The R-word in question is racism. Everyone's throwing it around these days, but very few people seem to agree on what it means.

The NAACP recently asked Tea Party leaders to repudiate the movement's racist members, to stop displaying "continued tolerance for bigotry and bigoted statements."

Mark Williams of the Tea Party Express responded by describing the NAACP's  antiquated use of the word "colored" (in its name) as racist and declaring that the storied Civil Rights organization makes "more money off of race than any slave trader" ever did.

Other right-wingers simply dismiss the NAACP's accusation of racism as racist, the socio-political equivalent of saying "I'm rubber; you're glue. Everything you say bounces off of me and sticks to you."

Via tweet, Sarah Palin called the NAACP's very charge "appalling."

In other racial news, Jesse Jackson is still being clowned and condemned for...

Is "white guilt" really real? Slavoj Žižek thinks so. 

The Slovenian political philosopher (once dubbed "the most dangerous philosopher in the West" by the New Republic and "the Elvis of cultural theory" by The Chronicle of Higher Education) has written a communist manifesto, First As Tragedy, Then As Farce, challenging contemporary interpretations of 9/11 and of the global financial meltdown of 2008. I won't try to capture all the nuances of that ambitious and provocative work, but I will give you my version of its punch line: that only what Žižek calls "a dictatorship of the proletariat" can make up for the limitations and constitutive exclusions that inescapably define capitalism (and liberalism and socialism) in all of their various guises.

Far from being a threat to capitalism's undeniable ubiquity and unchallenged global hegemony (as some Leftists attempt to interpret things)...

"How about just putting names in a hat and just picking one?"

A friend, Theresa, and I were comparing war stories about the graduate application process, and she offered up this witty solution. Indeed, we weren't actually "comparing" stories, not really. I was simply relaying frustrations that have been voiced by some of my friends and colleagues forced to choose as few as two graduate students (sometimes even just one) from among hundreds of prospectives.

This isn't about finding a needle in a haystack, the one gem that objectively shines brighter than all the rest. It can feel more like throwing a dart at a far away dartboard and then subsequently drawing a bullseye around it.

Of course, others have lamented the seemingly arbitrary criteria that sometimes separate some great grad-school candidates from other great ones. That's why I always tell my undergraduates not to take such...

Is it reasonable to simply ponder the "possibility," ever so idly and hypothetically, that bad genes might explain African-American underachievement? It is a an old and many-told tale, I know, but it just got a fresh re-telling at Harvard Law School this month.

A Harvard Law student recently apologized for comments she emailed to friends and colleagues following what sounds like an intriguing and heated dinner-time discussion about affirmative action. After first expressing concern that some of her earlier comments during that aforementioned dinner were misconstrued as politically correct, the student attempted to clarify her take on the matter.

"I absolutely do not rule out the possibility," she wrote, "that African-Americans are, on average, genetically predisposed to be less intelligent." Claiming that sound research could convince her otherwise, she seemed intent on dispelling any ...

At 11:14am this morning, wgeurin wrote the following in a comment to my previous blog post:

"The piece is so horribly written that into the second paragraph I was thinking it was a deliberate satire to show how bad some writing could be. Then I realized it was just bad writing."

intered added, much less dismissively, the following:

"Thank you, Mr. Jackson. I do not intend to be impolite with respect to the writing. I enjoy reading what you have to say. However, it is also impolite to ask readers to wade through unnecessary obfuscation, circumlocution, and jargon to get to a simple point."

These responses voice the common (and legitimate) concern that many academics and non-academic have about the love affair that some scholars seem to have with opaque and over-dressed prose.

wgeurin and intered push back against my willingness to, say, deploy words like deploy, or to unnecessarily "...

Jay Ruby cautions anthropologists against deploying film and video equipment on terms that are completely determined by an institutionalized media industry with its own assumptions about how stories are supposed to be told and circulated. He argues that anthropologists might need to organize their narratives (and distribute their films) in ways that run counter to industry (and even audience) expectations. There is a danger in approaching film making the way others do, he says, a danger that includes potentially betraying anthropology's intellectual mission.

Philosopher Lewis Gordon has recently penned a powerful piece that asks academics to reconsider current tendencies to perform intellectual authority in ways that traffic in neoliberal logics of financial accumulation and brand-name fetishization, logics that may similarly betray our basic intellectual mission. There is a danger, he ...

The RNC's Michael Steele has recently made national headlines for "playing the race card" by agreeing with the claim that African-Americans like himself, in positions of power, have "a slimmer margin of error" in America, including President Obama in that calculation, which was met by a swift dismissal from the White House press secretary. 

Critics always find it ironic (even pathetic) when proponents of purported color blindness frame their own problems in terms of "racial victimization." The "Left" is assumed to traffic in such sophistries. The "Right," however, is supposed to know better. Clarence Thomas calling his confirmation hearing a "high-tech lynching" stands as the quintessential example of such racial irony. Even the people who claim obliviousness to racial reasoning seem susceptible to its rhetorical seductiveness.

But who really doesn't see race? When is it ever...

Did Congress ever pass health care? Seriously. Lately, I've been trying to cultivate my own ignorance of all things "political." The stories are just getting too bizarre: ongoing sagas in the wake of major earthquakes in Haiti and Chile; racial epithets that serve as soundtracks for Tea Parties; sex scandals that allegedly implicate, quite directly, a sitting pope; Sarah Palin telling protesters to "re-load" in the context of actual violence linked to congressional votes and Tweets calling for Obama's assassination. With that as the backdrop, I've decided to issue my own self-moratorium on watching CNN, FOX and the evening news programs. 

Instead, I'm using my television for more otherworldly fare. And TV has never been better on that front. Although it is the quintessential site for sensationalized news-mongering, it is also the best place to spy complicated fictional tales about human...

Frank Rich wrote a New York Times op-ed this weekend that began by criticizing former White House Press Secretary Dana Perino and former NYC Mayor Rudolph Giuliani for their ideological readings of 9/11. Giuliani was appearing on ABC's Good Morning America in January; Perino, on FOX's Hannity last November. 

"We had no domestic attacks under Bush," Giuliani declared (though he probably meant after 9/11).

"We did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush's term," Perino stated. "I hope they [the Obama administration and the liberal wing of the press] are not looking at this politically. I do think we owe it to the American people to call it [the Ft. Hood shooting] what it is [a terrorist attack]."

The Rich piece is really about the extent to which Karl Rove (in his recent memoir) and Keep America Safe (a new foreign-policy advocacy group founded by Liz Cheney and...

I'm taking part in a faculty discussion today on "teaching controversial issues." In preparation for that meeting, I started to jot down some thoughts on the matter. (I'll be responsible for saying a few words.)

There is a hyperpoliticization of higher education today, a hyperpoliticization that I want to call "reactionary Foucauldianism." If Foucault's nothing-is-innocent poststructuralism gets marshaled to make arguments about knowledge production as a "power play," the same "metaphysics of power" informs reactionary critiques of academic culture. While Foucault gets deployed to challenge "the state" and what he labels "governmentality," reactionary Foucauldianism is a critique of those critics (on similar "knowledge/power" grounds).

To discuss, say, America's history of imperialism is to practice "communist indoctrination." (Of course, some of this is about the logic and language of...