of blackface fails my appropriateness test immediately for the simple reason that, in my opinion, white folks would be advised to never use blackface, ever. My thinking that a "no whites allowed" sign belongs over the burnt cork pile is straightforwardly reactive, as white folks (an admittedly imperfectly drawn class) strike me as having shown themselves to be rather, uh, maladroit at using blackface for peaceful purposes. (There are ways working class whites used the embodiment of black men as a from rebellion against Victorian mores, but that, as they say, is another story.) The "no whites allowed" thing is also utilitarian, in that the collateral damage invariably caused by a given use of blackface almost always outweighs whatever specific point was being made/scored by said blackface in the first place, so it seems best to leave the thing collecting dust in the rhetorical-weapon cabinet.

(Don't think of it as a prohibition, white folks, think of it as a kind of mitzvah, or, maybe like giving up sweets for Lent. Something little and relatively pain-free you choose to do or give up in order to go to white-people heaven.)

Billmon's intuition about the image's immediate back-story (he corked Wolf Blitzer after Blitzer whined about getting the rabid dog treatment from Veep Consort Lynne Cheney) is reasonable enough, in that Wolfie's whine could technically be characterized as "house negro-ish." The problem, of course, is the image's troubling older, world historical back-story. The specific racial archetype Billmon makes use of - the white minstrel re-enacting a white fantasy about black slaves for the entertainment of even more white folks - is bigger than Billmon, Wolf Blitzer, Lynne Cheney and yesterday's news cycle combined, so while blackface and minstrelsy might cover the CNN incident nicely, they also spill over from it onto, you know, my fucking lap, making them an attack not just on what Billmon calls "our pathetically servile corporate media" but on me as well.

Billmon's self-professed intent and racial virtue are largely irrelevant here, as the simple fact is that blackface and minstrels and house negroes are dangerously wild and crafty memes that have been laughing at intent and virtue for over 140 years. Anyone who has been paying the slightest attention to race in America knows that these are the sort of images that tend to slip out of a user's grasp almost immediately, so deliberately handling them constitutes a form of willful recklessness. It's not exactly like shouting "fire!" in a crowded theater, but it is kind of like pissing off an overpass in hopes of tinkling on some or another passing motorcade. If I'm driving home at the same time and you get that shit on me, I don't care who your target was or what they did, I'm doubling back to give your stupid, adolescent ass a piece of my mind.

As Prometheus 6 succinctly advised about wild racial memes (also quoted by Kai), a little extra careful is often the better part of racial valor: "When you want to use race metaphors, put down the Photoshop icon and back slowly away from the program." This is great advice, but it's also basic common sense and home training. So why do our white comrades seem unable to remember their manners on such a regular basis?

Billmon's non sequitur response to criticism of the image doesn't provide a direct answer to that question, but his tone is pretty illuminating:

As for the liberals, well, political correctness goes with the outfit. It's one of the fashion accessories that's supposed to set them apart, stylistically speaking, from the conservatives in a society in which racism is pervasive -- real racism, the kind that lets people die in flooded cities or grow up in urban hell holes I wouldn't want my dogs to have to live in. It's a badge that says: "See, I'm one of the good ones. I may not be willing to fight for social justice or even lift a finger to protest the brutality of the system and the human carnage it's created, but at least I don't tell racial jokes."

Well, OK, I guess I'm not one of the good ones. Not only am I not out in the streets fighting for social justice and protesting the day-to-day oppression of the poor (black, brown and white), but I also used a racial stereotype to make a point about our pathetically servile corporate media. Bad Billmon, bad bad bad.[full post]

While it's hard for me to say exactly what the above was precisely about, Billmon's tone tells me that in addition to feeling unfairly maligned (shades of Wolf?) he also thinks he's been brave throughout all this. Leaving aside the fact that Billmon still doesn't realize that the folks most upset by his image are people of color (his focus on generic "liberals" indicates this is a whites-only affair), his plain spoken world-weariness, combined with the impassioned blather about what is or isn't "real" racism, suggest someone quite taken with themselves when it comes to standing up to the hypocrites of the world. It's almost as if Billmon is having his own personal (albeit smaller scale) Sistah Souljah moment, his use of blackface a two-fer that, besides sticking it to Wolf, also provided a chance for him to stand up to all those nattering liberals and coloreds, you know, the ones who've been keeping him from the important, manly work of saving America, what with their complaining and their false piety and their fashionable identity politics.

In a subsequent clarification/response, Billmon goes on to defensively plead a range of bona fides that perhaps only Rick Blaine could credibly embody:

I'm more of an ex-Marxist, ex-socialist, ex-revolutionary who realized long ago that Marx got his economics wrong, that socialism doesn't work and that Peter Townsend was essentially right about the new boss being the same as the old boss. When I was in Russia, I even got to see the old bosses who became the new bosses turning back into the old bosses again.

On the other hand, I still despise bourgeois "morality" (the mother of all oxymorons), feel a persistent pull of sympathy to class-based, left-wing movements in places like Latin America (even though I believe resistance is essentially futile) and would very much like to see a radical redistribution of political power in this country -- although through peaceful, not violent, means. Obviously, I'm not holding my breath.[full post]

IMHO, white progressives who unabashedly use/defend white use of blackface tend to be precisely the above kind of holier-than-thou, tough-talker, someone quite heavily invested in making sure you never, ever confuse them for a trad liberal wuss. Like white prizefighters who believe that no one gets a championship belt without knocking out their fair share of Negro contenders, folks who defend the use of blackface like this do so largely (if perhaps subconsciously) to prove their hard-earned independence from traditional liberal special interests, much as Clinton was accused of doing in 1992 when he decried Souljah's comment that "if Black people kill Black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?"

But, of course, cynical or no, Bill Clinton had an actual, incendiary quote to work with, whereas Billmon created this entire incident of-a-piece and in response to an inciting incident that had absolutely nothing to do with race at all. I guess that means the Sistah Souljah's he's standing up to are the ones in his head, because they certainly weren't on CNN.

Posted by ebogjonson in race and other identities at 7:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

October 29, 2006

your god fucked up, lashawn

From the New York Review of Books, via atrios:

There is a particular danger with a war that God commands. What if God should lose? That is unthinkable to the evangelicals. They cannot accept the idea of second-guessing God, and he was the one who led them into war. Thus, in 2006, when two thirds of the American people told pollsters that the war in Iraq was a mistake, the third of those still standing behind it were mainly evangelicals (who make up about one third of the population). It was a faith-based certitude. [full story]

It's true. What do people who believe god talks to them daily on the telephone do when his instructions don't work out? Start killing people? Start killing themselves?

Posted by ebogjonson in Iraq at 1:52 PM | Permalink

October 25, 2006

your racist republican party

From TPM Cafe, via atrios:

Okay, so Election Central has just obtained a radio ad which you've got to hear: It actually has what sounds like tom-tom drums playing in the background every time the ad talks about Dem Harold Ford, Jr. The ad -- which says it was paid for by the campaign of GOP Senate candidate Bob Corker -- can be heard right here. When the ad mentions Corker, the music soars and no tom-toms are audible. Throughout the entire minute-long ad, you hear the rumble of tom-toms every time Ford is mentioned. This ad, keep in mind, quotes Bob Corker himself as having "approved" the message -- meaning it wasn't the work of the Republican National Committee, as in the case of the recent "bimbo" TV ad which drew charges of racism.

The funny thing about this is story is that Harold Ford is a Democratic talking android. Who plays drums for a talking android? I guess this makes sense when you figure that one of the uses of racism is the elimination of meaningful difference between black folks, the flattening of texture, but anyone actually paying attention would see that the ad described below is a kind of faulty absurdity. I mean, if you're going to play some drums for a black candidate, that dude at least better have a mad, militant Afro and a fist pendant around his neck, or maybe some straight up nyabinghi dreds and a deep name that when re-translated into English means "bloody spear of the people." If you played some drums for Al Sharpton, you'd be a racist, but at least you would have identified something true about him, which is basically that if you're a certain kind of white person you should back the fuck up out his way when you see him coming. But Harold Ford? That dude couldn't Mau Mau a Congress of Muppets, let alone a room full of white racists. It's silly, really.

Posted by ebogjonson in politricknal sciences at 6:03 PM | Permalink

October 21, 2006

WESLEY SNIPES SAGA DAY 3!!!

Okay, so maybe he's not really on the run, making this less of a saga.

Where in the world is Wesley Snipes?

In Namibia.

When the actor was indicted on eight counts of tax fraud Tuesday, U.S. Attorney Paul I. Perez said Snipes had not been arrested because authorities did not know where he was.

The TV show "Inside Edition" found Snipes in Namibia, where he is renting a house for $6,000 a month while he films the movie "Gallowwalker." He has been in the African nation for seven weeks, the show reported. [full story]

Maybe he is there having a baby with Brad Pitt.

Posted by ebogjonson in screened at 12:44 PM | Permalink

absolutely, sort of

Jamison Foser sez [via Atrios]:

If you believe what you hear from prominent conservatives and political reporters, the following things are true:

1) Anytime terrorism is in the news, it plays to the political and electoral benefit of the Republicans.

2) Terrorists who are trying to destroy America are trying to help elect Democrats because they think Democrats are weak. The terrorists are doing so by increasing violence in Iraq and otherwise drawing attention to their existence, as the Osama bin Laden videotape released shortly before the 2004 election.

Those two things are obviously incompatible. The latter is based on the premise that increased news of terrorism benefits Democrats; the former is an explicit statement of the opposite. The two are fundamentally inconsistent. (OK, there is a way the two sentiments could rationally coexist -- but it requires us to believe that The Enemy has reached depths of incompetence previously explored by only Wile E. Coyote. And, in that case, why haven't we been able to defeat them yet? This possibility can be safely dismissed.)

I actually see this a little differently. With the exception of the initial invasion of Afghanistan (sorry friends, but I was on that particular bandwagon), there is very little in the Republican toolkit that doesn't in some way serve as a recruiting or strategic boon to the jihadist movement. These include policies like:

- uncritical support for Israel in general, but most recently during the invasion of Lebanon
- the whole invasion of Iraq
- uncritical (and hypocritical support) of undemocratic states from Saudi Arabia to Pakistan
- gutting the Constitutional rights framework that makes the US unique
- undermining international organizations and relationships
- reliance on a Christian, apocalyptic political vocabulary

The fact of the matter is that terrorists love Republicans. The short-term losses that the jihadist movement incurs as an immediate result of American policy are acceptable to them as long as the US continues to hemorrhage men, treasure and standing.

Posted by ebogjonson in Iraqpolitricknal sciences at 12:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

October 18, 2006

omigod; you are so black and huge, obama

Time Magazine put Obama's big black head on its cover this week, breaking up the ad pages inside with a rote profile-cum-trend piece by Joe "Do-the-Right-Thing-Will-Make-Negroes-Riot" Klein. Money quote:

The current Obama mania is reminiscent of the Colin Powell mania of September 1995, when the general--another political rainbow--leveraged speculation that he might run for President into book sales of 2.6 million copies for his memoir, My American Journey. Powell and Obama have another thing in common: they are black people who--like Tiger Woods, Oprah Winfrey and Michael Jordan--seem to have an iconic power over the American imagination because they transcend racial stereotypes. "It's all about gratitude," says essayist Shelby Steele, who frequently writes about the psychology of race. "White people are just thrilled when a prominent black person comes along and doesn't rub their noses in racial guilt. White people just go crazy over people like that."

When I asked Obama about this, he began to answer before I finished the question. "There's a core decency to the American people that doesn't get enough attention," he said, sitting in his downtown Chicago office, casually dressed in jeans and a dark blue shirt. "Figures like Oprah, Tiger, Michael Jordan give people a shortcut to express their better instincts. You can be cynical about this. You can say, It's easy to love Oprah. It's harder to embrace the idea of putting more resources into opportunities for young black men--some of whom aren't so lovable. But I don't feel that way. I think it's healthy, a good instinct. I just don't want it to stop with Oprah. I'd rather say, If you feel good about me, there's a whole lot of young men out there who could be me if given the chance."

But that's not quite true. There aren't very many people--ebony, ivory or other--who have Obama's distinctive portfolio of talents, or what he calls his "exotic" family history. [full story]

Klein is too much of a star-fucker to pass off hack complaints like those of talking android John McWhorter (too light, too new) as handicapping, although I did catch neocon gargoyle Bay Buchanan on CNN today writing Obama off as rookie being rushed to the big show in hopes of offsetting Hillary. Still, Klein can't resist assuring his readers that the wonderfully exotic black man that so excites him is a political unicorn, i.e., rare and singular. Definitely nothing at all like those other black men, the kind that tend to walk four-abreast on the sidewalk in NYC and shout rap lyrics at Klein.

If I were a talking android like McWhorter, I would react to the various, arbitrary, impersonal racial forces structuring Obama's public image by blaming the victim. But since I'm one of those unreconstructed folks who buy into what black neocons call "racial orthodoxy," I tend to root uncritically for the black dude in any given circumstance. For his part, Klein takes Obama to (mild) task for his careful timidity, as if blowing out of the box with some truly mind-blowing, next-level shit wouldn't immediately brand the Illinois senator as the typical black fire-breather. Shelby "Kill-Them-All-And-Let-God-Sort- Them-Out" Steele (who you figure is in the handful of black folks who still talk to Klein) does manage to lay out the basic dynamic fairly succinctly:

"He's working a very dangerous high-wire act," Shelby Steele told me. "He's got to keep on pleasing white folks without offending black folks, and vice versa." Indeed, Obama faces a minefield on issues like the racial gerrymandering of congressional districts and affirmative action. "You're asking him to take policy risks? Just being who he is is taking an enormous risk."

Since we've all already established that my sense of things tends to hew to the, like, fucked-up, psychopathological side of things, it goes without saying that I detect a barely controlled erotic charge running beneath Klein's prose. Like a sailor fresh from his first Tijuana donkey show, Klein just can't get over how Obama drives the white women so completely wild.

Obama's personal appeal is made manifest when he steps down from the podium and is swarmed by well-wishers of all ages and hues, although the difference in reaction between whites and blacks is subtly striking. The African Americans tend to be fairly reserved--quiet pride, knowing nods and be-careful-now looks. The white people, by contrast, are out of control. A nurse named Greta, just off a 12-hour shift, tentatively reaches out to touch the Senator's sleeve. "Oh, my God! Oh, my God! I just touched a future President! I can't believe it!" She is literally shaking with delight--her voice is quivering--as she asks Obama for an autograph and then a hug.

That Klein finds the reactions of black folks opaque is unsurprising, as, in the scheme of such things, black-on-white invariably runs hotter than black-on-black. Klein, of course, winkingly links Obama to Philanderer-in-Chief and First Black President Bill Clinton, and "although the Senator's compassion tends to be less damp than Clinton's" (did you mean to say "less wet," Joe?), one needs a calculator to tabulate all the ways the following descriptions can be read as euphemisms for "man ho:"

[...] before he became a politician, he admits to cocaine and marijuana use and also to attending socialist meetings. Translation: You know those socialist girls put out, right? And when they're high? I mean, forget about it.

[...] he admits to political "restlessness," which is another way of saying he's ambitious. Translation: He definitely has Clinton's wandering eye, but much higher standards than Bill, meaning no chubby interns.

He flays himself for enjoying private jets, which eliminate the cramped frustrations of commercial flying but--on the other hand!--isolate him from the problems of average folks. Translation: Mile-high-club million-mile member.

[...] He blames himself for "tensions" in his marriage; he doubts his "capacities" as a husband and father. Translation: Don't be surprised if a woman shows up in the tabloids during the '08 Democratic primaries, and anyway: I'm really sorry and my wife forgives me.

But hey, it could be worse. In about three weeks our side may just re-gain control of Congress partially thanks to a national outbreak of gay-pedophile hysteria; turning on Joe Klein is downright All-American in comparison.

Posted by ebogjonson in politricknal sciencesrace and other identities at 4:10 PM | Permalink

THE WESLEY SNIPES SAGA!!!: DAY 1

1 - oh, schnap!

Wesley Snipes, whose flash-and-dash acting style carried him from the streets of the South Bronx to movie stardom, has been indicted on charges of conspiracy and tax fraud, federal officials announced Tuesday.

Prosecutors said Snipes fraudulently claimed refunds totaling nearly $12 million in 1996 and 1997 on income taxes already paid. The star of the "Blade" trilogy and other movies, including "Jungle Fever" and "White Men Can't Jump," also was charged with failure to file returns from 1999 through 2004.

The whereabouts of Snipes, 44, could not be determined, said Steve Cole, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office for the Middle District of Florida.

"We made an attempt to contact him through his attorneys and now with the news conference," Cole said in a telephone interview. "Maybe he'll find out from the media and turn himself in." [full story]

2 - Can I tell you a story? I once had a roommate named Wesley and one day I left a work notebook open in the living room that had the words "WESLEY FUCKING SNIPES!!!" written in big marker on a page. I think it had something to do with a piece I was writing, but for the rest of the day my roommate was kind of salty with me, so finally I was like: "Dude. What is your deal?" And he was like: "What? What? Worried I'm gonna snipe at you?"

Funny, right?

3 - Am I a bad person because I keep wanting post: Run, Wesley! Motherfucking RUN!!!!

?

I think I might be. Also: I need to call my accountant. Quarterly self-employment taxes are a bitch.

Posted by ebogjonson in screened at 3:34 PM | Permalink

are you ready for some (political) football?

There is no credible DIRTY BOMB THREAT to NFL stadiums, but Homeland Security has nonetheless alerted the NFL about the DIRTY BOMB THREAT even though it isn't credible. They are also saying in strong terms that there is no DIRTY BOMB THREAT - that, and that no one should let the THREAT OF DIRTY BOMBS prevent them from going about their business:

A Web site is claiming that seven NFL football stadiums will be hit with radiological dirty bombs this weekend, but the government on today expressed doubts about the threat.

The warning, posted Oct. 12, was part of an ongoing Internet conversation titled "New Attack on America Be Afraid." It mentioned NFL stadiums in New York, Miami, Atlanta, Seattle, Houston, Oakland and Cleveland, where games are scheduled for this weekend.

The Homeland Security Department alerted authorities and stadium owners in those cities, as well as the NFL, of the Web message but said the threat was being viewed "with strong skepticism." Homeland Security spokesman Russ Knocke said there was no intelligence that indicated such an attack was imminent, and that the alert was "out of an abundance of caution." [full story]

You can really assume one of two things from the above news item:

1 - Two weeks before a tight election, the Republicans are playing the terror card yet again, personalizing the so-called GWOT by hyping a threat that seems designed to capture the attention of men who may have felt little enthusiasm about the midterms.

2 - The threat is real and the terrorists have timed it to insure the Republicans hold their majority during in the midterms. Conservatives have argued very vigorously that terrorists have such a sophisticated grasp of American intra-politics that engage in specific acts of terror designed to cow voters into cutting running. If they're so smart, though, why not think that they're also capable of taunting a charging bull with a red cape? There is a point of view from which Republican majorities (with their promise of continued belligerence) seem like a boon to terrorists, whose lifeblood is American violence and blundering.

Either way, feel safer yet?

Posted by ebogjonson in politricknal sciencesterror at 1:35 PM | Permalink

October 17, 2006

john mcwhorter: talking android

The first in an occasional series on black America's talking androids.

Would you have any idea who John H. McWhorter was if, instead of being black, he was white?

The answer is obviously, unequivocally "no." McWhorter is an able linguist (The Missing Spanish Creoles is a nifty piece of work) but his entire portfolio as a racial pundit springs rather specifically from the combination (novel to some; useful to others) of his blackness and his neo-conservative inclinations. Without blackness to authorize his critiques of his brethren, McWhorter would be just another white neo-con competing with the already-entrenched Marty Peretz's of the world for the privilege of castigating the coloreds for fun and profit. Instead, the relatively young linguist has published a number of books, appears regularly in various media, and has landed a perch at the Manhattan Institute (the same think tank that initially sponsored, then thought better of, Charles Murray), from which he publishes largely self-evident books and newspaper essays.

Despite this clear indebtedness to racial status, McWhorter recently felt moved to sniff that Barack Obama has been riding some sort of racial tailwind to unearned, premature prominence:

The key factor that galvanizes people around the idea of Obama for president is, quite simply, that he is black. Other things about him don't hurt, but that's all -- they are not the deciding factor. Take away Mr. Obama's race and he's some relatively anonymous rookie [named Barrett O'Leary]. Barrett O'Leary, even if as cute and articulate as Mr. Obama, would have to wait at least another four years, and possibly six or seven, before being considered as a possible commander in chief.

What gives people a jolt in their gut about the idea of President Obama is the idea that it would be a ringing symbol that racism no longer rules our land. President Obama might be, for instance, a substitute for that national apology for slavery that some consider so urgent. Surely a nation with a black president would be one no longer hung up on race.

Or not. Mr. Obama is being considered as presidential timber not despite his race, but because of it. That is, for all of its good intentions, a dehumanization of Mr. Obama. We're still hung up. What Mr. Obama has done is less important than his skin color and what it "means." The content of our character is not exactly center stage here. We are a long way from Selma, but not yet where the Rev. King wanted us to be.[full story]

Maybe McWhorter is transferring some anxiety about the roots of his own career. Or maybe these comments are actually a poorly crafted act of solidarity, one black man obliquely warning another not to let the accolades soup his head up. All the same, McWhorter's strangely catty expression distaste for the Obama phenomenon is a bit like a porn star's complaint that a legitimate actress gets meaty roles just because of her "big tits." That may well be the case, but, big or not big, one of them puts food on the table by fellating men in print and on camera and the other doesn't. McWhorter further underscores the pettiness of his analysis by going on to make the bizarre claim that he's further disinclined to get on the Obama bandwagon because someday some hypothetical black lunkhead might reject our hero for being a tad too light-skinned:

Another reason for my lack of enthusiasm for Mr. Obama as symbol is that the racial healing many might see him as portending would not happen. Among a certain kind of black person and non-black fellow travelers -- roughly, those given to surmising that the levees near the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans were deliberately blown up -- the going wisdom would be that Mr. Obama was elected only because he is merely the kind of black person whites are "comfortable" with.

With his light skin, African father and white mother, and only faint hint of what I call a "black-ccent" -- the subtle vocal quality that makes most black Americans identifiable as black over the phone (yes, one can "sound black." It's been demonstrated repeatedly by linguistic analysis, and the "black-ccent" overlaps only partially with white Southern) -- Mr. Obama would easily be cast by these types as "not too black."

This is clearly a fantasy, McWhorter's "would not"s, "would be"s and "would easily"s untethered to even the pretense of reality, but it's interesting to note that his is a fantasy of revenge. Rather richly, Obama has been projected into a pickle that is most commonly the lot of the black conservative, McWhorter imagining that a man who is the most feted and buzzed-about black leader in two decades should be kept at arms length because he might, maybe, perhaps, someday be Mau Mau'ed by Spike Lee. Given that McWhorter himself could hardly be described as the brownest crayon in the box (in the interests of full, disclosure, I'm a "desert sand" myself), one can imagine the satisfactions such a fantasy might hold for him. Too bad all of that also has absolutely nothing to do with Barack Obama.

Despite being billed as an expert on racial dynamics, McWhorter is resolutely unwilling to address the obvious about race's role in Obama's aura, which is that many people believe his race, instead of offering mere symbolism, might also be an asset in the actual conduct of the American presidency. Blackness might offer a president access to unique experiences and points of view (unique for American presidents, at least) and might also lend novel forms of moral authority to his policies and pronouncements. One can legitimately debate the value to a leader of any such categorically expressed and experientially derived asset - lessons drawn from military service, for example, or from faithfulness - but for McWhorter to create fantasy color-caste conflicts and ignore a genuine point of interest is a kind of non-fiction malpractice. It's also an act of profound disingenuousness on McWhorter's part, as categorically expressed and experientially derived insight and authority happen to be the very foundations of his own practice as a pundit.

In so much as working black conservatism could be said to have a job description, it involves being an authentic, biologically-confirmed Blackman/Blackwoman who also echoes the right's policies, assessments and solutions vis-à-vis the problem of persistently restive, self-owning negroes. McWhorter has ably fulfilled these duties for almost a decade, lending a resolutely understated, youngish, and slightly effete face to an enterprise usually marked by bare-knuckles and bloodletting. (Just ask Clarence Thomas, or Michael Steele, or any other poor sap who has woken up in the morning to find their mug p'shopped to a lawn jockey.) As McWhorter points out in the New York Sun, this isn't the kind of gig from which millions are made, but it certainly does pay the bills. Although their author is handicapped by a vocal and presentational style that seems deliberately designed to tranquilize undergraduates (no racial charisma or rabble-rousing here! Just tendentious psycho-babble passed off as racial ontology!) McWhorter's books are widely reviewed, his essays regularly appearing in a range of venues. He himself presents as an intelligent, introspective gent, so one would imagine that he'd not only understand his race's particular use-value to the policy/opinion machine, but that he might even find some ironies there to savor. Instead, McWhorter, in classic, talking android style, refuses to admit that his race has afforded him any unique opportunities beyond a front row seat to black perfidy. Arguing that his success in the racial punditry racket was a matter of accident, good-fortune and right-place / right-time-ism, he explains in I'm black, I work for the Manhattan Institute, and I'm proud that, sometimes, shit really does just happen:

For eight years after I got my P.h.D, I was a professor of linguistics. I first found myself involved with the media in 1996 when the Ebonics controversy hit. I happened to be the black linguist working closest to Oakland where the issue arose (I was at UC Berkeley), and so the media called me. As the result of a series of chance developments afterward, I wrote a book questioning the leftist orthodoxy on race. Somehow it got national attention, and I started to be asked to write and speak on the topic.

This included writing for and speaking at the Manhattan Institute think tank in New York. A few years ago, I decided that I would be able to do my second career as a race commentator better by working for the Institute full-time in New York and doing linguistics research and writing independently (and, still, obsessively).

That's my story, a mundane one, really. I do two things. First, one of them put food on the table. Now, the other one does.

Nothing to see there, right? Except for perhaps the language. Take notice of the obsessive linguist's preference for verbiage that paints his transit from the academy to the punditocracy as a matter of imponderable happenstance. He found himself involved. Chance developments (whatever those are) had him writing a text questioning leftist orthodoxy. Somehow or another that book got national attention. Although the facts force McWhorter to make a feint towards the obvious racial foundation of his notoriety - i.e., that the only reason anyone wanted to talk to him in the first place was that he was the black linguist working closest to Oakland - he's careful to depict his racially-dependent coming-out party as a surprise that came looking for him, perhaps as he reclined languid and reasonable in the faculty lounge at Cal. Again, that's likely true enough, but the fact that it then must have taken plenty of drive, choice and will on McWhorter's part to so thoroughly capitalize on that initial incident is conveniently left out of his right-wing Horatio Alger story. Like a wingnut Lana Turner claiming she "just happened" to be discovered by Matt Drudge while sucking down a soda-pop in Schwab's Pharmacy, McWhorter pretends that his being a black man predisposed to espouse a predictable set of propositions was neither asset nor attraction, that the length of his neo-con gams had no bearing on his ability to play the sultry ingénue from the wrong side of the tracks during the Oakland Ebonics fracaso. This is all, of course, a fairy tale, but McWhorter sells it with an impressively effective soft-pedal. The militance of his affection for understated banalities, the signature underwhelming-ness of his rhetoric, ends up being deployed as the main proof of his tall-tale's honesty and guilelessness, contrasting as it does with the loud, angry, indignant, Machiavellian, like, blackness that is McWhorter's favorite straw man.

Although he is Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, the list of the things that McWhorter is not includes sociologist, educational policy expert, historian, child psychologist and music critic, so the bulk of his punditry must therefore rely not on research or expert knowledge, but on the chiaroscuro produced by contrasting his own thinking on a given issue with that of a deluded, leftist and largely hypothetical black consensus. Take his career-making assertions about black middle-class laziness in Losing the Race, as summarized in a 2001 San Francisco Chronicle profile:

In his book, McWhorter uses observation, personal anecdotes and others' research to support his conclusions. He describes how a band of black kids tormented him for being a good speller when he was young and moves on from there.

In one of the most disturbing sections of the book, he tells story after story of black UC undergraduates he has taught who had spotty attendance records, disappeared without explanation, avoided research, were generally disengaged or flunked out.

". . . In my years of teaching, I have never had a student disappear without explanation, or turn in a test that made me wonder how she could have attended class and done so badly, who was not African American," he writes.

He is convinced that black people think of school as a "white" thing: "The sad but simple fact is that while there are some excellent black students, on the average, black students do not try as hard as other students. . . . All of these students belong to a culture infected with an anti-intellectual strain, which subtly but decisively teaches them from birth not to embrace schoolwork too wholeheartedly." [full story]

McWhorter, of course, offers little to support these highly prejudicial generalizations beyond personal observations of a few students at one school, in the process passing off the only thing he can say for sure - that he was unable to motivate or inspire respect in his black students - as an insight or profundity about race. It never occurs to McWhorter that he himself might have been the problem, that he might, for some reason or another, be constitutionally or temperamentally ill-equipped to teach certain black students. By his own admission he had very little in common with those students beyond skin color: "[t]hroughout the '90s, I found that I never seemed to agree with most black people I knew about any race event that came up [...] I felt like I was on a different planet than most black people." And yet hailing from a different planet or failing spectacularly to teach an entire demographic is apparently no barrier in conservative circles to becoming a paid, expert-witness on education and undergraduate psychopathology. In any other realm of professional endeavor, folks would intuitively understand that such an "expert" could only have gotten where he is thanks to some form of nepotism, affirmative action, secret-handshake, or ulterior motive on the part of his patrons, but McWhorter persists in carrying himself as if he were the world's last honest black man facing down dusky, cynical hordes.

Typical of the talking android, McWhorter both rejects blackness and relies on blackness (or at least relies his biological association with it) to guarantee him professionally. Extra-planetary or no, at the end of the day McWhorter's only professional qualification is that he's a black man who can be relied upon to write about his people to the satisfaction of certain classes of white folks, his race validating an endless stream of negative anecdotes at the level of accuracy. Consider the role McWhorter's blackness plays in this rather pedestrian depiction of public misbehavior among some Harlem yout':

Not long ago, I was having lunch in a KFC in Harlem, sitting near eight African-American boys, aged about 14. Since 1) it was 1:30 on a school day, 2) they were carrying book bags, and 3) they seemed to be in no hurry, I assumed they were skipping school. They were extremely loud and unruly, tossing food at one another and leaving it on the floor.

Black people ran the restaurant and made up the bulk of the customers, but it was hard to see much healthy "black community" here. After repeatedly warning the boys to stop throwing food and keep quiet, the manager finally told them to leave. The kids ignored her. Only after she called a male security guard did they start slowly making their way out, tauntingly circling the restaurant before ambling off. These teens clearly weren't monsters, but they seemed to consider themselves exempt from public norms of behavior--as if they had begun to check out of mainstream society. [full story]

Leaving aside the built-in absurdity of John McWhorter politely masticating ghetto chicken while the teenagers at the next table tighten his psychic knickers into a knotty bunch, it becomes obvious fairly quickly that this dispatch from the heart of darkness hinges not on the expertise or insight of its correspondent but on his mere blackness. Turning "Unruly Teenagers!" into a meaningful lead would test the powers of wordsmiths more skilled than McWhorter, but "Black Man Attests to the Slow Collapse of Civilization in Harlem!!!"? Now that's a lead. The color of the source is clearly the entire game here, as the actual reports - from "unruly teenagers" to "hip hop: bad" to "black students: lazy" - are not only common caricatures, but in McWhorter's hands they're ineptly drawn caricatures.

Blackness is such a foundational element of McWhorter's shtick that it consistently authorizes him to pontificate on topics on which he has demonstrably limited grasp. The above KFC tableaux, for, example leads into an attack on hip hop that is not only ill-informed on basic, uncontroversial points of musicology (the so-called "origins of the hip hop ethos," for example) but that is also arbitrary in its assessment of historical import, as in the place of honor given Ice-T's "Cop Killer," or the breathless overstatement that attends dramatic readings of Schooly D rhymes.

Consider also, his more recent essay on the Survivor racial casting controversy which not only completely misstates objections to the tactic ("segregation!" wasn't the rallying cry so much as "exploitation!" and "cynicism!" and "pointless!"), but also indicates McWhorter and his editors have little appreciation for way racial conflict is used across the board in reality teevee to stoke viewer interest. Indeed, on such nuances of the popular culture McWhorter is reliably tone deaf. His takes invariably either received or frozen in amber, McWhorter seems to have missed much of the last twenty-five years, his ability to play black Trivial Pursuit likely no better than the average white conservative's, which is to say, no better than his editors'. As I noted in my review of Authentically Black McWhorter's relationship to any form of contemporary black culture seems to have ended with his graduation from junior high school, his love for the new no doubt beaten out of him by the same toughs who, as he incessantly reports, objected to his "talking good" as a child. This would all be problem enough, but in editorial environments where McWhorter is likely (and no doubt profitably) the only black man in the room, his ignorance becomes practically impossible to address. Setting aside the intuition that most of these essays are acts of politically-motivated hackery, the editors of City Journal or The Sun imported McWhorter to interpret black talk for them in the first place, so they can't be expected to meaningfully assess the merits of his interpretations beyond how well they conform to general conservative principles. Take away the epidermal guarantor of McWhorter's blackness, though, and the above essays would fall apart even for their editors, crumbling to dust like undead things exposed to sunlight.

For a man who regularly complains that African Americans are coddled and forever mired in a kind of unexamined and self-created mediocrity, McWhorter is a kind of object lesson in what it means to be the member of an underperforming yet protected class. One has the impression reading McWhorter's prose that somewhere deep down he understands this. A typical McWhorter essay is a horrorshow of powerfully neurotic transferences and recoils, his sensitivities to unruly children, loud voices, vulgar lyrics, strident drums, angular movements and so on as much evidence of a delicate, traumatized constitution as they are indications of distinct neo-conservative cultural politics. If there is a victim cowering at the heart of any McWhorter piece, it is invariably "John McWhorter," who is written of as being constantly under some form of largely sensory assault by uncouth, angry black folks. Indeed, from Losing the Race on, McWhorter's primal scene remains an incident of schoolyard abuse endured at the hands of a group of black kids. Not a book is written, no interview is given, without McWhorter offering ritually masochistic testimony to what he has been forced to endure just for the crime of being John McWhorter:

When I was four--and this is my very first memory--a group of black kids in the neighborhood stopped me and asked me to spell a word. When I did, one of them directed his little sister to hit me repeatedly. I later watched a friend of mine treated similarly for answering such questions as, "How far is it from New Jersey to Florida," and I'll never forget being asked by one of his tormentors, "Are you smart?" in the menacing tone you'd use to ask, "Did you steal my money?"[full story]

We have admittedly now left the frame of legitimate criticism, but there is a sense in which McWhorter has never recovered from the shame and trauma of having been beaten up by a girl when he was four. His entire politic can be read as one long act of revenge against that girl and her brother, that incident growing into a life-long prejudice that quite literally colors his every argument. (One can only imagine what it was like to look like that girl or her brother and to be in one of McWhorter's classes.)

What McWhorter doesn't understand is that everyone - quite literally everyone - has a story like his, a singular, massively dense event against whose pull one struggles in order to eventually (hopefully) become oneself. McWhorter has obviously chosen to become "John McWhorter" by orbiting around that moment, ensuring his abuse by those children remains eternal, implacable, and total, but he could have easily gone another route and still been true to the hurt and injustice of that moment. There is a powerfully troubling and potentially instructive conundrum to be found in the realization that one lives (at four!) in a society stratified by race and where your co-ethnics can nonetheless hurt you worse than any racist ever could. That conundrum is among the deepest things one could ever confront, and writers from Toni Morrison to Gayle Jones to Albert Murray to Richard Rodriguez have all wrestled with it in their own way and to their eternal credit. John McWhorter, though, has little in common with the folks listed above beyond a bit of brown. He would rather wrestle with children.

Posted by ebogjonson in talking androids at 11:45 PM | Permalink

October 16, 2006

you are being spied on

In the NYT, via digby:

Internal military documents released Thursday provided new details about the Defense Department's collection of information on demonstrations nationwide last year by students, Quakers and others opposed to the Iraq war.

The documents, obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, show, for instance, that military officials labeled as "potential terrorist activity" events like a "Stop the War Now" rally in Akron, Ohio, in March 2005.

The Defense Department acknowledged last year that its analysts had maintained records on war protests in an internal database past the 90 days its guidelines allowed, and even after it was determined there was no threat. [full story]

Feel safer yet?

Posted by ebogjonson in politricknal sciences at 2:41 PM | Permalink

October 13, 2006

rips tamara

Tamara Dobson aka Cleopatra Jones dead at 59.

A six foot-plus kung fu fighting model in a fur hat. What could be hotter than that.

It's strange to think to think that she was only 59. I am getting old enough myself to make gym and dining decisions that are largely intended to keep me relatively spry at that age.

Posted by ebogjonson in memoryscreened at 12:20 PM | Permalink

October 6, 2006

six hours and counting (pst)

6 - We decided not to host an above-ground frak party because we didn't want to risk anyone we didn't know coming over and asking "So, is he a Cylon, too?" ten times during the show, which actually happened last year. It was super ugly.

5 - As of now the official tally stands at: me, the lady, Mike, Minsuh, Cameron, Cameron's SO, Heemin, and Monica. 'Sley, Caleb, Dave and E.Y. might make appearances as well. (PF is apparently in Baja.)

4 - Food wise we are looking at: goat meat quesadillas (sp?), guac, wings, a couple of pies, chip/dip, short ribs, various Japanese crackers, pork chops in mole and whatever else walks in through the door. It goes without saying that there will be drinking, and after the show DDR, Guitar Hero and perhaps some non-game-centered dancing.

3 - I really and truly can't convey how excited I am that the season restarts tonight. It's not just all the like-minded friends coming together or the considerable pleasure I take in hosting, it's that I feel a bit like a child waiting for Christmas. The funny thing is that I know for a fact there is no Santa Claus and yet here I am still excited at the prospect of his arrival, convinced of it even. Is this what faith feels like?

2 - I had groused a bit last year that BSG had betrayed my faith just a bit with the awful stretch of episodes before Download (Scar, Black Market and one other crap one I'm not recalling, the one where poor Billy got blowed away), but betrayal being just a call by the gods to forgiveness and redemption, the dudes who make the show somehow found a way to restore my faith by pulling it out of its death spiral. Not only that, but dudes also found a way to quite literally stun me by smashing the very premise of the series with a kind of narrative hammer. The decision to locate at least half the action on an occupied planet (where the drama can only concern the ethics and logistics of guerilla resistance and terror) is not completely out of left field, dovetailing as it does (maybe too neatly?) with the show's pretenses to contemporary relevance, but the structural soundness of the New Caprica pivot doesn't account for the madly excessive chutzpah with which that pivot was executed. This is a great show, and yet there was little in the previous two years that could have prepared us for the slap in the face that was the finale's flash forward not just of a year but through a kind of conceptual membrane that had previously marked the unstated boundary of what was possible and impossible in the BSG universe. There is nothing in the resumes of anyone associated with BSG - any writer, producer, director or actor - that might suggest they would be able to collectively or individually come up with a such a maneuver, and that means that there is really nothing to suggest they will be able to repeat the feat this coming year. But here I am cooking and cleaning. Faith has often been presented to me as a surrendering, "god's will"-style opposite to the hubris that makes men think they can make magic on their own, but just the same I think it takes a kind of crazy greed to wake up this morning and think tonight will be as good or (more avarice!) better than last season.

1 - Someone's at the door. I think it's the goat.

Posted by ebogjonson in battlestar galactica at 2:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

October 5, 2006

party of allenfoleybush and other morons

I love it when talking android morons explain their own self-serving political choices by swearing that Frederick Douglass or MLK were Republicans. From LaShawn Barber's short-bus black history blog:

MD Lt. Governor Michael Steele has asked the National Black Republican Association (NBRA) to remove a radio advertisement (heard in Baltimore) because it is "insulting to Marylanders[.]"

[...]

The ad is factual: MLK was a Republican, Republicans spearheaded major civil rights legislation and the Democrats tried to block it, etc., but Steele says: "Although they may have had good intentions, there is no room for this kind of slash-and-burn partisan politics in the important conversation about how to best bring meaningful change to Washington, D-C, and get something done for Maryland."

I'm guessing, but he seems to think the appeal to race is unnecessary and divisive. Although I tend to agree, it doesn't hurt to get the truth out there.

LaShawn must mean the "truth"/"voices" chattering thou-shalt-nots in her head, because "out there" it is pretty established that MLK was not a Republican. And if she really believes that the fact that Douglass was a Republican provides any guidance for blacks considering the GOP in 2006, well, let's not even go there. Trying to decide whether certain kinds of hack conservatives are ignorant, incompetent or just plain idiots is an endless game of "heads: I lose; tails: you win." Totally not worth playing.

Despite numerous folks correcting LaShawn's false MLK assertion in comments, she has yet to update or correct her factually incorrect statement. Maybe Charles Murray wrote the Bell Curve using IQ data from a black Republican caucus?

Posted by ebogjonson in talking androids at 2:30 PM | Permalink

October 4, 2006

i can't believe it's not torture

One funny thing about one terribly sad thing. via boing boing.

Posted by ebogjonson in Iraqpolitricknal sciences at 4:58 PM | Permalink