Praise for the Kindle

I just purchased my first first e-reader, the Kindle. After two days of playing with it, I already love it. Although I tend to be a bit of a Luddite, this device - which lacks the sizzle of Ipod/Itouch/Ipad and their mutlifunctionality - does so much that I suspect that it or another e-reader will replace physical texts sooner than I thought.

Here is some of what I like it about it:

• lots of free classics - I already have copies of Scarlet Letter, Crime & Punishment, Endichron, and The Illiad on it.
• I love the free samples that Amazon provides of books. It makes me feel like I am browsing at a library or bookstore wherever I am.
• The books download unbelievably quickly
• I purchased the wifi version - no the 3 G one - and found it very easy to connect to the networks at home and work.
• Easy to e-mail pdfs to the kindle. In seconds, I added five reseach articles in pdf. I did not have to print out the articles, thus saving a lot of paper and without having to create a file system either, and will allow me to bring home research in an easy manner.
• It is easy to highlight key passages and very easy to review them.
• I will never be at a loss for a book to read ever again.
• Traveling with the kindle will save me the hassle of bringing books and research articles! I cannot wait.

I am looking forward to buying some newspaper and magazine subscriptions and seeing if that might alway me to get rid of my physical subscriptions. If that would work out, I would love it. I encourage anyone to try it out.

The Punishment of Jammie Thomas-Rasset

Jammie Thomas-Rasset is a name you should remember. She is the "mother of four" who shared 24 songs over the internet and a jury has ordered her to pay a $1.5 million fine (or about 62.5K per song) after her third trial. (See ).

While she is not the most sympathetic defendant, it is not entirely clear if posting songs to a website is exactly what Congress had in mind when it prohibited the distribution of copyright material.

I want to focus here on the logic behind the huge fines associated with copyright infringement. The U.S. Code authorizes juries to fine infringers as much as 150 K per infringing act, so Thomas-Rasset might have gotten off kind of "light." Compare this to the maximum fine of $5000 for involuntary manslaughter or second degree rape in Missouri or $100,000 for the same crimes in Wisconsin. It makes one wonder why the penalty of copyright infringement is so much stricter than for manslaughter or rape that the U.S. Code punishes much more harshly.

Ironically, if she had been charged with stealing 24 cds from her local store, the maximum fine would have been 1,000 per cd. (See Sec 609.52 Minnesotat Statutes).

Something tells me that we will hear more about this case before it is finallly settled!

The problem with philanthropy . . .

This article at gawker (http://gawker.com/5657220/ivy-league-schools-are-the-worlds-worst-charity) speaks to something that has been bugging me for awhile. This piece questions the wisdom of a $100 million dollar gift to Columbia's Business school (for adding space - not scholarships) as something that is truly worthy of being called philanthropy or charity.

While most of the comments focus on gifts to Ivy League institutions, my thoughts have been more focused on things like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet's "Billionaire's Pledge Club" where billionaires pledge to give more than 50% of their wealth to charity. This has gotten lots of good press and suggests that so much good will inevitably flow from these acts.

I guess I am just a wee bit cynical. While Bill Gates may know how to dominate the operating system market and Buffett may know how to invest money in stocks and bonds, I guess I am less optimistic that they know how to solve complex social and political problems. While choice is generally good, I am not sure why we should be thrilled when people are making choices in areas about which they are fairly ignorant or at least don't have a history of success. As economists have pointed out, consumers make good choices when faced with choices they regularly make (e.g. buying toilet paper) but generally don't do so well when faced with once in a lifetime decisions (e.g. picking a college or picking a heart surgeon). If Philanthropists are dedicated (like Gates), perhaps they become good decision-makers over time. But, it is not clear to me when or who their professionally honed judgment gets transferred to this new realm.

Even if billionaires can train themselves to become good decision-makers in this realm, this leads to the democracy problem. As individuals or their charities gain so much wealth, they gain the power to substituted their judgment for the majority. In other words, philanthropy is profoundly anti-democratic because an individual or relatively small and unaccountable group can determine which social problems, or in the case of Columbia what majors/buildings, will be fixed and improved.

Is philanthropy a good thing? If my arm was twisted, I would probably say it is. However, I guess I am not quite ready to strain myself in congratulating these folks until I am more confident that they are making good choices and folks can hold them accountable for their decisions.

Where Have all the Dangerous Ideas Gone?

I have been thinking a lot about banned books and the world of ideas lately.

Recently, I participated in Drury's Banned Book Celebration by reading a selection from Toni Morrison's Beloved. In reviewing the list of "Banned" Books, I noticed that relatively few books have been banned outright in recent years in that it was illegal to sell them.

Rather, the battle has turned to school curricula. Many books have become part of the curriculum wars, mostly for mentioning "forbidden" topics or words. Rarely if at all was the actual message or thesis of the book the problem.

Just today, I read the heart-breaking story of Risha Mullins at http://rorr.im/reddit.com/r/wtf/comments/dmzok/9b52fde5785125f3a0ebc44caca66852.html. She was accused of promoting "soft pornography" because the award-winning books she had chosen for students dealt with "dangerous" topics. As her blog outlines, Mullins ultimately lost her job but she stood tall for the idea that students should read books that matter. (Similar battles have been fought in the areas outside of Springfield, including Republic and Stockton)

For one of my classes tomorrow, I will be teaching Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience." It is a great essay but one that will, I suspect, perplex my students because he was willing to go to jail rather than violate the dictates of his conscience by supporting the state.

All these things seem to inform or set the context of the recent national conversation about higher education and the many ideas to change or abolish tenure. In a commentary posted at chronicle.com, Cary Nelson (the president of the AAUP) argues in support of tenure largely on the practical reason that parents should want their children educated by full-time professionals who devote their complete energy to teaching a reasonable amount of classes and have the employment safety to experiment with teaching and delve deeply into their subject matter. (See http://chronicle.com/article/Parents-Your-Children-Need/124776/?sid=wb&utm_source=wb&utm_medium=en) As a tenured faculty member, I am pretty partial to Nelson's argument (regardless of some of its flaws). The comments to the article echo, however, the broader national conversation that questions the competence of teachers and cost of tenure.

What links all of these topics for me is that feeling that ideas have lost their power. Tenure was created at a moment in U.S. history when holding the wrong idea was scandalous and was connected with a form of treason. Nonetheless, everyone agreed that colleges and universities were in the "idea" business. Thoreau, a national literary treasure, went to jail on principle.

Somehow, I doubt that contemporary Americans take ideas that seriously. Certainly, the critics of higher education and tenure seem to suggest that colleges and universities ought to get out of the business of reflection and ideas and more involved in practical skills training. Many defenders of tenure, I think, have missed that the real attack is not so much on the employment practices of higher education but the entire purpose of the modern university. If professors are "just" teaching job skills, then there are no dangerous ideas and tenure is not needed or so the argument appears in the mainstream media.

Risha Mullins may be the exception to this general picture, but one that proves the general rule. She lost her job because she thought education should be about ideas. While a number of authors lined up behind her, most of her colleagues did not or if they did, it was not in the way that Thoreau would have suggested. Rather, her critics associated with her controversial topics and succeeded in getting her removed.

I worry about all these things because I fear that we are forgetting how powerful ideas have rocked the world. The American, French, and Russian Revolutions transformed societies and toppled monarchies. The invention of monotheism and the prophesies of Moses, Jesus, and Mohammad have inspired religious traditions and caused tremendous wars.

Ideas don't seem to scandalize anyone these days. No one objected or was outraged at Drury's Banned Book Celebration. Sure, we might object to kids hearing dirty or inappropriate words, but ideas seem to be some sort of quaint artifacts of an earlier, more naive period. Rather than having revolutionary potential, we view ideas as forms of intellectual property we can accumulate or leverage for more stuff.

While I don't want to return to the Spanish Inquisition or the Communist Scare of the 1950s, I am saddened by how ideas don't seem to matter. I suppose I could now begin ranting about the evils of commercialism and consumerism and how economics has trumped everything else, but that may not be the real problem. Postmodernists, post-structuralists, and post-colonial thinkers were so successful in undermining the grand narratives and big ideas that modernity brought us that we no longer believe in anything. As a supporter of many of these positions, I do believe their criticisms were necessary to create a more democratic society. Unfortunately, their/my attack on ideas and idealism has been too successful and now we are all postmoderns whether we want to be or not. And all that may be left is shopping or the consumption of our niche goods.

I am looking for that one scandalous idea that will cause sufficient outrage to restore our faith in ideas and their power.

The Allegory of the Cave Re-visited

One of the nice parts about being a college professor is that I get to re-read Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" every fall with my freshmen class. While the selection we read is fairly short (only about 7 pages), it remains such a provocative piece. I am looking forward to what the class has to say tomorrow.

What really struck me today is how Plato is both deeply committed to truth and the obligation to share that truth with your fellow citizens. This idea remains revolutionary (and such a popular metaphor) because it refuses to accept popular, easy, or conventional answers. Moreover, the Republic is anything but sentimental, romantic, or patriotic as it places truth and wisdom above a fake or illusory common sense consensus. I wonder how our factured poliltics would look (e.g. the Mosque controversy or the Glenn Beck rally) if folks really applied Plato's approach.

Do yourself a favor and re-read it!

Mosque Controversy

I have not really waded into the NYC mosque controversy because I don't really know all the facts. It does seem like there are a couple of potential critical thinking problems with the reasoning of those opposed to the mosque (This is not say that the other side is not making some of its own errors).

First, it seems like that many commentators and people are equating Al Queda with all Muslims. While Al Queda claims to be a Muslim group, a very small percentage (less than a percent) of Muslims are connected with Al Queda. In a related vein, many are confusing the fact that some (again a very small percentage) Muslims advocate for a version of Jihad that is defined by political and violent confrontations with the idea that ALL Muslims hold similar values. The Imam in the center of this controversy is a Sufi. I don't claim to know everything about this form of Islam but I do know that it is distinct from the Sunni, Shiite, and Wahabism. It seems like critics of the mosque out to demonstrate some familiarity with the immense variety of versions of Islam.

Second, it seems like many folks who oppose the mosque do so on the grounds that it is an affront to "American" values and the memory of the victims. From what I have read, 10% of those who died in the WTC disaster were Muslim. For some reason, their memory does not seem to part of this discussion. Also, it seems like somehow people are forgetting that Muslims can be "Americans." Again from what I have read somewhere between 2.5 and 8 million Muslims are live and are citizens of the U.S. On its face, it seems contradictory to somehow suggest that these folks do not possess "American" values.

Third, just because an individual - in this case Al Queda terrorists - does something, it does not necessarily follow that they did so for religious reasons. For example, just because Christians or Jews regularly commit murders, rapes, and thefts in the U.S., it does not follow that these individuals did so out of religious reasons. While Al Queda frequently relies on religious symbols and rhetoric, Al Queda is much more of a political organization than a religious one. Its leaders are not called imams because they are not really focused on religious per se but pursuing a particular political projecte (albeit a very dangerous and violent one).

Fourth, as the picture above notes, there are many other potentially more demeaning buildings and businesses around the WTC than this mosque. I am not sure how pubs, strip clubs, fast-food joints, and lingerie shops help memorize the victims of this tragedy. It seems a bit idiosyncratic to attack this mosque if you are not going at these other businesses as well.

Fifth, I keep hearing that the Imam has potential radical ties with and/or has not been critical enough of certain groups (e.g. Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood). After doing some web searching, I cannot imagine someone who has a greater history of inter-faith dialogue and a geniune connection to Lower Manhattan. Given his extensive political ties to both parties, he seems like precisely the kind of Islamic leader than many politicians have been asking for! I believe I read that he has led services for something like 20 years in that area. This is not some "fly by night" operation, nor does he appear to use this space to be anti-American or to some denigrate the memories of the WTC bombings. Things are not adding up for me here as I would think that some folks would like that "moderate Islam" is trying to challenge "radical Islam" and present a model for how to be good "Islamic Americans."

While there might be a debate about its location (Are four or ten blocks a better "buffer"than 2?), I guess I am having hard time to see any nuanced argument why a pretty moderate Muslim group shouldn't be able to build a community center in Lower Manhattan. The arguments against the mosque don't seem to add up, especially when I consider that much of this criticism has come from folks who tend to want the United States to endorse or support religion more frequently. Frankly,I would think most Americans would prefer a community center/house of worship there - no matter the religion - more than the New York Dolls Strip Club or an Off-Track Betting Site. (BTW, I believe there was a Dunkin' Donuts across the street or within 2 blocks from the Holocaust memorial in Berlin in 2006!)

I also think that the fact this Imam has held services there before and after the WTC attack - with little fanfare or controversy - leads me to believe that this controversy is probably more manufactured than anything else and more an artifact of other partisan debates in American culture than anything else.

A Bad Book

The American Book Review has asked a number of pretty famous professors to identify a "bad book" (See http://americanbookreview.org/PDF/Top40BadBooks.pdf for their list). A number of the writers made it clear that a "bad book" has to be good enough to be worthy of getting angry with. In other words, they mean books that frustrate the reader because the writer could have clearly had the ability to do better and the topic warranted a better treatment.

My two nominees would be Percival Everett and James Kincaid's A History of the African American People [Proposed] by Strom Thurmond and Philip Roth's A Plot Against America. Both of these books began with fantastic, rich premises, but the authors seemed to get bored in the middle of the books. Because I love Everett and Roth, these were very disappointing to me.

Avatar and Authenticity

My wife and I were probably the last people in the United States to watch Avator when we got a chance to catch the film last night. I had read that the movie relied pretty heavily on metaphors of colonialism and that seemed all-too accurate to me. Building on this theme, what struck me was how the main character, Jake Sully, learned how to become one of the indigenous people. My father-in-law compared it Dances With Wolves and again I would heartily agree. It definitely seems odd to me that this film, which seems to offer a major critique of the European and American conquests of the "new world," would be so popular. When academics raise the very critiques developed in the film, we are generally castigated for our "weird" ideas.


The only spin that I would want to add to all this commentary is that Avatar has a pretty interesting representation of authenticity. In the field of hip-hop studies (one thing I write about), artists, critics, listeners, and scholars endlessly debate the authenticity of artists. In the film, Sully was able to shed his human skin and become like one of the "natives." So much so, that he manages to become their leader. I could not help to think of white folks like Eminem, Beastie Boys, Brother Ali or even socially conscious rappers like dead prez or Arrested Development. All these acts, even if they attain significant popularity, must engage the authenticity question. I do wonder how Avatar comments on this situation. It seems like a lot of Americans enjoyed watching Jake Sully gain entry into the indigenous society and become an "authentic" member of the community.

On the other hand, it seems like white audiences in hip-hop tend to prefer more "authentic" (i.e. gangsta) forms of rap. I wonder why the film found commerical success but that same kind of success eludes many middle-class and/or white rappers. Obviously, Eminem is the exception here but perhaps his own career might help explain the popularity of Avatar. Eminem and Jake Sully perhaps make whites feel that they could cross-over this seemingly impossible racial/species barriers and be on the "right" or "moral " side of history. Their ability to cross these boundaries suggest that we too might be exception who can escape the rigid nature of racial divides. Perhaps, it is that fantasy that helps catapault both Avatar and Eminem to their stratospheric commerical success.

Intellectual Bashing

Russell Jacoby just reviewed Thomas Sowell's Intellectuals and Society at http://chronicle.com/article/Skewering-Intellectuals/64113/. The review and the comments it elicited aroused my curiosity, so I read the first chapter on amazon.com to see how he sets up his argument.

While I can't quite endorse Jacoby's review based on this limited reading, Sowell's analysis appears to suffer from a number of potential critical thinking errors.

First, he defines intellectuals in a curious way. He argues that intellectuals is an occupational career for people whose career requires them to deal with ideas (Sowell 2). Then, in a footnote, he observes that many intellectuals do not earn their living from selling their ideas. This is strange because you have an economist defining an occupation in terms that do not include compensation for the work they do. Nor do intellectuals receive ownership interests in their ideas either (as an entrepreneur would who opens a business). So, they don't economically benefit if they are right, nor do they loose money if they are wrong. What they can do is benefit from their copyrights, trademarks and/or patents!

There must be some reason for this odd occupational definition of being an intellectual and this leads us to the second difficulty. By page five, Sowell wants to examine "Ideas and their Accountability." And this is where the critical thinking errors begin to multiply. In this section, Sowell wants to create a system for evaluating the quality of the ideas generated by these intellectuals and make judge intellectuals whether there ideas are "right."

And this is where Sowell has made his greatest analytical error (This may not shoot down his general critique of intellectuals but his methodology for doing so). By most accounts, the measure of an intellectual is his or her effect, not whether he or she is correct. This is even more true by the kinds of economic analyses Sowell tends to favor and employ. Intellectuals, even the most Marxist of intellectuals, do not own their ideas but they do write books and essays, make films, give lectures, and teach classes. From what I understand of traditional market economics, economics ought to frame intellectuals as in the business of selling the material products that result from their ideas, much like Walmart is in the business of selling low-cost goods. While Sowell wants to define them as non-market actors (hence his strange definition based in the language of occupation), most if not all market intellectuals are selling a brand. Books by Foucault, Derrida, and even his beloved Milton Friedman mostly sell because of the brand these guys (or their admirers) have created, not because of their truth. One would think that a free marketer like Sowell would understand this!

What I find ironic here is economists are typically not all that bothered by mistaken judgments as they are part of the market mechanisms. If a company errs in their understanding of the market and plans to sell a product at too high of a price, free marketers don't mind if they go out of business. Or conversely, if a business misunderstands what the public wants, they ought to go out of business even if there product is good. Consider the case of the mom-and-pop hardware store getting run out of business by a big box store, like Home Depot. Free marketers will argue that customers merely preferred lower prices to personal customer service or something like that.

The issue that really appears to be bothering Sowell is that intellectuals, particularly left intellectuals continue to make movies, write books, and give lectures even if many of their central arguments turn out to be wrong. He seems to be suggesting that the market is wrong and should not be purchasing their books. But how can markets be wrong? If you are a free market economist, they are not. Perhaps the market values the moral outrage, the theoretical language, and hearing tales of corporate greed and injustice.

In response to this apparent failure of the market to act rationally, Sowell trots out the truth standard as some sort of verification mechanism. The problem with this methodology (like much economic analysis) is you cannot evaluate a prediction about the future until the future arrives and you know all the contextual data. By then, it is too late to change course. (Consider how many economists -right or left- predicted it in its full misery). It is this point that Jacoby really grabs onto. What Jacoby and Sowell seem to miss is that intellectuals do a lot more than offer predictions about the future. Sowell appears to reduce intellectuals to mere political pundits. Most intellectuals ideas are way too nuanced to get fully enacted even if they can provide some of the general scaffolding for government action. So, what do intellectuals do best? Intellectuals ask provocative questions and examine our moral responsibility. I think many intellectuals leave the question of verification and experimentation to others (whom Sowell does not define as intellectuals).

Now, I am not disagreeing with Sowell's observation that intellectuals have been wrong a lot and those errors probably have social consequences. He is probably correct about this and, who knows, he might even be correct that left intellectuals are wrong more frequently than right intellectuals. However, this cannot save the form of his argument. Intellectuals are both market actors and interested in generating more ideas and in evaluating the morality of our current habits and social structures. We cannot merely evaluate them as intellectuals based on their predictions about the future (especially if you promote free market economics like Sowell).

As for Jacoby, I think he too readily takes the bait and tries to refute Sowell's attack on past left positions. For a supposed leftist, I also thought he missed an obvious opportunity to explain why someone like Antonio Gramsci relied on the figure of the intellectual as an antidote to the rise of modern capitalism and totalitarian dictatorships. I have not read his Prison Notebooks in a long time, but I always thought this metaphor was to remind workers that they were not mere cogs but human beings with minds and morality.

Sowell's form of economic thinking seems to find wisdom and morality in markets but not individuals, certainly not "experts or intellectuals". As a result, he appears to want to severely curtail the rhetoric of wisdom and morality in political discussions of markets and/or government action. I would think that Jacoby would have been more effective if he stayed focused on this disagreement with Sowell (are markets or individuals the locus of moral insight and wisdom?) and would have identified the real consequences in Sowell's efforts to rely on his brand of economic thought to evaluate the work of intellectuals.

Origin Myths in Hip-Hop?

Last week during class, one of my students asked a question that has been sticking with me (and I am paraphrasing): "Was hip-hop a revolutionary art form or something that evolved from earlier movements?" I loved the question and it has been bouncing around my brain for the past week. How much does hip-hop owe to James Brown, George Clinton, Sly & and the Family Stone etc.? Are these guys the inspirations for or co-inventors of hip-hop? This question certainly provides a nice transition to evaluating how the reigning origin myths of hip-hop explain the messy reality of the movement's beginning.

This week's readings (from That's the Joint! and Can't Stop, Won't Stop) underlined this question about the powerful need for origin myths in hip-hop, whether they revolve around 1520 Sedgewick Ave, TAKI 183, or Grandmaster Theodore's accidental "invention" of scratching. What purpose do these stories hold? Why do these stories continue to get told and circulated? (FYI - a recent episode of PBS's "The History Detectives" examined the 1520 Sedgewick story). Hip-hop needs an origin myth perhaps to validate or legitimate its status, suggesting that despite a 30 year plus history and billions of units sold, it still lacks institutional recognition. The language of "revolution," "invention," and "origin" help create cultural capital and thus make it "worthy" of social recognition. Perhaps, this teaches us about the "life-course" of cultural movements.

The specific origin myth, however, is revealing. Regardless of the involvement of Puerto Ricans and Jamaicans in the earliest days of deejaying, graffiti, and b-boying, hip-hop gets coded as "Black." It seems like both the hip-hop nation and the general American public (and perhaps the global audience of hip-hop) have a deep desire to code or frame hip-hop as authentically "Black" as part of the origin myth. Another aspect of this myth is that is intimately rooted to urban street life even if some of its most successful acts (i.e. Public Enemy, Run DMC, etc) have pretty solid middle-class roots. It seems like the hip-hop nation is deeply invested in positing itself as oppositional (against dominant culture?) and this stance relies on the figure or metaphor of urban Black males. There is some irony in labeling hip-hop as "street" as hip-hop has become deeply commodified, making billions for record companies and millions for some artists. Certainly, hip-hop is bigger and more complex than this origin myth, but the myth has an enduring power. It probably is even growing as the hip-hop nation becomes even more heterogeneous!

I don't mean to suggest that hip-hop has not been profoundly influenced by African American cultural sensibilities and the historical debates within African American culture. Of course, it has. Rather, the question is how do American cultural assumptions about race shape our understanding of hip-hop and its history. Not to be too melodramatic but the stakes of framing the "origin" of hip-hop may very well be a key to shaping future understandings of race in American culture. Do we want to continue to view American history through a simplistic black-white binary or do we want to understand the complex and paradoxical ways that race, ethnicity, class, gender, and national origin intermingle and operate in American culture and society?

So, what is the origin of hip-hop? Is it the beginning of the Atlantic slave-trade, was it Clyde Stubblefield and the "Funky Drummer," was it when Kool Herc first became a DJ, or when taggers became writers? I don't know, but I do know that we need an origin myth for hip-hop (and just about everything else too) to help ground our understanding. But sometimes that origin myth hides as much as it reveals. It also can tell us as much about "our" fears and hopes as it does about the actual thing itself.

(FYI - I just realized that K'Naan's "Does it Really Matter" was playing on I-tunes when I finished my blog entry!)

Hip-Hop Scholars?

My "Hip-Hop Nation" class begins this week (Hooray!) One issue that really jumped out at me in the readings (from Know What I Mean and That's the Joint! especially) is the real anxiety that surrounds the whole concept of academic scholarship about hip-hop. On the hand, the very of act of having a scholarly discourse about hip-hop legitimates it and helps increase the cultural capital of participants. For these reasons, many folks support the increasing academic popularity of and interest in hip-hop. On the other hand, this increase in scholarship has the potential to undermine the authority of participants in hip-hop culture. Another downside has been that many academic folks with limited or partial knowledge about hip-hop have been able to voice their criticism and praise for hip-hop. Frequently, both popular and academic publications have accepted these scholarly pronouncements without carefully evaluating the data or scholarship upon which that commentary rested! I think that much recent work in hip-hop studies is pretty much eradicating this interloper problem.

I look forward to posing this question to students to see how they respond to the whole situation. In most academic fields, the debate about the relative authority of participants and observers is pretty settled. I am curious whether students will draw on analogies from other things that they have studied, such as history, literature, social science, art, or even biology and apply them here. What complicates this whole question is that race, class, and gender possess a much greater presence in this debate about the relation between the scholar and his/her subject-matter than in other fields. I don't have the answers but I really want to hear what students have to say about all this. I wonder if how students pre-existing knowledge about hip-hop will shape how they approach this debate!

My own take about this question is shaped by my own entry into hip-hop studies via being a lawyer. I came to hip-hop studies because lawyers and judges (mostly white) were making all sorts of judgments about sampling and the meaning of hip-hop culture vis-a-vis criminal law in the early to mid-1990s. Few of those judges, attorneys, legislators, or police officers had a detailed knowledge of hip-hop, but their views shaped how hip-hop has developed and been regulated by the state. For this reason, I have always been somewhat skeptical of the claim that ONLY hip-hop participants can and should discuss and analyze hip-hop. The challenge I have always struggled with is how to balance the two very different forms of knowledge being developed about hip-hop.

As I think about all this, my mind keeps coming back to the debate within American studies (the field where I received my Ph.D.) between those who viewed American culture as unique and exceptional and those who viewed American culture as following similar rules (regarding class, gender, ethnicity, capitalism, democracy, etc) as other countries. While the critics of American exceptionalism tend to rule the current day in the study of American culture, it appears that the exceptionalists tend to hold the dominant position in hip-hop studies. In other words, it seems that the consensus is that hip-hop is so unique that we cannot apply existing theories to understand it and we would be better off emphasizing the view of the actual participants. I am not confident enough to want to defend this position yet, but I am hoping my students will help me figure out if this analogy holds or if it simply an interesting but failed idea.

The Harry Reid Controversy

As is probably well-known, Harry Reid privately told two journalists in 2008 that Obama was more electable because he's "light-skinned" and lacked a "Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one." (This description is based on the story posted at the Root: http://www.theroot.com/views/was-harry-reid-right). Since that has been revealed by the journalists, there has been considerable discussion about Reid's comments and whether he should resign his position as Senate Majority Leader.

I am not going to address whether he should resign, but I do want to try to clarify (a key critical thinking step) about the issues swirling around his comments. It seems like there are a number of key points here:

1. Reid used an extremely dated term to refer to African Americans.
2. Reid identified that race mattered in the election of Obama
3. Reid identified that intra-racial differences matter and they can affect interracial communication and perception.
4. Reid identified that cultural practices, specifically language patterns, can change depending on the audience.
5. Reid noted that shifting and controlling one's linguistic patterns can affect people's perceptions (and in turn affect electoral success).

I think that we should hold our political leaders accountable for their language. While perhaps it is understandable that Reid might employ a racial term frequently used in his youth, Reid clearly made an error in his language usage. Again, I leave it to others about what the consequence of this should be, but he definitely should have apologized for that error.

As for the remaining issues, I think the distinction that needs to be made is whether Reid is making descriptive statements or prescriptive ones. From what has been reported, he appears to be describing reality, not promoting his wish for how things ought to be. Based on my assumptions as a professor, telling the truth or trying to tell the truth is not in itself of objectionable. If his descriptions are wrong, bring evidence that they are wrong. (I am happy to see that some folks, like those at the Root, are doing precisely this!)

While he may be wrong in his descriptions of contemporary reality, it seems like the outrage, especially from conservative media, over his comments has stifled a discussion about his observations about contemporary America. I think the controversy reveals, among other things, that white America is still so obsessed with colorblindness as the only strategy to approach race that any reference or discussion of race makes folks cringe. It seems like some of the uproar results from the fact that a white person appears to be acknowledging that race and culture matter.