Posts tagged "race"

How Very Banal To Ask What I Mean

All U.S. irony is based on an implicit “I don’t really mean what I say.” So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it’s impossible to mean what you say? That maybe it’s too bad it’s impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already? Most likely, I think, today’s irony ends up saying: “How very banal to ask what I mean.” Anyone with the heretical gall to ask an ironist what he actually stands for ends up looking like a hysteric or a prig. And herein lies the oppressiveness of institutionalized irony, the too-successful rebel: the ability to interdict the question without attending to its content is tyranny. It is the new junta, using the very tool that exposed its enemy to insulate itself.

-David Foster Wallace (via nooneishere, lovearth, andrewtsks)

And here we get at a good part of the reason I find Stuff White People Like so trying. Christian Lander mistook recognition for insight, and in the process came up with a “joke” Republicans had been making about liberals for decades. (But it’s different this time, supposedly, because Lander’s actually a liberal.) His work doesn’t interrogate or explore or say anything new or incisive about race and class in the United States. Lander thinks he deserves a cookie for merely making his observations. How very banal to ask what he means!

60
America politics race books
Apr 09

Beyond the Pale

Glenn Beck excels at expressing adventurous thoughts in memorable language, but he outdid himself when, one morning last summer, he offered a diagnosis of President Obama. He said, “This President, I think, has exposed himself as a guy, over and over and over again, who has a deep-seated hatred for white people, or the white culture. I don’t know what it is.” (The context was one of the summer’s most entertaining reality shows—the one starring the black Harvard professor and the white police officer who arrested him.) In September, Beck sat for an interview with Katie Couric, and she asked him a deceptively simple question, which had been posed by a Twitter user named adrianinflorida: “what did u mean white culture?” Whatever adventurous thoughts this query inspired, Beck did not seem eager to share them. “Um, I, I don’t know,” he said. Finally, after two minutes of temporizing, he arrived at a nonresponsive response that was both honest and sensible: “What is the white culture? I don’t know how to answer that that’s not a trap, you know what I mean?

This is the beginning of Kelefa Sanneh’s article in the latest edition of the New Yorker, and I was going to hold off posting it until I could come up with some commentary, but since I’m sure I’ll refer to it a whole bunch in the future anyways, I’ve decided to just post up the link here so y’all could read it. Which you should, because it’s fantastic.

And I know a few folks in my feed have already posted it, and perhaps they’re wondering why they didn’t get a reblog or a h/t. And in answer to them: sorry guys, I saw this first. Nobody out-stans me on Kelefa Sanneh.

race America politics books criticism
Apr 11

I'm not sure I can treat him the same after this.

Douglas Martin:

There are a few things— like the legislative fuckery going on in Arizona— that make me question what it means to be American. I’m all about people having pride in their heritage, but I have a lot of pride in my nationality. Excluding a lot of the people who are chosen to represent us, I’m extremely proud to be an American.

That being said, there’s something that doesn’t sit well with me when I’m called an “African-American”; there an implied sentiment that people of a different skin tone have to have labels put on them.

Sometimes, this gets the better of me when around well-intentioned people. When referred to as an “African-American”, I’ve been known to sharply reply, “No. I was born in El Paso. I’m an American.” 

Fuck being black… Martin Douglas is Texan???

16
Texas America race
May 04

I missed the part where it stopped being about Imus.

It’s time to drop some old school Kelefa Sanneh knowledge on y’all. Here’s his 2007 article “Don’t Blame Hip-Hop.” The events may not be current, but the commentary still is. Here are some choice quotes; absorb them, then read the whole thing:

  • “Somehow Don Imus’s ill-considered characterization of the Rutgers women’s basketball team — ‘some nappy-headed hos’ — led not only to his firing but also to a discussion of the crude language some rappers use.”
  • “Nowadays, as all but the most intemperate foes of hip-hop readily admit, this is not a debate about freedom of speech; most people agree that rappers have the right to say just about anything. This is, rather, a debate about hip-hop’s vexed position in the American mainstream.”
  • “Like MySpace users and politicians and reality-television stars and, yes, talk-radio hosts, rappers are trying to negotiate a culture in which the boundaries of public and private space keep changing, along with the multiplying standards that govern them. This means that mainstream culture is becoming less prim (or more crude, if you prefer), and it’s getting harder to keep the sordid stuff on the margins.”
  • “The rapper Cam’ron, who was shot in 2005, cheerfully told [Anderson] Cooper that cooperating with police would hurt his professional reputation and run counter to “the way I was raised.” Asked what he would do if he were living next door to a serial killer, Cam’ron merely shrugged and said he would move. The segment said remarkably little about the fear and anger that might help create such an anti-police culture. Even if Cam’ron is just doing what sells, the question remains: Why is this what sells?”
  • “Those major [recording] corporations that Mr. Cooper mentioned aren’t very good at promoting so-called positivity or wholesome community-mindedness. But give them some words to snip and they’ll diligently (if grudgingly) snip away.”
  • “One of hip-hop’s many antecedents is the venerable African-American oral tradition known as toasting; those toasts are full of those three words. Hip-hop took those rhymes from the street corner to the radio, and those old-fashioned dirty jokes are surely meant to shock people like [Oprah] Winfrey. Once upon a time, such lyrics (if they had been disseminated) might have been denounced for their moral turpitude, but now they’re more likely to be denounced for their sexism. Both verdicts are probably correct, and each says something about mainstream society’s shifting priorities and taboos. Maybe dirty jokes never change, only the soap does.”
  • “But it wouldn’t be surprising if the big record companies eventually decided that brash — and brilliant — rappers like Cam’ron were more trouble than they were worth. (Cam’ron’s last two albums haven’t sold well.) Why not spend that extra money on a clean-cut R&B singer, or a kid-friendly pop group? … [H]ip-hop isn’t in an especially filthy mood right now. It sounds more light-hearted and clean-cut than it has in years.”
  • “What if hip-hop’s lyrics shifted from tough talk and crude jokes to playful club exhortations — and it didn’t much matter? What if the controversial lyrics quieted down, but the problems didn’t? What if hip-hop didn’t matter that much, after all?”

Related: For the Ladies

    3
    America hip-hop music race gender
    May 06

    There is peculiar bit of jujitsu that white public figures have employed recently whenever they’re called to account for saying something stupid about black people. When the hard questions start flying, said figure deflects them by claiming that any critical interrogation is tantamount to calling them a racist, which they most assuredly are not. Last year, Bill O’Reilly took a jaunt up to Harlem’s famed Sylvia’s and returned with the news that blacks had learned the basics of table manners and developed opposable thumbs. When Media Matters attacked O’Reilly for his voluminous ignorance, he angrily accused his critics of distorting “a positive discussion on race and accusing me of racism.”

    […]

    The racist card is textbook strawmanship. As opposed to having to address whether her comments were, as Obama said, “wrongheaded” and “absurd,” [Geraldine] Ferraro gets to debate something that only she can truly judge—the contents of her heart.

    […]

    Implicit to the racist card is the idea that no racists actually live among us. After reality TV star Duane “Dog” Chapman was taped by one of his sons dropping n-bombs, a more loyal son insisted, “My dad is not a racist man. If he was he would have no hair. He’d have swastikas on his body and he would go around talking about Hitler. That’s what a racist is to me.”

    Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Playing the Racist Card,” Slate, March 14, 2008
    2
    America race
    May 07

    And the next few lines of the song are: Ain’t no plantations in my family tree,He didn’t believe in slavery, thought that all men should be free and it also contains, “Ain’t about the races; the cryin’ shame/To the fuckin’ rich man all poor people look the same,” then conspicuously shouts out MLK. Which is the song’s point, I guess. The Southern Thing should be something transcendent, but what the South is isn’t the pro-regional, post-racial ideal the Drive-By Truckers sing of. This is a New South band; it’s as much Bubba Sparxxx as it is Lynyrd Skynyrd.

    And the next few lines of the song are:

    Ain’t no plantations in my family tree,
    He didn’t believe in slavery, thought that all men should be free

    and it also contains, “Ain’t about the races; the cryin’ shame/To the fuckin’ rich man all poor people look the same,” then conspicuously shouts out MLK.

    Which is the song’s point, I guess. The Southern Thing should be something transcendent, but what the South is isn’t the pro-regional, post-racial ideal the Drive-By Truckers sing of. This is a New South band; it’s as much Bubba Sparxxx as it is Lynyrd Skynyrd.

    1
    America The South music politics race
    May 29

    Goodie Mob - “Dirty South” (Soul Food, 1995)

    The counterpart, perhaps?

    See in the third grade this is what you told:
    You was bought, you was sold.
    Now they saying Juice left some heads cracked
    I betcha Jed Clampett want his money back

    1
    America The South music race
    May 29

    Black books. [1]

    A thing here in America that strikes me as vaguely unusual whenever I see it is the section in book stores and libraries called African American Literature. Vaguely unusual because in Australia we don’t have sections of book stores divided by race. On seeing such a section, my instinctive reaction is, “Why can’t they go with the other books?” And, then, “Why would I not want to read these books?”

    Now, I’m not an idiot, and with a bit of thought I can work out that the reason we don’t have sections for specific races in Australian book stores is because no people in Australia occupy a category analogous in size or history to black folks in America. And that because African Americans occupy a distinctive place in American society and have a unique history, it’s not surprising that they might want to write books that tell stories about themselves, and that therefore this might constitute a unique genre worth being grouped together in a store for the purpose of easy location. I can figure all that out, but it doesn’t stop it seeming weird when I come across it. [2]

    Since there is this genre in America called African American literature, I’d like to find out some more about it. And since I know next to nothing about it, I’m going to need some recommendations. 

    From what I’ve seen of the section, it seems to contain three distinct strains of books. There are the classics, which I can tell because I’ve heard of them. [3] There is contemporary literary fiction, which looks just like any other “respectable” new release except there are black people on the cover. And there are the — for want of a better word — “trashy” novels; mass market paperbacks that don’t look dissimilar to romance novels or detective series or airport thrillers. [4]

    What I’m hoping you folks can help me out with is some recommendations. I would like to read at least one example from each of the categories I outlined — assuming I did correctly outline these categories. So if you can recommend something from each, that would be good. But even if you can’t, I’d appreciate any suggestions.

    (We can discuss me broaching other barriers of literary segregation and how I should go about that at some other date.)

    ——

    1. Not the sitcom.

    2. Incidentally, book stores in both Australia and the United States have sections for gay and lesbian books, something I’ve never thought to find unusual. And stores sort of separate books by gender, e.g. “Romance” or “Chick Lit,” though middle to high brow books are allowed to intermingle.

    3. For instance, The Color Purple, which I’ve not read and probably should, right?

    4. I think Iceberg Slim was one of these before he was Jay-Z or something?

    2
    America books race
    Aug 05

    Chicago by Radical Cartography Pink = White Blue = Black Green = Asian Orange = Hispanic Gray = other —— More here. I thought Portland, New York and San Francisco were quite interesting. (h/t Matt Yglesias)

    Chicago by Radical Cartography

    Pink = White

    Blue = Black

    Green = Asian

    Orange = Hispanic

    Gray = other

    ——

    More here. I thought Portland, New York and San Francisco were quite interesting. (h/t Matt Yglesias)

    1
    race Chicago cityporn America
    Sep 20


    1 2 3 4 5 6 7