The article offers his take on the currently-raging debate over King Tut’s complexion, which is taken as a signifier of his (and therefore Egypt’s) links to Sub-Saharan Africa and is also taken as bearing on the matter of whether Egypt should be understood as “African” or “Middle Eastern.”

(Whatever. Everyone who has ever seen a Hollywood film knows that the ancient Egyptians were white, just like Jesus! You can click the head for a pictorial history of Tut, and if you haven’t heard this story, background reports are at the end of this post.)

This week’s hoopla actually started in 2005, when a major museum exhibit was accused of whitewashing Tut’s image. The exhibit featured “new” images of Tut popularized by Zahi Hawass, secretary general of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, who in 2005 led a team of anthropologists and forensics experts France, Egypt, and the United States. Just this week, Hawass declared:

“Tutankhamun was not black, and the portrayal of ancient Egyptian civilisation as black has no element of truth to it,” Hawass told reporters.

“Egyptians are not Arabs and are not Africans despite the fact that Egypt is in Africa,” he said, quoted by the official MENA news agency.

As you can imagine, that one didn’t go over too well.

There is plenty to say on all of this, for instance how we pick and choose when and what race signifies, or how even what counts as racial is subject to similar ebbs and flows and desires.

This new Tut-tutting also points to a fundamental ambivalence in the African-American cultural tradition. Before the rise of Afrocentrism, our main relationship to ancient Egypt was in the allegorical essence we distilled from the book of Exodus. In that story, my friends, Egypt was on the wrong side of righteousness. (I am reminded here of Black Woman’s take on this week’s events: “I’m actually kind of relieved about this news. I always feel a bit guilty around Passover time like my people had something to do with the oppression of Jews. Looks like Black folks are off the hook!”) Further, if indeed Egyptians are some kind of hybrid people (and I know that technically almost everyone is some kind of hybrid and blah blah blah, but please bear with me), but if they’re hybrid people historically located at a geographical crossroads, do they still count as “black,” in the 90s kente-cloth sense that the protesters mean it? After all, if Barack Obama isn’t “black enough,” what does that mean for ol’ King Tut?

But I am being silly, for I really do get it. Something about Hawass’ comments, in their focus and intensity, went right under my skin. And that is why I am so appreciative of this Stephen Barnes piece, which really elicits a deeper sense of what is at stake. I can’t quite reproduce its overall tone in a quote, so I really recommend reading it and its comments, here.

Here is the gist of it:

If you don’t think Tut was black, fine. But don’t think black intellectuals who claim he was are doing anything other than what people have done since the beginning of time. The hunger of blacks to see themselves in history is not a radical revisionism but a core human need.

In a Jules Feiffer cartoon, two intellectuals, one white, one black, sit across the table from each other. The black man says: “You have your history. White history. Written by white men, to promote white power. We want our history. Black history. Written by black men, to promote black power. Our demand is separate but equal lies.”

I’ve never forgotten that cartoon. It contains a basic truth: Everyone wants to think the world revolves around him. Many indigenous peoples have a name for themselves that means, simply, “the people,” and the mythology of many groups in the world suggests that God created them first, loves them best, and created everyone else later . . . and less.

Indeed.

Something is very wrong with this. It’s difficult to be sure. But I am reminded of sitting in my tiny study in my old Flatbush apartment. Looking out the window, I see a squirrel perched on a fence post, chowing down on a chicken wing.

A chill goes through me. Oh Wayne.

“Skulls Confirm We’re All Out Of Africa”

Well, apparently UNICEF Germany, like The Guardian, might have already gotten the memo:

But maybe they also took it a little too seriously? (curtsy to Black Women in Europe, via African American Political Pundit)

BWiE also includes a letter from a Black German media watch group:

dear all,

This link was forwarded to our media-watch organisation by disturbed readers:

http://www.unicef.de/4500.html

This is an actual ad-campaign by UNICEF Germany!

This campaign is „blackfacing“ white children with mud to pose as “uneducated africans“.

The headline translates “This Ad-campaign developed pro bono by the agency Jung von Matt/Alster shows four german kids who appeal for solidarity with their contemporaries in Afrika”

The first kid says:

“I’m waiting for my last day in school, the children in africa still for their first one.”

second kid:

“in africa, many kids would be glad to worry about school”

third kid:

“in africa, kids don’t come to school late, but not at all” (!)

fourth kid:

“some teachers suck. no teachers sucks even more.”

Besides claiming that every single person in “Africa” isn’t educated, and doing so in an extremely patronising way, it is also disturbing that this organisation thinks blackfacing kids with mud (!) equals “relating to african children”. Also, the kids’ statements ignore the existance of millions of african academics and regular people and one again reduces a whole continent to a village of muddy uneducated uncivilized people who need to be educated (probably by any random westerner). This a really sad regression.

Bottom lines of this campaign are: Black = mud = African = uneducated. White = educated. We feel this campaign might do just as much harm as it does any good. You don’t collect money for helping people by humiliating and trivilaizing them first.

There’s more at the BWiE site.

Gee, I better get on this question of when blackfacing = whitewashing (or is it the other way around?)! But really, what we do when even the good intentions are hurtful and tiresome?

John over at Theory My Culture has a nice post on the recent brouhaha over a British group asking Borders to remove Tintin in the Congo from shelves.

(And don’t worry, I’m not jumping on the tintin hate bandwagon lorry… I’ve hated this tintin shit my whole life!)

At the center of his post, John asks an interesting question:

how do otherwise decent adults (let’s work with that assumption) come to accept these sorts of images and storylines as appropriate for their children? That’s what is happening here, of course. Buying racist books for children who, by definition, are initially clueless about such vicious history and violence. Why put those children at risk of this grotesque ideological constellation? There are better educational tools for little brains, if you’re thinking about that angle…

I think this goes to the heart of a particular version of postmodernity. I imagine the buyer of these books saying a couple of things. “I loved them as a kid!” “But he’s so cute!” “It’s ironic now!” I understand those sentiments. They aren’t entirely foreign to my initial instinct. I’m both nostalgic for things - especially cute things - of my youth and I love both irony and sarcasm. But there is a lot at stake in this disposition.

Hmm. As a shameless connoisseur of random little cute things, I come across a lot of Tintin, who seems to be the Francophile’s Hello Kitty. And the cuteness factor leads me to add one more thing to John’s list of rationales, and that’s the “it doesn’t hurt anyone” angle, which is the one I most often hear, and which I assume is supported by the speaker’s underlying rationale, “Clearly it’s fine. After all I’m fine.” (Read: “I’m not a racist.”)

Now, I could do a whole thing about how you might not be fine. About how we might imagine that this kind of racist imagery, this random cultural phenomenon, does in fact have real social consequences. Though I also know from experience that, when making such an argument, the person one is talking to invariably asks for “evidence,” that s/he be given an example of how imagery makes consequences.

I can make that argument, and I have very fancy conceptual tools for doing so. But I have to say, as I get on in my old age, all that evidence-making gets quite tiresome. The request shifts the burden from the person in the act to the person who feels affected by the negative consequences thereof. So why not just cut to the chase?

I hate Tintin because Tintin makes me feel like shit. If you love Tintin, Peter Jackson and Steven Spielberg, then I cannot help but imagine you as somehow complicit. So maybe, then, it is not about you; it is about me. And it is up to you figure out what that means to you. It is up to you to determine what I mean to you.

That’s one race card, redeemable for one saucy wink.

Here’s some background:

What Parsons’ refers to as “the personal” in Obama’s remarks I simply see as his willingness to speak on silence and inaction in the media– especially when it comes to justice for black people. And even though he’s not talking about anything new, there is something particularly striking in the specter of disproportionate sentencing in this cultural moment, this moment of Paris Hilton and Scooter Libby, of Genarlow Wilson, the Newark lesbians sentencing, and the Jena Six. (Jesse Rae Beard, one of the h.s. students, is pictured, left.) Obama took a good opportunity for shifting the norm, by using specific examples to make other candidates seem too abstract and less connected to the cultural moment, without affecting his own reputation for being “intellectual,” but here humanized, relatable.

The story is a good one. Below it is a Jena Six background story, since I haven’t posted on the case yet:

And here’s a background story related to the Jena Six, whom I will say more about in a later post:

Related posts at $3.60:

More on Barack Obama

More on Genarlow Wilson

More on Michelle Obama

Related posts by me at Cypher&Syllable:

More on Michelle Obama

Here’s a quote from BET, but there is more to read at Jack and Jill:

“Hot Ghetto Mess” is an entertaining, tongue-in-cheek examination of the good, the bad and the ugly of Black popular culture. Utilizing comedy, man-on-the-street interviews, video clips, pictures and music, “Hot Ghetto Mess” aims to shine a spotlight on prevalent images in pop culture and examine what role they play in American lifestyle. “Hot Ghetto Mess” goes where most shows fear to tread. As host Charlie Murphy guides viewers through shaking booties, thug life, baby-mama drama and pimped-out high schoolers, “Hot Ghetto Mess” will explore what these images really mean to all of us. Cutting edge, original, relevant and irreverent, “Hot Ghetto Mess” is like the traffic accident you can’t look away from. Viewers will laugh. They’ll cry. They’ll think. They’ll learn, and hopefully they’ll recognize they’ve GOT to do better.”

You’ve got to be kidding me. No, of course, you aren’t…

Update:Oooh! According to a site called What About Our Daughters, advertisers are indeed already pulling away from the show… Hmm, this should perhaps be followed more carefully…

Via Racialicious, I found this article at the L.A. Times, regarding Edith Isabel Rodriguez’s death at the Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital:

… the existence of a security videotape showing the woman writhing for 45 minutes on the floor of the emergency room lobby and the public release this week of two 911 calls in which witnesses unsuccessfully pleaded with sheriff’s dispatchers for help.The case — first reported by The L.A. Times — has crystallized people’s fears that even in their most desperate moments, the emergency system won’t take them seriously.

Indeed. Though it’s interesting that the LAT story, as well as others I have looked at, take the angle that Rodriguez’s death is about a failure in the U.S. healthcare system. I won’t dispute that, but it is also important to recognize that this isn’t something that could “happen to anyone”; it’s not, as Arthur Caplan is quoted as saying in the article above, about “a kind of morality tale of a society gone cold.”

The story of Edith Rodriguez’s death is a story about how people of color are treated in the American healthcare system, a system whose structural brokenness amplifies the moral and ethical emptiness with which many blacks and Latinos are treated in American social systems. That system, it is safe to say, has always been cold as ice.

You can hear the emptiness in the calls made to 911, as Ms. Rodriguez was writhing on the hospital floor, bleeding and vomiting. And you can also hear the callers hearing it– which makes an understatement out of the LAT’s assessment of the situation as “crystallizing” people’s fears. It didn’t “crystallize,” i.e. make apparent or bring into focus. It was merely a repetition of the too-real surreality people face everyday.

Even if you’ve heard the report discussed on TV, this one is worth listening to. Many of the accounts are quite edited and I’m not even sure where CNN gets their transcripts from; they’re barely related to the original text. An abridged transcript follows (my emphasis in color):

Operator: What’s your emergency?

Caller: There’s a lady on the ground… and we’re here in the emergency room .. and they are overlooking her.

Operator: Well, what would you want me to do for you, ma’am?

Caller: Send an ambulance out here to take her somewhere where she can get medical help.

Operator: OK, you’re at the — you’re at the hospital, ma’am. You have to contact them.

Caller: They have — they have a problem. They won’t help her…

[...]

Operator: … This line is for emergency purposes only. This — 911 is used for emergency purposes only.

Caller: This is an emergency, mister.(crosstalk)Operator: It’s not an emergency. It is not an emergency, ma’am.

Caller: It is.

Operator: It is not an emergency.

Caller: You have to see how they are treating her.

Operator: OK. Well, that’s not a criminal thing. This line, 911, is used for emergency purposes only.

Caller: It is an emergency.

Operator: … life threatening emergencies. It’s not. OK?

Caller: May God strike you too for acting the way you just acted.

Operator: No, negative m’am. You’re the one.

The painful quality of this conversation. It begins with the Kafkaesque surreality of this interaction as a scene of fundamental non-communication: “It is an emergency”; “It is not an emergency,” and it deepens the symbolic weight of an already tragic death.

There is something important in this conversation about recognition, about who has authority to understand a situation, and who has the power to ignore or negate that authority. I hear this in the ways the first caller signifies the power dynamic she is experiencing. You can hear her holding her voice, trying to sound knowledgeable and official as she talks to the operator, but also using language that signifies her awareness that she and the woman dying on the floor are fundamentally unrecognizable as subjects: “they are overlooking her.” And the caller knows whom she is talking to. “This is an emergency, mister.”

He hears something in her voice too. Is it race? What in her voice tells him that he really doesn’t have to listen? That this person has nothing relevant to say or cannot possibly know what she is talking about? Maybe it’s by virtue of where the call is coming from, a poor city hospital, an emergency room qua primary care facility, supposedly filled with people lacking wherewithal, lacking knowledge.

His condescension, cloaked and bathed in protocol, is in the “OK, you’re at… the hospital,” and his authority is implicit in the “OK. Well, that’s not a criminal thing“– which comes in response to the caller’s insistence that she who is present, not he who is not, knows and understands what is happening in this moment. Speaking on the problem of representing traumatic events, the holocaust scholar Dori Laub once noted that many situations we might think of as crises in witnessing– meaning that we aren’t getting testimony that really presents an event properly– instead constitute crises in listening. People are signifying, but we don’t recognize it, and thus don’t hear it.

I am not suggesting that the operator should be anything but official and professional, but here there is something specific in that tone. It’s hard to hear it if you aren’t used to hearing it. The caller is familiar, and it sets her off.

I am sure the 911 operator was shocked when the curse came: “May God strike you too for acting the way you just acted.” Her “too” is broad, aligning the operator with the dominant power structure that has brought them all to this tragedy. Who knows what race he is, but the operator is speaking through and for a kind of power. Tellingly, after her curse his diction switches more fully into a language of structural authority, “No, negative ma’am. You’re the one.”

10-4 ma’am. I don’t hear you.

I am reminded of when I was in labor with my son (you know, the one stolen by Sanjaya Malakar’s sister). It was after midnight on a Sunday, and the anesthesiologist, white and grumpy, was clearly irritated with my needing him, or rather, needing my epidural. He was cold and rough with me. Not rough like mean but rough like I was meat, which is worse.

The nurse, who was black, noticed this, and said something like, Marisa here is a professor at [insert fancy college name here]. It is silly, but this is information I often withhold unless relevant. I dislike giving some people the pleasure of “knowing” me, when otherwise I might well be, let’s say, invisible to them. The nurse, meanwhile, deployed it, thus assuring me better treatment.

It worked: thus informed, that ass stopped in the middle of what he was doing (i.e. preparing a needle for my spine), walked around the bed, held out his hand and introduced himself. In my affiliation I had suddenly flashed into subjecthood, transformed from she who required no recognition into she who was someone to know. To care about. To connect with.

Needless to say, we didn’t hit it off. I think my disinterest in him stressed him out.

Christina Olivares

I find this one difficult to work out: If you have never boxed, or done some sort of martial art, it might be hard to understand how such activities aren’t quite about violence. But in this post that boundary around violence is difficult to identify, since part of what I’m thinking about is a kind of self-defense (which thus assumes violence). I’m not saying, for instance, that I believe that all women should box, or that knowing how to fight would necessarily alleviate women’s vulnerability to domestic abuse. But there is something to be said for the psychological effects of imagining one’s self as able to hold one’s own. It’s an effect on the mind developed through the disciplination of the body.

“Disciplination,” by the way, is just fancy for “what we put our bodies through” in order to achieve some kind of effect. Disciplination makes comportment– or what my grandparents refer to as “how you carry yourself.” So learning a new sport or a new style of dance involves disciplination. We simply use the fancier word when describing such activities as also having psychological effects. The philosopher Iris M. Young has this beautiful essay called “Throwing Like Girl,” and in it she talks about a moment when she realizes that there are all these things she never learned to do with her body because she was a woman, and that “being a woman” was explicitly tied up in having a limited physical relationship to her body. It’s not that girls can’t throw; it’s that girls never learn to throw. We don’t teach girls to throw because girls can’t throw; girls never learn to throw. There is no such thing, really, as throwing like a girl. Oh, unless “girl” just means “badly.” Language is a bitch, huh?

It’s really quite amazing to think about. If I throw a ball at you, will you duck or catch? How much is that reflex guided by your training? How much is your training justified or strengthened by what do you think you should do? Or what you have always done? Who are you anyway?

Comportment is fascinating, especially coming off of a semester of teaching classes like “Girlpower” and “Racial Passing.” Passing is all about understanding comportment, and knowing how to adjust one’s bearing in such a way that people take you to be a certain kind of person. Two of the best examples of passing through comportment I can think of are Will Smith’s character in Six Degrees of Separation, and Kevin Spacey’s character in The Usual Suspects. (Although I guess these might also be examples of how vexed relationships between the real and the imaginary can be: remember when Denzel told Smith to use a body double for kissing a man, b/c it would ruin his career?)

But anyway, race and gender passing are usually about conscious decisions, while comportment is mainly unconscious, much in the way being “who we are” is an unconscious performance (for instance your regional accent or your gentle manner). But sometimes things happen that make you suddenly aware of “who you are.” Someone tells you that you don’t sound black, or look Jewish, or sit like a man. That moment of being told who “you” are is called an interpellation, and it speaks to how identity requires both our own actions and other people’s explicit recognition thereof. (If you’re interested in thinking about what this means for gender performance, you should check out the Chloé A. Hilliard article I mention in “all lesbians are sneaky.”)

So back to boxing and blows, to subjects and objects, and to the complications of our relations therein. Three powerful readings: In her post on CnS, Olivares has all these important things to say regarding boxing in relation to her own femininity through boxing. Then I saw a post over at a cat and twenty, picked up via Objectify This. Both women riff on how often women apologize, “I’m sorry this,” “I’m sorry that.” Apologies for imposing. Apologies for taking up space. Apologies for making people deal with themselves, and then watching their struggle.

1. So here’s Olivares. I don’t want to reproduce too much here, because I’d really like you to read the women above for yourself:

on the train to the gym this morning i realized that it was fear that kept me rooted & accepting of my teammate’s blows. not about being quick. i’ve just been trained to sustain blows. when i was little – the one time i evaded my father’s heavy hand, perhaps at 7 or 8 years old, i felt, for the first time in my life, not fear, but contempt for him as i spun to the other side of the kitchen – and he, shame? either way, when he caught me by the arm a second later, it became the worst beating of my life. for future (inevitable, i was a back-talker) punishments i never resisted, partly to not bring worse punishment, but partly, it must’ve been, so that i would never have to feel contempt for my father. fear was preferable to loathing. fear made it my fault; loathing, his fault. and so i’ve trained myself to not duck blows.

2. From a cat and twenty:

… she was sorry. she knew enough, even drunk to the point of unconsciousness and physically incapable of movement, that she was sorry about something. because we always are. we are always supposed to be.

you know what i wish? well, i wish a lot of things, really, chief among them being that men would stop hating women so goddamn much. because it’s not our fault. whatever it is that actually drives that misogyny, whatever fear is actually coiled up at the bottom of that vast heart of darkness, it is most definitely not our fault.

but barring these impossible dreams, you know what i wish? i wish that we would stop apologizing. it’s not easy - we’ve learned to say “i’m sorry” to try to preempt the whipping, or to lessen the lashes, or just to quiet our own minds while it’s happening. we’ve learned that “sorry” helps us survive. but i wish we could start fighting back, just a little, in little ways.

3. And finally, two scenes from Karyn Kusama’s Girlfight. The first is when Michelle Rodriguez’s Diana gets into a fight with her abusive father, and beats him. The second, which you can catch a glimpse of in the clip below, is when she hits her sparring partner. Hard. Then she apologizes. Her trainer admonishes her “don’t be sorry. Don’t ever be sorry.”

I could problematize this by emphasizing that the “don’t be sorry” implores women to be like oppressors. But here, I really don’t think it’s about apologizing, about proper conduct in the interest of ethical relations. This is about a state of being: Don’t ever be sorry.Though there are dangers. On top of her father, subjecting him to her blows, there’s this moment when Diana seems to see her abusive father in herself. By virtue of her position over him, she suddenly sees him as her abused mother, which makes her… Multiple subject positions, multiple significations: It’s hard not be sorry– in every sense of the phrase. Hard not to apologize for living while female, and then hard not to be a sorry ass punk… So much work.

To end, a Madonna video, “What It Feels Like for a Girl.” I have some feelings to smash out. The ending doesn’t bode well (nor does her English accent!), but afterwards I always feel strangely fine, being left to the work of recuperation.

But for a boy to look like a girl is degrading
cause you think that being a girl is degrading
But secretly you’d love to know what its like
Wouldn’t you?
What it feels like for a girl?

What do you think?

Fun and irreverent take on being young and down with the Obama campaign? Or sinister shadow of the Harold-Fordism Obama should expect throughout his campaign?

[6/20/07: Jack and Jill Politics has a nice update, here.]

And it does seem to have a scent of Limbaugh on it:

Related story:

Click here for the latest Genarlow Wilson updates at $3.60.

20 July, 2007 @ 11a

• Wilson’s appeal trial is being held right now. It was being simulcast, but the feed from the courthouse has gone out. You can check here for updates.
• The Daily Report (a paper out of Georgia) has one of the best information pages I’ve seen on the case. You can check it out here.
• Radley Balko has a particularly useful survey of some of the more recent issues with the Wilson case, particularly viz. McDade’s release of the party tape. I’m not a fan of the title (I’m just not in a glib mood lately), but it’s definitely worth checking out: “Genarlow Wilson and the N Word.” And here’s the link to my long comment thereon. (Reason.com)
• Democracy Now just posted this interview with Genarlow Wilson’s mother, Juanessa Wilson: “10 Years in Prison For Consensual Sex: Genarlow Wilson’s Mother Speaks Out on Why Her Son Remains Locked Up“ (click to listen).
• CNN transcript in which the actual Genarlow Wilson tape is discussed.

Have you seen this, about the tape being leaked/released to members of the public?

Release of Ga. Teen Sex Tape Draws Fire (NYT)

How could they have not protected the girls involved in this incident? What is going on in Georgia?:

Senator: Release of Wilson sex video should be investigated (AJC)

Following is some important background:

You can read the full story here at CNN, or here at the New York Times. And here is a CBS news story from last year, which more detail, if you are unfamiliar with the case.

After the jump, a timeline of stories on the Genarlow Wilson case.

You might also find this article, “The Harsh Wages of Sin: Why Genarlow Wilson is Languishing in Prison.” It’s written by Sherry F. Colb, a professor of law at Rutgers.

Below are relevant news clippings and videos. These go by date, most recent first:

The video is so interesting, as it uses Angelou’s blackness to authenticate Clinton’s femininity, and by some kind of metaphysical extension, her integrity as a candidate. Mainly consisting of images voiced over by Angelou, the video intercuts all these images of women of color (look Latinas! look AA&PIs!) with Clinton spending “quality time” with black children. Don’t get me wrong; I really like Angelou. She even wrote me a really sweet letter for my first book. But there’s something about the way the Clinton people use her in this video, an image amongst many others, that doesn’t sit well with me.

Elizabeth Benjamin on The NY Daily News’ blog reads the endorsement as “humanizing” Clinton. Angelou at best historicizes Clinton, reminding us that it is really meaningful that a woman is running for president. But at worst…

“Along with Hillary Rodham Clinton…and me!”

I am displeased. Not necessarily with the endorsement; I’m still working through that one. But the message was already a little, say, “thin”– vote for Hillary because she is a woman. And it is absolutely degraded by Angelou’s role here as Hillary’s black friend.

I’ll come back to this– accusations of whitewashing, blackfacing, and so on– in my next post. But before we jump into the racial representation issue, we should first look at Pearl and Jolie’s story of how they came to be friends through mutual admiration, each seeing the other on screen and realizing that they might be BFF. In an interview in this month’s Glamour editor-in-chief Cindi Leive declares that “Less than five minutes into our conversation, it’s clear that the bond between these two women is warm, respectful and real.”

I totally buy it, because they are both just wide-open empathy-machines. I spent some time at Pearl’s Global Diary site at Glamour. Every story contains some moment of primal connection with her subject-women. One could imagine that, if Jolie were a reporter writing about women in the wake of 9/11, she might be Mariane Pearl. And if Mariane Pearl were an actress trying to, I don’t know, change the world through adoption, she would be Jolie. Or Josephine Baker. I am unclear.

The point is, connection in gender, temperment, and class (frankly) all stand to trump race, which goes unmentioned in the online interview. I’ll get my hands on the hard copy tomorrow, and make this a better post. But for now suffice to say that, while I am willing to buy the idea that Pearl and Jolie are simpatico, I do find it strange that the article never approaches the most notable aspect of the decision. The decision to cast Jolie as a woman of color is second only to the fact that the film is being produced by Brad Pitt’s Plan B production company. This latter matter, however, is referenced quite compulsively throughout, mainly in all parties pointing out that Pitt committed to the film before his involvement with Jolie.

So we’re to imagine that that awkwardness has been cleared away. So why not at least mention the brown thing?

Or, to read it another way, might we imagine that that is what the whole simpatico thing is really about, consciously or unconsciously?

6/24/07: I’m adding this video b/c it touches this sense of the simpatico and this sort of heavy valuation of global empathy…

Earlier this week, FoxNews ran a segment on which Ramin Setoodeh, a Newsweek correspondent, and MeMe Roth, a representative from the National Action Against Obesity (NAAO) debated whether “the full-figured teenage Idol Jordin” is physically fit to be an American Idol. (The video is after the jump.)

I might post more on this fat-fitness bait fest later, but you can catch the conversation over at Fat Feminism. Let’s just say that I expect Jordin’s “weight statement” shortly.

For now, I’ll leave you to contemplate how, rather than take this opportunity to educate, Roth uses as evidence for her claim about/on Jordin’s body the fact that Jordin will drop weight once she wins. I am sure Roth is right, but I am not sure that prognisticating on Jordin’s future as thinspiration counts as responsible advocacy. And even though Roth insists that this comment was directed at “unhealthful Hollywood handlers,” it seems to me that she has fallen too easily into the trap of snarking about a woman’s weight as a matter public discourse.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svxLdNsxPSw]

Oh, and by the way, the fact that Jordin is a person of color, and that one is more at risk for weight-related illness if one is “Latino, African American, Asian or Native American,” which Roth is quick to trot out in her statement on the Fox discussion, just doesn’t trump the problematic core of the TV-ready NAASO spokesperson’s argument.

I am a strong advocate for improving people’s access is to quality food and health education, but I am just unclear on how Roth’s point and manner don’t in fact hurt more than help. She makes her statement, but at whose expense?

Correction: This post has been updated to change NAASO (The Obesity Society), to NAAO (National Action Against Obesity).

Last weekend, on the bucolic Quad at Harvard University–typically, the site of a casual game of Ultimate, or perhaps an afternoon reading of some Shakespearean sonnets before English class-an unusual and, to some, frightening scene was played out. There were people throwing things! And running! And jumping! And most scary of all, every single one of them was black. So the Harvard students watching from their dormitory windows, growing increasingly agitated at the sights below, did what any normal, white Harvard student would do when they saw a large, seemingly unruly group of black people: They called the cops!

Uhm, what?

And here is some reporting from The Harvard Crimson:

Bryan C. Barnhill II ‘08, president of the BMF, said that police officers asked the students whether they had a permit to be on the field, and left after students explained that they had gained permission.

Barnhill said that many of the participants had been wearing Harvard paraphernalia and the event had been approved by all the Quad House masters. He said the call to HUPD was “disturbing” because of the “assumption that we didn’t belong there.”

Seguing from one of our discussions in the last weeks of classes, I found this story particularly striking. Of course the students who called would never call it racism, because we still often think racism only has meaning in overt violence. It also speaks to how our ideas of race and racial meaning are tied to space: unexpectedly present on the Quad, those black students were not perceived as being the right bodies in the right space at the right time.

But, of course, they are students, meaning they were exactly the right people in their rightful place in the school’s historical and metaphorical center. And it is racist to assume they are in the wrong place, no matter how unfamiliar the scene may seem. If their appearance had been contextualized as a “black event” that everyone knew about, the response may have been the opposite; it’s so great they’re here! But don’ t they too have a right to their randomness? Or is that still a luxury for people of color?

And it is interesting, no? The students on the Quad say that many of them were wearing Harvard clothing. What would it mean to look right at them, but nevertheless manage not to see them as they are? Just kind of being there, playing dodgeball and capture-the-flag; could you get a more Seventh Heaven vision of college?

This is like some post-King, “hey weren’t you going to vote Obama for president?” page out of Ralph Ellison’s prologue to Invisible Man!

But really, Barnhill puts it best:

“In this day and age, racism rears its ugly face in ways that are much more subtle,” he said.

“We just want to show that subtle forms of racism exist, such as seeing a group of black people on Harvard property and assuming they don’t belong there,” he added.

Oh, and by the way, I know Gawker is just being snippy, which is the kind of thing I want from them, but this time, doesn’t their title, “Blacks Terrorize Harvard Students” kinda over-reinforce the race dynamic the article is criticizing?

And the aftermath: here are two more Crimson articles, Ashton Lattimore in an opinion piece, and an Editorial letter.

One reason offered for the major increase of the likelihood of college-educated Black women being abused sexually, among others, is the backlash theory. It states that as women become more successful outside of the home, men become abusive due to resentment of their move outside of the traditional roles of women.

The article is quite interesting, and also talks a bit more about how the statistics were collected, as well as also discussing how part of the problem is linked to ways in which abuse is not discussable in many black households. Check it out!