Anti-'Racism'

The reaction over at Sociological Images to the above cartoon is a classic example of how loose and mindless definitions of racism have become in this country. It seems clear to me at least that the humor here has to do with the moral misshapenness of white supremacists in love; as Sociological Images (or at least as the author of the post, anyway) sees it, lynching is no laughing matter, and the mere mention of it is itself tantamount to an act of racism. Even worse, the explanation on the part of the student newspaper that published the cartoon--'Its intent was to ask how can someone show affection for one person while at the same time hating someone else enough to commit such a heinous act as hanging'--is rejected in the following manner:

[The Echo] explains that the intention was to point out the “hypocrisy of hate-filled people,” not make light of lynching, without interrogating the relative importance of intent and reception. One could argue that cultural producers are at least somewhat responsible for the myriad of ways that an item could be reasonably interpreted.

This is a bit of a cop-out ('One could argue that...'). But let's say that the author actually committed to this argument instead of straddling the fence. The author is then using a line of reasoning familiar to oppressively censorious regimes, but not, one would have thought, characteristic of thoughtful, left-leaning sociological criticism. Why tolerate complexity, ambiguity, or doubles-entendres? We should hold cultural producers responsible for any reasonable interpretation of their texts, even if they might be demonstrably far from the intended meaning.

Trading Places

Imagine for a moment that a young American falls into a Rip Van Winkle sleep in 1960. He awakens suddenly in 2008 and learns that we are in the midst of a historic presidential election between a white and a black candidate. He learns that one candidate is a Democrat, a Harvard Law School graduate, a lecturer at the conservative University of Chicago Law School. He also discovers that this candidate is married to his first wife, and they have two children who attend an exclusive private school. His running mate is an Irish Catholic. The other candidate is a Republican. He was an average student who made his mark in the military. This candidate has been married twice, and his running mate is a woman whose teenage daughter is pregnant out of wedlock.

Now ask our recently awakened American to guess which candidate is white and which is black. Remember, his understanding of race and politics was frozen in 1960, when a significant number of blacks still identified themselves as Republican, an Ivy League education was a marker of whiteness and military service a common career path for young black men. Remember that he would expect marriage stability among whites and sexual immorality to mark black life. It's entirely possible that our Rip would guess that Obama was the white candidate and McCain the black one.

Melissa Harris-Lacewell (the author of the quote above) acknowledges the manner in which Obama-watchers oscillated between judgments of 'not black enough' to 'too black' during the 2008 campaign, but offers this little thought experiment as a way of illustrating her main claim: that Obama not only disrupted standard definitions of blackness, but put whiteness itself in crisis.

Suddenly whiteness was no longer about educational achievement, family stability or the command of spoken English. One might argue that the folksy interventions of Sarah Palin were a desperate attempt to reclaim and redefine whiteness as a gun-toting ordinariness that eschews traditional and elite markers of achievement.

Obama's whiteness in this sense is frightening and strange for those invested in believing that racial categories are stable, meaningful and essential. Those who yearn for a postracial America hoped Obama had transcended blackness, but the real threat he poses to the American racial order is that he disrupts whiteness, because whiteness has been the identity that defines citizenship, access to privilege and the power to define national history.

Who are these threatened upholders of America's racial order, and what evidence is there of their efforts to contain this disruption? Harris-Lacewell doesn't say--nevertheless, an interesting read.

Year One

I love Gail Collins. She's so witty, though, that I wonder if she isn't misunderestimated as a political analyst. You might be too busy laughing to notice that she's got quite an intimate knowledge of the ins and outs of Beltway culture (what Emily Nussbaum calls 'a needling insight into the surreal grind of governance'), as well as a familiarity with key political figures that goes back decades. Anyhoo, GailCo is on my mind because one of her recent columns delivers as sympathetic and pragmatic a capsule assessment of Obama's first year as is possible at present (any more sympathetic, and the author would have to be a White House staffer; any more pragmatic, and the defense would boil down to 'Well, at least he's not Bush!'). Here is what she says:

I personally think Obama has been doing a good job, all things considered. The economy is still depressing, but that’s an improvement over mind-bendingly terrifying. The rest of the world likes us better, and whenever the president goes overseas he seems to be able to nudge the other countries toward a little progress on some issue on which they had been hopelessly stuck.

And health care reform. Extremely big deal. Really could pass. Eventually.

No matter how difficult the issue, Obama has been sensible, deliberative. Just look at Dick Cheney swooping around like a dementor from Harry Potter, and you have to appreciate how much things have improved.

There you have it.

Brain Candy

It's the little things in life, as they say in Brain Candy. Here's one of my favorites: crossing the Williamsburg Bridge on the J Train, eating my own homecooked stir-fry leftovers as the lights of Manhattan slowly pass in review.