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Courtesy of cnn.com

• Beyonce does interview with bleeding feet
• Newest Obama ‘loves to chew on feet’

Catching up on a backlog of unread items in my RSS reader, I came across a nice one from the Feminist Law Professor blog about “Smile on a Stick”: a “useful solution” for women who are repeatedly being told to smile by the men in their lives. The blog entry in question included the leftmost portion of the image above along with a link to the online vendor where you could buy your very own portable smile. When I saw the original post, I’ll admit that one of the first things I wondered was whether this particular novelty item came in other skintones, and I was happily surprised to see that there was at least a small range of other options available . . .

. . . until I saw the labels for them, that is. Just when did “original” become another way to say “white”? And shouldn’t people of color get to hide their expressions behind a cardboard frown too?

Why I chose to make Monday my “regular” blog posting day, I’m not sure.  It’s my long teaching day this semester, and several of those long days will be made longer by various meetings that are scheduled to happen in between my morning class and my afternoon seminar.  Not to mention the obligatory (for me, even if not always for anyone else) post-seminar retreat to the local brewpub for a bite to eat and a pint (or two) to drink.  Just when did I think that blogging would happen in all that?  I don’t know.  I simply don’t know.

Anywho . . . last Monday’s post never happened because Monday Night Football demanded my attention.  My team (who shall remain nameless here, seeing as how they have the most heinous and offensive nickname in all of professional sports) was playing, and when one lives 1100 miles away from one’s team’s homebase (and the guarantee of weekly TV opportunities), one doesn’t let a MNF appearance by one’s team slide by.  The blog, I’m afraid, suffered as a result.  But I did come away from the experience knowing, for the first time in my life, someone I could turn to should I ever want to place a bet with a bookie.  Not to mention a bar where “buying” shots for the bartender seems to mean that you and he and half the staff all drink for free.  So it wasn’t a total loss.

Less pretty — and something closer to a total loss (at least to this point) — is the AFSCME strike at the U, which officially ended last Friday . . . but only because the striking workers couldn’t afford to stay away from steady (if still inadequate) paychecks as long as the administration could afford to hold out.  There’s much more to say here, but I’m still feeling far too angry about it all to get it down cleanly.

Let’s kickstart this blog a bit, shall we? And let’s try doing so with a recurring quick-hit approach that will (hopefully) goad me to drop a fresh chunk of prose here at least once a week.

1. A few folks have inquired about the long-promised but not-yet-delivered intellectual property tale. And I’d love to say that this has reached a point of resolution that would allow me to share it here. But, alas, the denouement that was afoot in April got postponed . . . and has since been deferred . . . and may still be a few weeks away from achieving sufficient closure to go public with the tale. But I haven’t forgotten. Promise. (Truly curious parties can always contact me off-blog for further details.)
2. I keep meaning to write a more detailed post about the Cultural Studies Now conference — even though Ted Striphas has already proclaimed that my previous tease of a post fulfilled that duty. There’s more to say than that, I think, but it’s been a hectic month since London, and the fast approaching semester only adds to the frenzy. But this story, too, will be shared.
3. The latest entry in my personal lifelong struggle with institutional “check one box only” approaches to racial identification came last week, when the University noted that it did not have a formal race/ethnicity code connected to my personnel file . . . and asked me to fill out this form. I was particularly amused by the last two lines:
   

   The University may acquire this information by visual survey. This may, however, result in the collection of erroneous information.

   I have fantasies of the University sending teams of ethnographers — all trained in the subtle art of “visual survey” with respect to racial identification — into the field to suss out the “truth” about folks such as myself who “fail” to shoehorn ourselves into a single box. And I want to be a fly on the wall for the deliberations that result from different team members deciding that different visual cues are the key to answering the question “correctly.” “Sure, his skin’s pink enough,” someone will say, “but those aren’t a white man’s lips.”

Margaret and I closed on the new house yesterday. And, of course, this has required a range of formal encounters with a host of different bureaucracies. Utility companies. Insurance companies. Title companies. And then some. In the process, we’ve been amazed and amused at the number of different ways our identities — especially Margaret’s — have been magically transformed by the default assumptions of different institutions. To wit:

• Our insurance company knows that we’re not married. At least not to each other. In spite of the fact that the friendly agent we dealt with asked about our marital status so that he could process the policy accurately, the final paperwork showed up . . . and Margaret was listed as “Mrs.” More curious, though, is that her last name remained the same, so she’s evidently now married — by an astonishing coincidence — to some other member of the Werry clan.
• Margaret handled most of the calls for fresh utility accounts on the new place, since all but one of the utility accounts on the old place are in her name — and her name only. When she called the gas company and gave them the new address, though, she found that she’d already been “disappeared”: when the previous owners of the new house made arrangements to close their account, the gas company automatically put the new owner’s name into their system. And, though both Margaret and I would have shown up on any formal records of the then-still-pending transaction, the gas account for the new house was already set up solely in my name. Perhaps the gas company figured I was so enraged by Margaret marrying someone else that they assumed I’d already kicked her out.
• As we were signing up for thirty years of debt yesterday (and so I am no longer unencumbered), we hit the part of the paperwork where the government asks for racial/ethnic identifiers so that it can (ostensibly) make sure that fair housing laws aren’t being violated. And though no one at any point prior to this had asked either of us to self-identify along these lines, we were both listed as “White.” And only “White.” As I added the other relevant X’s to this form, I said something about how this new (to them) information had better not do anything to mess up the deal.* To her credit, the closing agent sounded genuinely horrified and disturbed at the very thought that such a thing could happen to anyone.

Meanwhile, the house remains lovely. But evidently, I’m now a single white male. And Margaret has been lucky enough to find a new husband who already had her last name. I do hope she’s happy. Maybe the gas company can tell me where she and Mr. Werry are now living.

*In Seeing a Color-Blind Future, Patricia J. Williams writes about a real estate transaction coming to a screaming halt the moment she corrected the same mistake on her paperwork.

[Possible mild spoilers ahead, depending on just how sensitive you are to these things.]

Just came home from seeing The Departed at the glorious second-run theatre around the corner. And it was, in all sorts of ways, classic Scorsese: it’s not a film for folks who flinch at a little blood (’cause there’s more than just a little to be found here), but it’s sharp and engaging and taut . . . and it’s tough to make a 151-minute film seem taut.

Still, as I walked home from the theatre, I found myself wondering about the film’s opening moments, which feature footage of white-vs.-black violence from the Boston busing furor of the 1970s, with a voiceover from Jack Nicholson’s character, Frank Costello:

I don’t want to be a product of my environment. I want my environment to be a product of me. Years ago we had the church. That was only a way of saying — we had each other. The Knights of Columbus were real head-breakers; true guineas. They took over their piece of the city. Twenty years after an Irishman couldn’t get a fucking job, we had the presidency. May he rest in peace. That’s what the niggers don’t realize. If I got one thing against the black chappies, it’s this — no one gives it to you. You have to take it.

And then, after that, except for one brief line (also in the opening few minutes) from Matt Damon’s character, blackness effectively disappears from the movie as a subject of any significance. There are no scenes where Boston’s Irish mob tangles with crosstown black crime bosses, no visible racial tensions involving the movie’s lone black police officer, no further utterances of the N-word from Costello (or anyone else): for the last 145 minutes or so of the film, it’s simply a white man’s world, and no one else really matters much.

Which, to my mind, makes that opening speech and the accompanying footage all the more disturbing. Maybe the idea was to convince us that Costello is a cold-hearted bastard — except that Costello is also clearly supposed to be (and is) charming and charismatic (while still being a brutal crimelord) . . . and there are enough early scenes of Costello behaving like a violent badass to render any opening “tough guy” speech unnecessary to establish his credentials as such. So those initial words and images feel much more gratuitous than anything else: an excuse to have the biggest star in the movie drop the N-bomb and accuse black folks of being lazy, and to recirculate old images of rocks being thrown at (presumably) “lazy” black schoolchildren. And then, having done that, we can sweep all the blackness that’s just been invoked back under the rug and get on with the “real” business of watching six white men (Baldwin and Damon and DiCaprio and Nicholson and Sheen and Wahlberg) rack up an impressive body count to determine which of them is the real Alpha Male of All Boston.

. . . since I last set fingers to keyboard with active blogging in mind. The first couple of weeks of the semester have kicked my ass more than I expected.

And, if my visit to the Science Museum of Minnesota’s new exhibit on race is any indication, it’ll be a long, long time before we get to a place in this country where we can routinely have sane conversations about race. That’s not a knock on the exhibit, mind you, which is very smartly done (though I’ll admit that I’d have been happier if Ward Connerly hadn’t been accorded even the minor “expert” commentator role he was given in a couple of places), but some of the visitor feedback — of both the live and the recorded variety — was unsettling.

The section of the exhibit on racialized sports mascots, for instance, included an album of visitor comments . . . that was all the more disturbing because I suspect the curators filter out some of the more heinous responses they’ve received. The comments from pre-teen children were all very sweet in their open-minded desire to treat other people with respect and kindness, but they weren’t enough to offset the multiple comments from (alleged) adults about “whining” Native Americans who should “get over it already” and stop complaining about team names like “Redskins.”

I also watched the female half of a twentysomething white couple interact with a computerized questionnaire that attempts to assess people’s beliefs about the connections between national and racial identities. Asked to decide which of about two dozen nationalities were “white” or “non-white,” she confidently decided that Britons and Canadians were white, but every other nation on the list was non-white. And she did so at a speed that suggested she didn’t even bother to need to read the list: if she didn’t recognize the name of a nation right away, she didn’t even bother with the “not sure” option — she just pressed the “non-white” button and moved on. Even granting that the questionnaire is set up so as to encourage such sloppy thinking — I’m not sure there’s a nation on the list that can safely be said to be mono-racial, either by its own standards or by those currently in play in the US — the ease with which this woman divided the world up into “people like me” and “people not like me” was frightening. After she was done, she turned to her date/boyfriend/husband and (in a complete misreading what of the screen was actually telling her) proudly proclaimed that she’d “gotten them all right.”

It’s possible, of course, that I was simply caught off guard because the students in my “Media, Race, and Identity” course this semester have been surprisingly game when it comes to these sorts of issues. Not perfect — by any means — but I don’t think too many of us (myself included) have perfect conversations about race and racism: it’s way too fraught a terrain for that to be the rule. But they’ve been an impressively earnest and open-minded group — all the more so given that we’re only two weeks into the semester. And I can’t recall ever teaching these issues in the past without there being at least a small (but vocal) undercurrent of self-interested resistance to the conversation somewhere in the group. I’ve got my fingers crossed (though I should probably know better) that the rest of the semester will run so smoothly.

The tagline above is at the heart of the University of Minnesota’s latest “Driven to Discover” public relations campaign. It’s by no means the worst such campaign I’ve seen,* but it does seem to cut against the grain of the U’s public aspirations to become “one of the top three public research universities in the world.” Setting aside the problems with that campaign,** there’s a pretty big gap between saying “we want to be the best university in the world” and “we want to be just like Google.” There are certainly many different benchmarks that one might want to use for measuring and comparing universities, but I doubt that the ability to transform significant research findings into pithy soundbites is likely to improve Minnesota’s ranking very much. To a certain extent, I can understand the desire to add the proverbial human face to what many people see as a large and impersonal institution. But there are probably better ways to pull off the “human face” trick well than to try and make the U into a search engine with a face . . .

. . . especially given what a search engine with a face turns out to be: i.e., Ms. Dewey. As an example of an online game with a semi-slick interface, Ms. Dewey is very distracting and very disturbing, all at the same time. Someone spent an awful lot of time and energy scripting the dozens (hundreds?) of responses that the site’s namesake — a 21st century version of an old B-movie trope (the professional librarian who’s really an uninhibited sex kitten) — offers to various searches, and so there’s a certain ELIZA-like quality to the site: i.e., it’s easy (at least for me) to spend more time playing around with quirky, random, and/or perverse “conversational” gambits — just to see what sort of response you’ll get — than to play things straight and take the program at face value.

To be sure, part of what makes the site work is that some of those pre-canned responses are pretty damned funny. The site’s gender politics, however, remain a bit tricky: “Ms. Dewey” (who’s portrayed with style and sass by Janina Gavankar) offers up the occasional dose of (post)feminist self-reflexivity about how brainy women with multiple degrees get paid more to be eye candy than to strut their intellectual stuff . . . but most of the site still leans heavily on Gavankar’s ability to purr and coo suggestively for an audience of straight guys. And I’m still trying to sort out just how I feel about the site’s racial politics: Ms. Dewey’s style has more than a little racial/ethnic ambiguity to it, which is both cool (insofar as people of color aren’t often depicted as encyclopedic repositories of infinite knowledge) and not so cool (insofar as women of color are routinely depicted as fetish objects).

In the end, though, the site is still nothing more than Microsoft’s “Live” search wrapped in a fancy Flash interface*** . . . and all that flash and style ultimately makes Ms. Dewey into a pretty lousy search engine. If you’re serious about going online to try and learn about something, you’re probably not going to be happy with a search process that requires you to sit through 10-20 seconds of Ms. Dewey’s schtick (however amusing that might be at times) before you’re actually given a long list of sites in a box that’s (a) way too short, (b) difficult to scroll through, and (c) impossible (because of that Flash interface) to grab URLs from without copying them by hand.

Similarly, if you’re serious about promoting a university — any university — as a source of first-rate knowledge and cutting-edge research, you probably don’t want your sales pitch to imply (even obliquely) that your school is long on flash and short on substance.

Michael Omi was on campus tonight, where he gave a smart and engaging talk: “The Contradictions of Colorblindness: Race and Its Discontents.” During the Q&A period, two different audience members — seemingly with noble intentions — commented on the racial/ethnic make-up of the audience and on which members of the audience were (and weren’t) asking questions . . . and it was clear from their comments that they were relying heavily on visual markers to make their respective claims. Their eyes apparently told them everything they needed to know about the identities of the people in the room.

Of course, for pink-skinned mulattoes such as myself, moments like these are always loaded. Whether either of the audience members was actually including me in their reading of the room is impossible to say — the crowd spilled over into the hall, and so there were a lot of faces for them to focus on — but I’d be willing to bet that I wasn’t the only person in the room who typically gets read as white, but who would self-identify as something else. And I found it particularly ironic that a talk as nuanced as Omi’s — where one of the issues specifically on the table was the sloppiness of racial profiling — led more than one audience member to slot a crowd of 150 or more people into discrete racial categories solely on the basis of visual appearance.

Skip ahead to the trip home after the talk. Margaret had taken the car so she could attend a different function just off-campus, and our arrangement was that she would pick me up when she was through with her duties. The side street where she pulled up seems to lead around the side of the building and onto a major thoroughfare . . . but it really doesn’t. And we discover this at the moment when we’re suddenly squeezed in on both sides and stopped on a sidewalk facing an iron gate that’s way too narrow for a car to pass through.

At this stage, Margaret gives up — she’s had a long day and is usually happier as a passenger anyway — and she asks me to drive the rest of the way. So we switch seats, I back out of the predicament we’re in, find my way back to something resembling a real road — and then I proceed to take a wrong turn which has me heading down a “street” that’s technically a pedestrian-only zone, but that I know will actually get us where we need to be. I hadn’t intended to do the illegal thing (honest), but suddenly I was past the “Do Not Enter” sign — and I made the split second decision to cheat the half block or so it would take to get onto a legal road again.

Only problem was that I did so right in front of one of Minneapolis’ finest.

So Officer Friendly pulls me over and asks for my license and proof of insurance. The insurance card I show him was expired (by a few weeks), and he says “close enough.” (The proper one turned out to still be in the glovebox.) He wanders back to his car, checks my priors, comes back, reminds me of the speeding ticket I got in 2004, offers me a firm lecture about paying attention to road markings . . . and then lets me off with a warning. I thank the nice man, and we drive away.

And I suspect that Officer Friendly did just what those two audience members had done: he profiled us. He looked at me and Margaret (and her colleague Sonja, who was also in the car), saw what he thought were white folks with good jobs . . . and that visible whiteness is what spared me the expense of a ticket. While I’d like to be wrong about this, I suspect that if my blackness or my native-American-ness were more clearly visible in my pigmentation and features,* this story would’ve had a different ending. Especially given that I initially handed him an expired insurance card: compounding one offense with another is usually not a recipe for success when people of color get pulled over. I’m not exactly itching to have the ticket he could’ve legitimately written for my moving violation. But I’d feel better about the break I was given if I could believe that I wasn’t being rewarded simply for having pink skin.

*Mind you, in some people’s eyes, I amvisibly non-white. It happens often enough that I’m not completely surprised when it happens again . . . but more typically, I get read by people who don’t know me as just another white guy.

A quick-hit blog entry from Oakland as I wind up my time at the American Studies Association conference. My formal work at this gathering was relatively modest — a response to a panel — but fruitful, since the process of thinking about the papers in question gave me a potential jump-start on the first chapter of my Mixed Messages project.

ASA continues to be my favorite “big” disciplinary conference for a lot of reasons, and that list has grown since the last time I actually attended (and, to my shame, I’ve just realized that I haven’t been to ASA since 1997). One of the major new reasons, though, is that ASA has become a haven for a broad range of smart scholarship on race and ethnicity, If the Crossroads in Cultural Studies conference in July was laudable for its international-ness (among other things), this year’s ASA — and the vibe around the meeting suggests that this has been going on for a few years now — is comparably laudable for the astoundingly strong presence (maybe even dominance) of scholars of color. I’m already looking forward to next year’s gathering in Philadelphia.