After the 2006 midterm elections my department put on a post-mortem where my colleagues and I discussed the ramifications of the elections for American politics. I was in the minority among my colleagues in thinking that the era of the median voter theory in American politics was over. I thought Roveism, or the idea that the middle doesn’t matter as much in American politics as mobilizing the bases, was in acsendance. I expected a politics of polarization where “tribes” on either side would dictate the outcomes in presidential politics for the forseeable future. What that meant is that as long as the tribe of people who identified as conservative is larger than the tribe of people who identify as liberal, that group will win regardless of objective factors like economic indicators or performance of past administrations.

Initially, the Obama campaign made me rethink my initial view. His call for “bringing people together” seemed to have struck a chord in the American electorate. But 80 days from the election, I’m starting to settle back into my initial view that strong party identification will win out over facts on the ground. I was struck watching the Saddleback Forum yesterday at Pastor Rick Warren’s church that voters are beginning to sort into their tribes. For all the talk of new, young evangelicals giving Obama a chance in November, it was apparent from the difference in responses given to the two candidates that Obama stood no chance of connecting with this group of potential voters. Indeed, among White evangelicals, Obama is faring no better than John Kerry did in 2004. That is stunning given that Bush is widely regarded as the “evangelical candidate” and Kerry was viewed as a largely secular figure.

Now the table seem reversed, Obama is an avowed Christian, albeit at one of those “liberal” churches and McCain is a traditional Western Republican who is reticent to talk openly about his faith. But it hasn’t moved the needle one inch. I think this is because we have two core constituencies on either side of the political divide that have starkly different world views. I’ll be interested to see if his “change” theme works in the face of this continued polarization.

Evan Ratliff at Salon’s Machinist blog asks if the Internet is making us lose our memory. Building off of Nicholas Carr’s provocative Atlantic article entitled Is Google Making us Stupid and the discussions that have resulted therein…here and here, Ratliff wonders what happens to our brains when we never develop the need to remember certain items, like remembering phone numbers, an task that online personal databases has rendered obsolete.

My interest is in whether memorization is a skill we should be teaching our undergraduates. If facts are readily available, should our student assessment consist of testing the retention skills of our students? Should our role be to help students develop the memorization skills they might not have learned beforehand?

Anthropologist Michael Wesch has an interesting take on this question. In this wonderful lecture from the University of Manitoba, Wesch makes the claim that most university classrooms are designed with the assumption that knowledge is limited and the expert at the front of the room is its main disseminator. The result is that the professor is competing directly with the web as a disseminator of knowledge. Speaking for myself, that’s a battle I can’t win. I agree with Wesch that our job is not solely to disseminate information, but to help students use the tools of knowledge aggregation to address problems. In Wesch lecture, he talks about how he poses a “grand narrative” question at the start of his course and the students structure the types of materials they need to address the question they are addressing.

The problem is that many of us in academia treat the web as the enemy. I’ve had countless conversations about the evils of Wikipedia. Much of this is a natural reaction on the part of “experts” whose authority is being challenged by “the crowd.” Unfortunately for us, the information produced by “the crowd” is more accessible, and therefore potentially more influential than that produced within the ivory tower. Since the majority of our students will not live in the ivory tower, I’d rather they learn to marshal “the crowd” rather than ignore it.

I’m confident this article from Reuters by Matthew Bigg on “racial code words” is going to have the right-o-sphere up in arms. I have to say I am sympathetic to their plight. How do you attack a relatively young, relatively inexperienced, African-American presidential candidate without being tagged with the racist label? Even for academics who think about this stuff for a paycheck, finding a “bright line” definition of what is “code” and what isn’t is challenging. For instance, Was this “code” or a slip of the tongue?

In May, Hillary Clinton said Obama’s support was weakening “among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans.” Her comments were read by some as implying that blacks were lazy but also as a subtle appeal to white racial solidarity.

What about this?

An advertisement run by McCain’s campaign this month, which portrayed Obama as a celebrity who was not ready to lead, sent a subtle racial message by flashing images of Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, according to Ronald Walters, professor of politics at the University of Maryland.

Walters said the ad played on deep cultural fears about inter-racial dating and marriage, which was illegal until the 1960s in some U.S. states.

One obvious difference was that Clinton’s statements were in response to an interview. The words were uttered in the moment and thus probably the result of a really bad juxtapositioning of words.

The McCain ad, on the other hand, wasn’t an impromptu response to a reporter’s question. The ad might be trying to tap into these fears of miscegination. But that doesn’t pass the logic test. Polling suggests that very few people are against interracial marraige.

Those for whom that message would be salient are concentrated in the 65+ demographic. In 2007, 75% of people over 50 years of age approved of interracial marriage as opposed to 90% of people under 50.

Personally, I think that anyone with qualms about voting for a black presidential candidate has already made up their minds to vote for McCain. So if there is an appel to miscegination going on, it’s probably a wasted effort to convert people who are already on your side.

A number of university presses have recently created blogs and podcasts to feature their authors. These podcasts and blog entries have the potential to deepen the interaction that students have with the ideas promoted by these university presses. I’m planning on assigning some of the podcast entires in my race and politics class this coming semester. I’m also thinking about having my students track author blogs and respond to their posts. I wish that academic journals would follow suit and expand the range of media they use to communicate ideas. Listed below are some of the major university presses in the United States and their presence on-line. If anyone has a link to a university press blog or podcast, let me know.

University of Chicago Press Blog

Yale Log (Yale University Press Blog) and Podcast

Harvard University Press Publicity Blog, Author Blog and Podcast

University of California Press Blog and Podcast

From Glenn Thrush in Politico:

According to a Congressional Sportsmen’s Foundation poll to be released Wednesday, John McCain leads Obama by a 45 to 31 percent. That’s only about half the 27-point edge respondents say they gave George W. Bush over Kerry four years ago and far short of the 65-to-15 percent margin gun owners gave to Bush over Gore in 2000.

What gives? Isn’t Obama the guy who thinks central Pennsylvanians “cling” to guns? The explanation from the foundation that sponsored the poll:

I don’t think John McCain has really made his case to hunters and anglers,” says Melinda Gable, communications director for the foundation, which advocates gun rights and expanded access to federal land for hunters. “Things were very different in 2004. Everybody knew that George W. Bush was from Texas, he was a rancher and that he went hunting. We haven’t seen that from McCain yet—there’s the unknown—he really needs to come out as a sportsman. Neither candidate has talked a lot about the issues that are important to us.

Of course, this is the framing that this particular group would like to place on this data. This would force McCain to focus more on issues that pertain to sportsmen. What really stands out from that data is the drop from a 50 point gap between Bush and Gore to a 27 point gap between Kerry and Bush. This is either the fruits of the hard work the Democratic part has put in to be competitive in rural America. It could also be that post 9-11, hunter and fisherman/person are not as salient to voters as issues of national security or economic stability. What do you think?

HT: Ben Smith

Keeping with the littany of race-related articles on the presidential campaign, New York magazine has a series entitled Race: The Impossible Conversation. The series kicks off with a John Heilemann article that looks at why Obama’s lead isn’t bigger that a few points. He thinks race has something to do with it.

Call me crazy, but isn’t it possible, just possible, that Obama’s lead is being inhibited by the fact that he is, you know, black? “Of course it is,” says another prominent Republican operative. “It’s the thing that nobody wants to talk about, but it’s obviously a huge factor.

He doesn’t provide much demographic evidence to support his point other than to note that Obama is under-performing among Whites. Perhaps this is all the evidence he needs. Currently Obama is running in the mid-thirties with this group. This is low even for Democrats. Heilemann points out how valuable this paleface (don’t ask me why he uses this term) demographic:

The pollster Thom Riehle, who founded the AP/Ipsos survey and is now a partner at the firm RT Strategies, calculates that even if black turnout rises by 25 percent from 2004 (and Obama wins 92 percent), if Hispanic turnout holds steady (and Obama wins 60 percent of it, seven points better than John Kerry did), and the under-50 vote rises by 5 percent (and Obama wins half of young white voters), the Democrat would still need to win 40 percent of the overall paleface vote to prevail in November, one point less than Kerry garnered and two points less than Al Gore did in 2000.

First off, I think this pollster’s estimates are way too conservative. I’m not sure why Hispanic voting would only “hold steady.” Doesn’t he know that Salsa has replaced Ketchup as a America’s favorite condiment? If the youth vote only increases by 5% then Obama has a problem. Heilemann concludes from this that Obama is not going to be able to win by “changing the map.” I suggest that it’s his only choice. Particuarly because of this nugget:

In October, Obama’s former pastor, Wright, will publish a new book and hit the road to promote it, an occasion that might well place the topic of Obama’s blackness (along with his patriotism and his candor about what he heard in the pews in all those years at Trinity Church) squarely at the center of the national debate.

Thanks to our inability to place people in their specific historical and cultural context, October will be “gratuitous racialization” month. This suggests to me that Obama’s bounce out of the convention better be a big one. He’s going to need a bit of padding when Sean Hannity resumes his scholarly interest in Black Liberation Theology.

There are qualms I have about Matt Bai’s long piece in the New York Times magazine that speculates upon whether Obama’s emergence means the end of “black politics.” It does however, articulate something I’ve been feeling for a while about the discussions of race during the campaign. Bai points out that the new generation of black politicians have endured a different form of racism than their predecessors. This quote from Corey Booker, reflecting on the similarity between his youth experiences and Obama’s, highlights the changing experience of racism for a set of thirty and forty something blacks.

You know, what it’s like growing up every single day and having people ask to touch your hair because they’ve never seen hair like that,” Booker said. “To have the entire class laugh and giggle when somebody pronounces ‘Niger’ as ‘nigger.’ The constant bombardment of that kind of thing really affects our spirit, and it’s every single day. Like when people want to come back from a vacation and compare their tan to yours and joke about being black.

This is a racism of nuisance and the struggle to be seen as a whole human being rather than a racism of formal exclusion and violence. Whereas the previous generation had to endure racism in all its forms, the struggle for this group is less about breaking barriers and more about struggling to be accepted as a multidimensional person. This comes across in Booker’s answer to Bai’s question about whether he sees himself as a leader in the black community:

I don’t want to be pigeonholed,” he said. “I don’t want people to expect me to speak about those issues.” By this, presumably, he meant issues that revolve around race: profiling by police, incarceration rates, flagging urban economies. “I want people to ask me about nonproliferation. I want them to run to me to speak about the situation in the Middle East.

This seems to be Obama’s struggle. A person who wants genuinely to be seen as a whole, but is repeatedly dragged into a civil-rights era, conversation about race and structural inequality. This conversation still needs to be had. The fact remains that for all the gains of the black middle class, a sizeable black underclass remains, hate crimes are on the rise, and the black incarceration rate is several times that of other groups. This is probably what drove Jesse Jackson to make his unfortunate comments. I can understand his indignance at this “upstart” who seems to be leapfrogging what he sees as the unfinished business of the civil rights era to attack black fathers who are already beleaguered by societal stereotypes and institutional racism.

Therein lies the problem…the shift in racism from the formal and overt to the subtle and personal for many in the black middle class. Your politics derives from where you stand. It’s telling that Obama sought out the experience of black inner-city life by moving to Chicago to become a community organizer. His is a politics of searching, of constructing identity from a pastiche of experience. This is the stuff of novels, but not necessarily of politics. This might be what the “new black politics” turns out to be. A politics that is rooted more in identity and recognition rather than challenging structural inequalities. If you listen to Obama’s recent rhetoric, he doesn’t strike me as one who is relishing the opportunity to get in there and “stick it to the man.”

Sociological Images links to a wonderful hoax site called Felon Spy.

It purports to help you find felons in your area using a “patented Felon Search technology.” The only tip off to being a hoax is the hilariously funny terms of use which includes such gems as:

The Company may terminate your marriage; delete your bank accounts and any content or information that you have ever collected over the entirety of your life for any reason, or no reason, at any time in its sole discretion, with or without notice, including if it believes that you are under age 96. When we are notified that a user has died we will not send flowers but rather say a small prayer and fire our AK 47s into the air. We will generally, but are not obligated to, keep the user’s account active under a special memorialized status for a period of time determined by a custom magic 8-ball.

and

FelonSpy Pages are completely random and fake. They are used solely to critique the sad state of our commercial, political, realities. You may not search FelonSpy on behalf of another individual or entity unless you are authorized to do so in writing (triplicate form). This includes fan FelonSpy Pages, as well as FelonSpy Pages to support or criticize another individual or entity including local county Sheriffs, other than Boss Hogg and Barney Fife. Sheriffs in New Hampshire, and Georgia should learn the term “to Google” 
FELONSPY DOES NOT PRE-SCREEN OR APPROVE FELONSPY NAMES, AND WILLNOT GUARANTEE ANYTHING AT ANYTIME AT ANYPLACE. Terms of Use, FelonSpy Pages are subject to and governed by certain laws that go beyond the galaxy most humans and similarly primitive life forms are aware of.

Hoax sites like these are the new vanguard in political and social activism. With so much of mass culture oriented towards a hyper-vigilance that primes a basic human response, the only ammunition left is to mock our own human failing. As a resident of and college professor in,Thousand Oaks, California, I live in what should equate to a “fear-free” zone. However, I’ve observed that conversations around crime are more pronounced here than in other, less safe, places in which I’ve lived. Why do low-crime areas obsess about crime? Is there a base need for us to experience a measure of fear, even if it’s fabricated?

Adan Serwer has an interesting article posed Monday in the American Prospect on “Obama’s Racial Catch-22.” He makes the case that instead of emphasizing the juxtaposition of young white women and a black male candidate in the latest McCain attack ad, we should be focused on how the ads prime the “jockey syndrome” New York Times journalism William Rhoden wrote about in his book 40 million dollar slaves. Serwer explains:

He defines Jockey Syndrome, as what occurs when “the establishment attempts to change the rules when the competition begins to gain ground.” It refers specifically to the phenomenon of changing the rules in certain sports to end black American dominance, which began with the expulsion of black jockeys from equestrian sports at the turn of the century. Once white athletic dominance was re-established through changing the rules of the game, declining black prowess was held up as proof of black inferiority.

He pretty effectively applies this phenomenon to the presidential race where he claims Obama is subject to multiple tests (is he presidential? is he “too presidential”? Is he a light weight? Is he too cerebreal?) Some of these tests are the natural result of his newness on the political scene. But undoubtedly this “newness” would be less of an issue if he wasn’t a racial “other.”

The “jockey syndrome” analogy doesn’t entirely apply. No one is “expelling” Obama from the presidential race. Indeed he won a major party’s nomination. And as many conservatives are ready to point out, there may be a percentage of Americans that are bullish on Obama because of what his candidacy might mean for race relations.

But thinking about the campaign in these terms does shed light on a recurring problem in Black-White relations, the idea that Black success must come at the expense of whites. As Serwer explains:

By comparing Obama to Paris and Britney, McCain’s latest ad implies that the attention given to Obama is undeserved, the result of “natural” assets rather than hard work, much like these “spoiled” athletes who “get paid too much.”

This is a dangerous meme for Obama and it poses siginficant challenges for him, as the article suggests. How do you reinforce the notion that you’ve earned your position when there are a majority of people who have a “possessive investment” in believing that you haven’t earned your place at the table?

Two things might work against him. First, being a bi-racial candidate might buffer him from this framing. Although history would suggest that you don’t get to choose your racial designation if you are bi-racial. The other is that the grueling fight with Hillary Clinton allows him to pretty effectively argue that he’s earned his way to the table.

Whatever the outcome, this discoure is far from the halcyon days of Spring when we were going to have a long awaited “conversation” about race.