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.

Neoconservatism Updated

City Journal editor-at-large Myron Magnet eulogizes Irving Kristol with these (seen from a sufficiently perverse perspective) wonderfully felicitous lines:

[Kristol] had had his youthful flirtation with left-utopianism and, disillusioned by experience, became a neoconservative--a liberal, as he defined it, who's been mugged by reality. What he really meant, of course, was simply a liberal who'd been mugged--who'd seen that all the liberal, welfare-state ideals for the uplift of the poor, and especially the minority poor, had in the end produced a criminal underclass, exactly the opposite of the intended uplift.

You almost have to admire the deft invocation of hoary images of black criminality used here to discredit an entire political philosophy.

Doin' McLuhan

Today I've assigned a bit of Marshall McLuhan in my Political Sociology class. Impossible for me to think of McLuhan at all without flashing back to this classic scene...

Merit

Er, I'm back. A marathon of grading, then packing, then moving, then unpacking, then other kinds of my-two-cents distractions (Facebook, Twitter), etc., etc. Long story. Anyway...

One of the more common--and more despicable--assumptions on the Right concerning persons of color in high places is that any achievement or station in life is the result, not of merit, but of misplaced liberal guilt. One could cite as a recent example Fred Barnes' on-air musings about the legitimacy of Judge Sonia Sotomayor's summa cum laude honors at Princeton; or one could simply read this wretched commentary by City Journal's Harry Stein on l'Affaire Gates. 'We're ... learning that race hustlers come in all kinds of packages', he fumes, and while his basic claim is that 'the racial-grievance industry won't learn anything' from the whole dust-up, his main ambition seems to be to drag Gates, a Cambridge-educated Harvard don, through the mud of calumny and innuendo. 'As a scholar in the trendy[!] field of black studies [sic]', Stein declares (without supporting evidence of any kind), 'Gates has built a career on being deferred to by cowed liberal colleagues, and he's obviously unaccustomed to anyone's calling him out on anything'. (Actually, according to one former colleague, he's quite accustomed to being called out all the time, simply on account of the color of his skin.) Stein then cites an instance where Gates apparently misattributed a line by the poet Robbie Burns to William Shakespeare, and approvingly quotes an anonymous online commenter in explaining the failure of the press to highlight this error: 'Why shouldn't Gates expect preferential treatment? He's been getting it his whole life'.

It's an interesting 'damned if you do, damned if you don't' moment when great achievement is taken as proof of a lack of merit: Stein might have looked to Gates' scholarship, or his command of the language, or his intelligence, for such proof. But these seem to me to be, even given my limited familiarity with his work, fairly unimpeachable, pace what seems to have been a rather egregious slip in erudition. No matter: Gates has been handsomely rewarded, he is black; ergo we have some quota to thank. '"Teachable moments" never teach these people anything', Stein concludes. Indeed.

The Thinkable Revolution

David Brooks thinks the tumult over the Iranian elections reveals that the regime is 'fragile to the core'. But it's not clear why he thinks that disenchantment with Ahmedinejad's government and its efforts to stay in power is the same thing as disenchantment with the Revolution.

The Higher Learning

When I was fifteen years old I saw the University of Chicago for the first time and somehow sensed that I had discovered my life.  I had never before seen, or at least had not noticed, buildings that were evidently dedicated to a higher purpose, not to necessity or utility, not merely to shelter or manufacture or trade, but to something that might be an end in itself. ... The longing for I knew not what suddenly found a response in the world outside.

The transformative experience Allan Bloom that describes in The Closing of the American Mind (1987) is one that, according to Rick Perlstein, is no longer possible for today's wide-eyed freshmen.  (To begin with, they are no longer wide-eyed:  thanks to the usual technological suspects, they've already had all the transformative experiences previous generations could only access in the rarefied environs of the university.)  Interestingly, Bloom's reminiscence suggests that Damascus Moments were not the birthright of all hitherto existing undergraduates; rather, it was a privilege linked to a particular place and time:  

In high school I had seen many of the older boys and girls go off to the state university to become doctors, lawyers, social workers, teachers, the whole variety of professions respectable in the little world in which I lived.  The university was part of growing up, but it was not looked forward to as a transforming experience--nor was it so in fact. ... But a great university presented another kind of atmosphere...

Perhaps this atmosphere was only ever really available at Chicago and at a few other like places.  But if that's so, then Perlstein's pronouncement is even more dire, since his sweeping conclusions are drawn entirely from conversations with contemporary undergrads at ... Chicago.

Nevertheless, I'm inclined to be skeptical of Perlstein's claims.  It can't be denied, of course, that there is a general movement among both students and administrators to view university training in more corporatized, instrumental terms.  But that is all the more unfortunate, given that Damascus Moments that are still to be had in a good university.  To say that transformation is no longer possible because kids can now discover free jazz or indie films on their own overestimates the amount of transformation to be had autodidactically; in principle, there was all kinds of information available to the novice even before the advent of the Web.  The point of a university even then was to acquire the interpretive and critical apparata that permit a higher assimilation of such information.

Never Had It So Good Again

The summer after my sophomore year in college, I lived with two roommates in what seemed like a brand-new apartment in Cleveland Circle, on the outskirts of Boston.  There was wall-to-wall carpeting, cable, and a pool and hot tub in the courtyard (we spied on at least one late-night hot tub tryst).  I thought I'd never have it so good again.  

I'm thinking about that apartment these days as I get ready to pack up and leave the faculty housing I've been in here since August.  There's no pool or hot tub, but measured by other standards, I have been living in a lap of luxury most obscene:  there are two bathrooms and two porches; there are two cars and a bicycle; and for most of the time, there has been just one inhabitant.  

Of course, life's hardly been a picnic:  I've spent so much time working in my office that I'm rarely home; and even when I am home, being the unsociably sociable person that I am, I've wanted for company.  I look forward to going back to life with roommates, as much as that life has its own downside.  It's just that, at a moment when I'm not even sure how I'm going to put food on the table come September, the current digs deserve some kind of commemoration.  So here's a quick house tour, interrupted by a short, 'summer breeze' DJ set: