Chip Saltsman, a candidate to head the Republican National Committee (RNC), decided to spread holiday cheer by sending an audio CD to members of the RNC that included a parody song called “Barack the Magic Negro.” The song a mocks Obama’s appeal to whites in the voice of an Al Sharpton sound-a-like.

As someone who worked in politics (briefly) before going into academia, I find it difficult to wrap my head around boneheaded decisions like this. Why would anyone, no less a candidate for RNC Chairman, think this was a good idea. It isn’t like this is a Congressman without greater ambitions catering to a constituency that might find this amusing (Saltzman was Mike Huckabee’s campaign manager). If that were the case, I could understand using out-group racial mockery to strengthen ties among your brethren. But this guy is running for a national party. Unfortunately for him, he’s running the be operational head of a party in an increasingly diverse country. Tough break, that.

Maybe it because I’m getting older, but I find myself shaking my head at incidents like this rather than indulging in righteous anger. The act seems petty, the behavior of a flailing wing of a political party that would just as soon cast explicit racists out (See current RNC chair Mike Duncan’s response).

For a party that needs to get its bearings quickly if it wants to serve as a useful push back to the majority party, these types of stunts renders it impotent. Those of us who are more left of center can hold this incident up as an example of a backwards, bigoted party. In reality, most of the ideas of the Republican party have a place in American political discourse but this stuff doesn’t help.

You live by the Southern strategy, you die by the Southern strategy… I guess. My New Years hope for my Republican friends is that they have the good sense to elect Michael Steele, the sensible, African-American, former Lieutenant Governor of Maryland, for RNC chair. A two party system works better with two viable parties, and it would be nice to drown the Southern strategy in the bathtub (not the federal government… Grover Norquist).

I know lots of people are on the Brand Obama bandwaggon, but I haven’t seen much discussion of the implications of Obama’s brand for governing. There is already a book out by Barry Liebert and Rick Faulk called Barack Inc. that promises to share with you the winning business lessons from the Obama campaign. The idea that a political campaign could have any insights for the private sector is pretty paradigm shaking. It’s hard for me to fathom a book detailing the marketing secrets for business from the Kerry campaign or even the Bush campaign.

As any popular book would do, they’ve broken the more complex reality of Obama’s branding success into a pithy sondbyte:

Be Cool, Be Social, Be the Change

I’m not sure what to make of the the “Be cool” or “Be the Change” stuff yet….it doesn’t seem too earthshaking, but I haven’t read the book. But what I am interested in seeing and thinking about for the next few years is how/whether the “be social” parts can translate into political capital. The “be social” part deals with the penetration of the campaign into multiple corners of the on-line social networking world.

What will it take to translate these micro-communities the Obama campaign built on various platforms into leverage that can be used to pressure congress into effecting policy change? Will the Obama campaign get out in front of developments in the Semantic web to create even more narrowly tailored communities? In the public policy literature we talk about epistemic communities of experts and interest groups that produce the ideas that shape policy debates. Will the Obama campaign try to create “super-epistemic” communitiies that can shape policy agendas? can they create targeted “flash” epistiemic communities to deal with pressing crises? We’ll know soon.

Here is our holiday edition (number three) of ThickPod, just in time for the holidays. In this episode, Russell explains the difference between translucent and transparent, Jose blanks out on Jam on It by Newcleus at a critical point in the podcast (wiki, wiki, wiki, wiki), Don discuses ObamaGirl, Ken manages to throw in a Judith Butler reference, and PanoptiCat watches over all.

The posts referenced in this podcast are as follows:

Giving Thanks 2008 by Russell Stockard
Early Exploration of Political Communication in the Election by Don Waisenan
Wiki Transparency by Ken Kambara
Change we can Comment On, by Jose Marichal

This has been an interesting experiment for us, but we’d love to hear what you think. Drop me a line at marichal@callutheran.edu with coments, suggestions, rants or other forms of communication.

Happy holidays!

There is a lot of buzz today about the Obama campaign’s use of the internet in his administration. Even public radio has skin in the game. The New York Times editorial board is urging the Obama campaign to make good on his promise to propose a stimulus package that includes expanding the nation’s internet infrastructure.

But to keep my “webphoria” at bay, I need to remind myself that the most popular politically related use of the web in the last 48 hours has nothing to do with the transition. It’s this:

This video has received 5.5 million web views. So I can’t get too carried away about participatory culture just yet 🙂

Give the current POTUS credit. He might not have been all that as a president, but his reflexes are pretty sharp.

As I try to get out from under the mass of “green books” (the blue book is a casualty of campus greening efforts), I thought I’d give a shout to my Race, Multiculturalism and Politics students at California Lutheran University. I’m a pretty mild mannered person in general, but for some reason, I often perform “high wire acts” with untested assignments.

This semester, I asked my Race classes (mostly first-semester freshmen) to create Wikipedia entries for books from the suggested readings section of my syllabus. I was a bit nervous about this assignment. Particularly as students began coming to me reporting that the “the crowd” on Wikipedia had decided to delete their blog entries.

Today, some of my students presented their Wikipedia pages, and I was blown away. Other than the occasional typo here or akward sentence structure there, they exceeded my wildest expectations. Here are two examples:

Wikipedia page for Multiculturalism Without Culture, by Anne Phillips
Wikipedia page for Unequal Childhoods by Annette Lareau

I was impressed with my students ability to synthesize pretty heady stuff. I wonder how presenting material in such a public forum changed the work product. Has anyone given a similar assignment? How did it work out? I was stunned by the zeal with which many of the students approached this project. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

In honor of the Obama’s campaign’s decision to adopt a creative commons copyright license over a traditional copyright, I’ve added a video of the Health Care Transition Team responding to calls for citizen feedback on how to address the health care issue. The video includes former Senate Majority Leader and soon to be Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Daschle (BTW — I dig the red specs).

Matthew Burton is underwhelmed about the whole thing. I’m definitely whelmed (which apparently means the same as overwhelmed). While the clip fails to uncover the magic bullet solution to the health care crisis, it does something perhaps as important — it brings thousands of people into the conversation about the health care issue. The participatory potential for the web is not that it will turn every American into a policy wonk. God forbid! Seriously! The promise is that it will democratize the process of elite selection. All the participatory tools in the world are not going to yield more that a subset of Americans to be engaged in most policy issues. But having an additional 4,000 voices in a discussion can help policy makers identify blind spots that a handful of “experts” might overlook. This video has amassed 3,700 comments in 36 hours. The big question for those of us who think and write about stuff like this is what happens to those 3,700 after they have watched the video and posted a comment? Do they read the other posts? Are they promoting their own blog? What results from this semi-structured, popcorn popper of ideas, insults, and negotiations? Citizens!?!?!

The following guest post is from Barbara Trepagnier. Barbara is a Professor of Sociology at Texas State University-San Marcos and is author of Silent Racism: How Well-Meaning White People Perpetuate the Racial Divide (2006 Paradigm). She is also a member of the Texas Task Force on Racial Disproportionality, sponsored by Texas Child Protective Services and Casey Foundation.

Silent Racism refers to the negative thoughts and images in the minds of white people regarding African Americans and other people of color. This claim seems unremarkable except that, by “white people” I mean all white people, including those who care about racism and would never do anything intentionally racist. In the same vein, the claim that silent racism is more dangerous than acts of blatant racism like that of Thomas Cosby, who ran down a young black woman riding her bicycle along a sidewalk in Florida last summer, downright preposterous. But it is not preposterous if you know what I mean by “dangerous.”

Clearly Cosby’s attack was dangerous for Nekedia Cato—she could have been killed. Silent racism is dangerous because it is insidious: It is hidden, and yet silent racism contributes daily to the institutional racism that lowers the life chances of African Americans throughout the U.S., especially children.

We all learned silent racism growing up, but most of us don’t notice it because the oppositional terms Racist/Not Racist hide it. These racism categories are profoundly out-of-date: Before the Civil Rights Movement, people in the Not Racist category were few and far between, and took a courageous stand against segregation and unfair voting practices. Today, Not Racist is a default category—people must perform hateful acts or make patently racist statements to lose Not Racist status and earn the label Racist (think Don Imus)

The rest of us sit smugly in the Not Racist category claiming that we would never do or say anything racist. The Not Racist category allows us to see ourselves as “innocent” and therefore not responsible for—or even connected to—institutional racism and the resulting racial inequality.
Silent racism, because of its prevalence in white people, is a sociological issue. For example, decisions fueled by silent racism result in the overrepresentation of African American children—especially males—in the child welfare system, a system dedicated to protecting all children. These decisions are not intentionally racist; nevertheless, the decisions lower the life chances of black youth who all too often end up homeless or involved in the juvenile justice system when they reach 18.

We need to get rid of the racism categories and think about racism in a new way, such as a continuum labeled More Racist and Less Racist. This step alone would shift how well-meaning whites think about racism. We would stop worrying about whether we are racist, knowing that we are to some extent. We would be more likely to think about how we are racist, a much more productive line of thought.

In Off the Books, Sudhir Venkatesh offers us a compelling and nuanced look at the underground economy in the South Side of Chicago. His key insight is that the boundaries between the “legitimate” and “illegitimate” economy is blurred. He notes that legitimate businesses often engaged in illicit practices to supplement licit income:

Some, like Ola Sanders, are well-known proprietors whose businesses have suffered in recent years. They cannot resist the opportunity for immediate cash to supplement their legitimate earnings. So they rent out their space to a gang or another underground trader. They develop creative hustling schemes and do not report their income. They might even exchange services with each other off the books, letting barter replace taxable income altogether.

What struck me about Venkatesh’s description of the economy of the South Side neighborhood he studied was how much it mirrored my own experiences growing up in a Cuban-American enclave in Hialeah, Florida, a suburb of Miami. When compared to Blacks, Cuban Americans are often considered a “model minority,” but Venkatesh’s work could just as easily apply to my neighborhood where “hustling” was an essential part of the local economy.

This is the house I grew up in. Most of the houses on my block have “efficiency” apartments that homeowners would rent out in violation of city zoning laws. Many people in my neighborhood operated businesses out of their homes without licenses. It wasn’t unusual for people to have “free cable” or suspiciously cheap electronic goods in their homes. Nor was it unusual for people to get “arreglos” (fixes) from “gente de confianza” to get insurance companies to pay for hurricane damage that never happened or car repairs that were not caused by accidents.

Despite the fact that all this was going on, the people engaged in these exchanges were good folks who went to church, raised good children, and build a vibrant and thriving community. I appreciate Venkatesh’s perspective in describing the South Side economy he studied:

Despite the moralizing of some, we cannot truly understand the “shady” economy if we see it as a dirty, lawless world of violence and disrepute, one that tarnishes an otherwise pristine sphere where everyone pays their taxes, obeys the laws, and turns to the government to solve disputes and maintain order.

I could just be sympathizing with “my people,” but part of what I think is going on with these exchanges is not simply a lack of jobs in the inner city, but a lack of trust in the rule of law. In the example of my community, my family were Cuban exiles fleeing communism. This set of early exiles constituted an entrepreneurial class. This group, for good or ill, had strong anti-statist views. They perceive government to be corrupt and predatory. As a result, many people I’ve talked with in my old neighborhood see government as something to “get around.” At the same time, they were and are very pro-American and defend American ideals like the rule-of-law.

What do you think about underground economies. Are the things I described unethical? Are we in a position to moralize? Does any of this mirror your own experiences?

In our second installment of ThickPod, Ken, Don and I muse about the sociopolitical significance of LOLCats, I thoroughly impress Don by showing him that I know who Marshall McCluhan is and Ken breaks out some Latin. Here are the posts we discuss in the podcast:

Ken – The Web 2.0 Election

Don – Facebook, Mass Interpersonal Persuasion, and the Public Sphere

Jose – Aren’t we the Change We’ve Been Waiting For?

Enjoy. And don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast RSS feed

In The Trouble with Diversity, Walter Benn Michaels makes a provocative case against the elevation of cultural diversity, or respect and appreciation for different groups, over class concerns. This argument draws upon the classic American Exceptionalism argument that American society differs from Europe in that it lacks a class consciousness. Benn-Michaels adds an interesting twist: he argues that diversity, as we practice it on college campuses, is complicit in masking class inequality by encouraging us to focus on important, but less controversial aspects of cultural difference (food and holidays for instance) while ignoring the growing income inequality in the United States:

We love race — we love identity — because we don’t love class…..for 30 years, while the gap between the rich and the poor has grown larger, we’ve been urged to respect people’s identities — as if the problem of poverty would be solved if we just appreciated the poor.

I’ve written a bit about how our current understanding of diversity emphasizes tolerance at the expense of broader civic obligations to work across group boundaries to solve vexing civic problems like poverty and inequality. The result is we develop a keen appreciation that difference exists in society, but have no incentive to address what Cathy Cohen calls “cross-cutting” issues — those that affect groups across identity categories and are thus require cross-group mobilization.

What do you think? Where does race stand vis-a-vis class in terms of an identity that affects life chances for individuals in American society? Do we emphasize group acceptance at the expense of class-based concerns? Can we do both? Why don’t we? Should we?