A Seed editorial this week, which is incidentally an endorsement of Barack Obama, offers a dubious idea about the relation between science and politics. more...
As we move closer to what may very well be a milestone in America’s Racial History, it’s instructive to look back on where we came. I’m having my race and politics class look through a brilliant interactive site on racial expulsions put together by the Austin American Statesman newspaper in 2006. The investigative journalists working on the series found, along with numerous instances of town expulsions:
14 countywide expulsions in eight states between 1864 and 1923, in which more than 4,000 blacks were driven out. These are only the most extreme examples of a widespread pattern.
These expulsions were not pretty sights. Here’s an account from the intro to the Austin American Statesman series of an expulsion in Marshall County, Kentucky:
vigilantes led by a local doctor posted notices in 1908 telling blacks to leave. When that failed, more than 100 armed and hooded men raided the town of Birmingham, picked about a dozen people at random and tortured them. Nearly two-thirds of the blacks left, and the most recent census showed only 37 blacks among the 30,125 people living in Marshall County.
The series coincided with Elliot Jasper’s 2007 book on racial expulsion entitled Buried in the Bitter Waters which details the story of countywide racial expulsions throughout the United States. Here’s an NPR piece on racial expulsion in Corbin, Kentucky. the site includes an excerpt from Jasper’s book.
How do we make sense of this history today? it’s particularly poignant to me to see an African-American candidate for president with a reasonable chance of winning the majority vote in three of the four states featured in the Austin American Statesman piece (Georgia, Indiana, Missouri).
Which aspect of the interactive series was the most interesting to you and why?
I’m putting together my syllabus for a course in California Politics and I want to avoid the bland, conventional approach to teaching what amounts to an upper division intro class. I’m beginning to play with a theme of Cyberfornia that draws parallels between the development of California and the emergence of Web 2.0. Yochai Benkler claims that the web’s revolutionary turn is that it turns the task of production into something that is granular and modular so that vast numbers of people can engage in peer production.
California, at least Southern California — my primary frame of reference, seems to have that same amount of modularity and granularity. Los Angeles is often referred to as a network of neighborhoods without a center. An entire Los Angeles school of urban studies has been built around the city’s postmodern, de-centered, elements. But I don’t think anyone has made the connection between California’s open-source, peer production driven nature (think of our initiative process) and Web 2.0.
What do you all think of the relationship? Am I off base?
A Friday treat for late 20 and 30 something domestic beer drinkers 🙂
More convergence culture, Don 🙂 I wonder what impact all this has on the campaign.
One question has been driving much of my thinking lately: what is the best way to communicate the value of “politics” to people who consider themselves apolitical? What do you say to people that argue, often very casually, “I’m not really into politics.” I’ve found that many students who are hoping to enter seemingly non-political careers such as business, media, entertainment etc., for example, think that “politics” is a phenomenon that is very distant from their lives and interests—something that goes on in the faraway, bureaucratic world of Washington, DC, but bears little connection to their personal and professional career trajectories.
I’d like to open up a space for public inquiry here—what have you done to communicate the value of politics to others who consider themselves apolitical?
In my own dealings with this quandary, I’ve found it best to bring politics down to the level of “everydayness” as much as possible, communicating to apolitical others how buying a t-shirt, a cup of tea, or even their favorite album can all be political acts—supporting whole systems of equality or inequality that are hidden from us in our everyday doings (and per Kenneth Burke’s wonderful aphorism that “every construct is a destruct”). I try to talk about “power” as much as possible, particularly how “power” is who gets to speak in society—which means that we are all implicated in influencing or being influenced by forces which help or hinder both ourselves and others in everyday life. I try to raise (following Henry Jenkin’s findings on promoting civic engagement among youth) issues that are “immediate” and “involving” for the person I’m talking to—have they had any trouble with healthcare lately, or potholes in the road, what about noisy neighbors?—these all bring up civic issues that relate to our everyday lives. There are many more examples, but what I most try to do is expand the definition of “politics” for people so that they can start seeing the political in the seemingly “nonpolitical” (in Barry Brummett’s terms—perhaps talking about how race is politically negotiated in Wayans Brothers films or two white teenagers in the suburbs listening to Eminem—in moment to moment acts of negotiating meaning that wield influence for ourselves and others). Per one of my favorite theorists, Stanley Deetz, I try to also communicate how all information is political and sponsored, even the front of a “Trix” cereal box is political in occluding its means of production and sheer coma-inducing sugar content (not to mention its fostering of childhood obesity). As Deetz and others such as Stuart Hall have argued, the sanitized, supposedly neutral word “information” hides political dynamics in social life—that is, “information” really puts us “in-formation.”
Paradoxically both simple and difficult to answer, this is, I believe, an enduring interdisciplinary question that we all have a significant stake in. Think of the number of vital political issues (e.g. civil rights, human rights, health rights etc.) that might be left unaddressed by future generations who think politics is “out there” rather than “right here.” We should do everything within our power to find novel ways to communicate and translate the value of politics to others who consider themselves apolitical. What means/methods have you used for communicating the value of politics to others who think they are apolitical? –Don Waisanen
Is it me, or are there a lot of article trying to tie political orientation to personal habits or consumption choices? Apparently the messiness of my desk is a marker of my progressive politics. A recent New York Times article tries to make a link between maternal weight and political ideology arguing that heavy mothers produce more conservative offspring. A month ago I read about a connection between an individual’s startle reflex and their orientation towards more hawkish national defense policies.
This is all driven by the recent resurgence in genetic explanations for political behavior. While advances is DNA mapping explain part of the resurgence, It seems to me that our scholarship is also being driven by our increasingly polarizing politics. As we move into left and right tribes socially, we seem to be resurrecting essentialist arguments to explain the phenomenon. I suspect we’re asking the question “are liberals wired differently than conservatives” because we’ve had “Red America vs. Blue America” beaten into our heads for almost a decade. I hope this academic fad passes quickly into the night so I can go back to keeping a messy desk!
A bit off track for the blog, but I thought I’d share Ta’ Neishi Coates’ post on the date/fiancee rape seen in the AMC show Mad Men last night. It was an incredibly disturbing “look away” moment for me, but one that had the desired effect of jarring me back into the reality of patriarchal, hegemonic America in the 1960’s. The show is so lush and stylish at times that you lose that core message in the series: under the contented veneer of traditional roles lies raw, potentially damaging and explosive, power. My mind then wandered to whether we’ve come all that far in 40 years as far as date rape is concerned.
I saw this politically-flavored ad in New York City this weekend and it struck me as unusual.
In an election year, we can expect to see many product advertisements that utilize political imagery or poke fun at political culture. Along the same block, I saw a display featuring cardboard cutouts of the two presidential candidates bearing various wines and spirits. But most of these ads, do not take a political perspective or mount a critique. They tend to be of the “whether you support Obama or McCain” variety. This ad for a storage company make a very clear criticism of Sarah Palin — albeit on experiential and not policy grounds.
Is this actually unusual? Is it permissible because NYC is a fairly liberal place? Or perhaps because Obama-Biden are such clear frontrunner? What do you think?
I’m having my students read excerpts of The Race Card by Richard Thompson Ford a Law professor at Harvard. Good read, but here’s an exceptionally thought provoking passage. He’s describing the notion of a “post-racist” society.
Like “postmodern” or “postcolonial,” the prefix in post-racist doesn’t suggest the demise of what it modifies—in this case racism. Instead, post” suggests a sort of supernova late stage of racism in which its contradictions and excesses both cancel out and amplify its original intent.
Although we can quibble with the “late stage” characterization, I find it an accurate way to think of how racism is practiced in today. Post-racism indulges in racist stereotypes while at the same time not engaging the moral dimensions of racism. In practice, you can engage in all the racism you want as long as you are being ironic about it.
Here’s Thompson articulation of a post-racist worldview:
she doesn’t really think of her black friends as “black,” and she means it. She also freely indulges in the black stereotypes our culture has on offer: hip-hop’s image of the black thug, the black pimp, the black drug dealer, the black crack whore, the black hustler. The post-racist is free to be explicitly and crudely bigoted because he does so with tongue planted firmly in cheek.
Thompson’s work makes me think of Dave Chappelle. I have to admit to being one of the legions of admirers of Chapelle’s “Rick James” impression despite it’s racist and sexist subtext. But at the same time, I understand that I’m complicit in perpetuating racist stereotypes by watching the show. I can justify it by saying we’re having a collective national laugh at the absurdity of race, but at the same time, we lack the outrage that contemporary racism should instill in us.
In my race and politics class last week we talked about the well-worn concept of White Privilege in American society. Of course, i trotted out Peggy McIntosh’s seminal article identifying numerous instances of White privilege. The concept made sense to students on an abstract level, but when I asked them to apply it to the political process, I got blank stares. One of my students shared with me Tim Wise’s article on how Sarah Palin benefits from white privilege which I shared with my class.
After reading the article, my students were surprisingly nonplussed. It made me wonder if anyone has empirically tried to test white privilege’s effect on politics? I imagine you could do some sort of experimental design where one group is given a set of candidate attributes and told the race of the candidate while the other group is given the same set of attributes and not told the race of the candidate. If anyone has seen work like this on white privilege…give a shout!
Oh…and speaking of my favorite subject from last week. I found this Sarah Palin moment on SNL odd but funny. What’s the angle here? Does she know she’s being mocked? Does the campaign want her to be mocked? The mind reels when it’s procrastinating.