Good Afternoon and a Merry Christmas to you all:

Yes, I am aware of the obvious contradictions (I prefer the term “complexities”) of sending out a blog that introduces a new work on one of the foremost radicals in the black intellectual tradition - Frantz Fanon - on this day, which has become perhaps the central religious symbol of the high holidays of American capitalist consumption. But, alas, this is the conundrum of being a New World Negro Scholar…

For a number of reasons, I am sending this out in this moment:

First (the selfish reason), I am in the process of sorting through a dissertation chapter on the Black Arts Movement and it is impossible to examine the various iterations of Black Power, in politics and culture, without taking seriously the import of Fanon’s thinking on this generation. I’m thinking about Fanon, so here you go…

Second (perhaps less selfish), in the spirit of giving I wanted to support the work of a good friend of mine, Vivaldi Jean-Marie, who I was privileged to meet at the beginning of 2007, while we were both teaching at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn.

Val is a sharp brother trained in the continental tradition - in fact, he was the first person of African descent to finish the New School’s PhD program in Philosophy in over twenty years - who I have had the opportunity to break bread with on topics ranging from the unique opportunities of teaching at an HBCU, the challenges of balancing personal commitments and professional aspirations, the joys and anxieties of entering fatherhood (both of our wives are due to give birth in January), and how to find a great sale on high end jeans (the only way most of us in the Academy can afford them)… I digress.

Anyway, it gives me great pleasure to introduce Val to you all and to celebrate the publication of his first book. By the way, he has already finished the manuscript for his second book- a revision of his dissertation on Hegel and Kierkegaard.

What follows is more formal intro (photo and print) provided by Val himself and a link to where you can find his book.

A Peaceful Holiday season to you all!

Respect, Josef

Vivaldi Jean-Marie received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from the New School for Social Research in New York City. He is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, NY. Fanon: Collective Ethics and Humanism is his first book and focuses on Frantz Fanon’s final book Wretched of the Earth. Dr. Jean-Marie’s research project is to reflect on the ethical experiences of the people of Africa and the African Diaspora. The key question is: What is the good life for the people of Africa and the African Diaspora in the Post-Colonial period? This fundamental question was raised by Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, which attempts to formulate the Ethos of the happy life for Westerners, but it has not been raised for the people of Africa and the African Diaspora. Fanon:Collective Ethics and Humanism is his first attempt to address this question from a social, cultural, and political perspective.

You can purchase the book on Amazon or at Peter Lang.

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It has been impossible to ignore the shouting match that has taken place over the past couple years between Michael Eric Dyson and Bill Cosby, but their debate - which many others have weighed in on - is part of a much longer dialogue regarding class divisions among black people living in the United States. On the one hand, the black “elite” and middle class have complained that poor black folks need to hold up their end of the bargain (read: y’all are making us good negros look bad); while, on the other, poor and working class blacks have insisted that Du Bois’ so-called “talented tenth” have willingly left the rest of the race behind in exchange for their share of the American dream (read: y’all do the same stuff we do, but money covers a multitude of sins).

This debate is also closely tied to a similar academic conversation regarding whether the issue of poverty (often linked to a history of racism) is best addressed through structural (read: social policy change) or cultural (read: behavioral change) interventions. This debate has gone on just as long and has been equally rife with shouting matches where one side labels the other as victim blamers (cultural) and hand-out givers (structural).

Cornel West’s classic 1993 text Race Matters straddled this debate - holding culture and structure in tension - and much scholarship and social criticism has since moved in this direction. The following article by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. - whose recent work on race and genetics has been the subject of much heated debate on issues of both race and class - seems to capture some of the complexities and contradictions of each of these conversations while highlighting the reality of an increasing class divide that exists not only with Black America (Gates’ focus), but in the United States, generally, and between the so-called “first” and developing worlds more broadly. Discussions of DNA aside, the issue of CLASS certainly deserves a deeper dialogue that moves beyond the perceived mutually exclusive categories of culture and structure….

Op-Ed Contributor

Forty Acres and a Gap in Wealth

By

Published: November 18, 2007

Cambridge, Mass.

LAST week, the Pew Research Center published the astonishing finding that 37 percent of African-Americans polled felt that “blacks today can no longer be thought of as a single race” because of a widening class divide. From Frederick Douglass to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., perhaps the most fundamental assumption in the history of the black community has been that Americans of African descent, the descendants of the slaves, either because of shared culture or shared oppression, constitute “a mighty race,” as Marcus Garvey often put it.

“By a ratio of 2 to 1,” the report says, “blacks say that the values of poor and middle-class blacks have grown more dissimilar over the past decade. In contrast, most blacks say that the values of blacks and whites have grown more alike.”

The message here is that it is time to examine the differences between black families on either side of the divide for clues about how to address an increasingly entrenched inequality. We can’t afford to wait any longer to address the causes of persistent poverty among most black families.

This class divide was predicted long ago, and nobody wanted to listen. At a conference marking the 40th anniversary of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s infamous report on the problems of the black family, I asked the conservative scholar James Q. Wilson and the liberal scholar William Julius Wilson if ours was the generation presiding over an irreversible, self-perpetuating class divide within the African-American community.

“I have to believe that this is not the case,” the liberal Wilson responded with willed optimism. “Why go on with this work otherwise?” The conservative Wilson nodded. Yet, no one could imagine how to close the gap.

For the entire article click on the following link to the New York Times

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It has been well over one month since I last made a post to my blog…

Much has transpired during this time that would typically be the type of material that I hope to engage and interrogate on this page, but for too many reasons I have chosen to abstain - to simply read rather than write. Nonetheless, I am thankful for the prodigious efforts of bloggers, much more faithful than I, who have continued to offer tremendous insights into a number of occurrences that have piqued my interest, including several obvious incidents:

• The Violent Break-up of Thomas Weeks and Juanita Bynum
• The building of a critical mass in support of the Jena Six
• The appearance of additional “nooses” not only in the South, but up north in such places as Hempstead’s Police Headquarters (Long Island) and Columbia University’s Teachers College
• The latest black morality tale in the release of Tyler Perry’s most recent movie, “Why did I get married?”
• ANOTHER scandal connected to my undergraduate alma mater - Oral Roberts University. Oh, ORU…
• The debut of BET’s new show “Exalted” - a behind the scenes look at some of America’s most popular black clergy

The list could go on ad infinitum…

However, as I write today I am fresh off the heals of a wonderful retreat with a small group of friends - most of whom are pastors serving churches across the United States - that took place in a small coastal town on Massachusetts’ North Shore. We have been meeting as a group for seven years now, and more than anything else the time serves for me as a chance to check in with a group of great colleagues and friends who are as ambitious about being good parents to their children, loving partners to their spouses, and supportive friends to, well, their friends, as they are in their professional lives. Over the weekend we read, prayed, cried, talked, ate and drank with each other. What almost always emerges most powerfully out of these incredibly honest exchanges - which is most important to me - are deep, tear-jerking belly laughs that are not always as easy to find every day. They serve to remind us that our lives need not always be as serious as we are prone to treating them and that, to paraphrase a bible verse “… laughter does the heart good, like medicine…”

In this spirit, I invite you to check out an essay by Hannah Rosin from the Book Review section of the October 14 New York Times. The book under discussion sounds something like “Borat in Bible-Drag” and I hope it will provide plenty of laughs as a balance to all the serious debates about what is up for grabs in the contemporary religious landscape. As I am reminded of a course I took during graduate school in which Cornel West pointed to the fact that not once does Christian scripture record Jesus laughing, just this once I encourage you to - forgive me - Do What Jesus Didn’t Do:

———————–

October 14, 2007

By the Book

By HANNA ROSIN

THE YEAR OF LIVING BIBLICALLY

One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible

By A. J. Jacobs.

Illustrated. 388 pp. Simon & Schuster. $25.

If I were to write this review while trying to live biblically, here are some of the rules I would have to follow:

Love thy neighbor. Jacobs is a fellow journalist and thus a neighbor of sorts. I would have to strive to be as generous as possible, and point out right at the outset that this book is an inspired idea and that Jacobs is alarmingly adept at keeping the joke alive for 365 days.

Thou shalt not covet. I would have to confess my jealousy that Jacobs already had a movie contract in place before the book had even been published, and that even though I have spent much more time around young-earth creationists than he has, he thought of a much funnier way to describe them (people who believe in an earth that’s ”barely older than Gene Hackman”).

Thou shalt not bear false witness. I would have to admit that every once in a while, as he wrote about walking down some New York street in a shepherd’s robe strumming his 10-string harp, or throwing small stones at a random suspected sinner, or eating crickets or burning myrrh each morning, I thought to myself, What’s the point, really?

But having a point is slightly beside the point. Jacobs is a stunt journalist, although that term seems belittling to the monumental self-improvement projects he subjects himself to. In his last book, ”The Know-It-All,” Jacobs read the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica in an attempt to make himself smarter than his showoff brother-in-law.

In ”The Year of Living Biblically,” he attends to the soul, turning himself from a guy who is ”Jewish in the way the Olive Garden is an Italian restaurant” into a follower of ”the ultimate biblical life.” This means spending a year strictly following a typed list of more than 700 biblical rules, including the obscure (don’t wear garments of mixed fibers, bind money to your hand, pay the wages of your workers every day) and the potentially awkward (don’t touch your wife seven days after her ”discharge of blood,” bathe after sex and don’t tell lies, in their many variations).

Unlike Norah Vincent (who wrote a book about passing as a man) and Eddie Murphy (who made himself over as a white man in a classic ”Saturday Night Live” skit), Jacobs does not take the undercover spy route. Instead he lives out the biblical high life in his usual New York surroundings, among all his wanton, gossiping, blaspheming journalist friends. The result is that he ends up sort of like Kramer on ”Seinfeld,” a big weirdo who interrupts the normal patter of urban life. Lots of comic relief ensues. He accepts a hug from a homeless woman on the subway, who then accuses him of harassing her. He contemplates taking his cute nanny as his second wife. He grows a beard of ZZ Top-like proportions.

His efforts to obey the injunction against lying are an endless source of sit-com moments. He refuses to tell his son that an English muffin is a form of bagel, prompting a massive temper tantrum. He and his wife run into an old college acquaintance of hers at a restaurant. When the friend suggests they get their kids together sometime for a play date, he tells the friend he’ll ”take a pass” because he doesn’t ”really want new friends right now.” His wife, of course, wants to kill him.

The larger context for this book is that we live in age of flourishing biblical literalism, where a lot of Americans who don’t live in New York still believe the Bible to be literally true. Jacobs does make dutiful visits to an Amish community, Jerry Falwell’s church in Virginia and a new creationist museum in Kentucky. But his visits yield no tremendous insights about why the United States continues to be such a literal-minded nation, or what comforts people derive from refusing to read between the lines. They merely leave him feeling confused and depressed.

This is a New Testament nation, but most of the rules that make for good comedy are in the other book. So Jacobs’s most lively interactions by far are not with red-state America but with his own people: Mr. Berkowitz, the guy who comes over to check for shatnez, or mixed fibers; or his Uncle Gil, the inspiration for Jacobs’s project.

Gil is the person Jacobs fears he could become if he really took the project to heart. Gil, too, started out as a secular Jew on a spiritual mission. But then he got in too deep. He careered, Jacobs tells us, from acid head to Hindu to cult leader to born-again Christian to ultra-Orthodox Jew who gathers in the lost souls of Jerusalem. Jacobs has dinner with him, and leaves with the impression that Gil is ‘’subtly dangerous.”

Jacobs comes closest to transcendence in a crowd of Hasidic men dancing ecstatically all night. But otherwise he skirts around the edges. The truly Orthodox would say you can’t do this alone, in your apartment, with your wife rolling her eyes. You need a community, not some stranger rabbis who drop by once in a while. Alone, Jacobs can ponder the big questions, but he usually turns them into a joke. (”If there is a God, why would he allow war, disease and my fourth-grade teacher, Ms. Barker, who forced us to have a sugar-free bake sale?”)

Jacobs begins the book by saying that if his new self met his old at a coffee shop they would think each other ”delusional.” I’m not sure he makes the case for that much of a transformation. But here and there, through some surprisingly poignant moments, he sees through to the other side, and he stumbles his way to a working definition of what it might mean to become a better person.

At the start of the year, his mind cleansing is yet more sit-com fodder: remove the magazine with Jessica Alba in a skintight bathing suit, the wedding album picture of the friend with cleavage, the Celestial Tea box showing the hot geisha. Stop self-Googling. Don’t be jealous of Jonathan Safran Foer’s speaking fees. Don’t check your e-mail on the Sabbath.

But toward the end, he deepens. A friend e-mails him a YouTube clip of a newscaster who gets smacked in the head by a stage light and falls over. Jacobs can’t bring himself to ”lol” as his friends do. He finds it upsetting. He spends 20 minutes trying to track down the newscaster’s e-mail address so he can ask if she’s all right, while at the same time worrying that he’s become some kind of ”overly virtuous sap.”

After a year of praying every day he becomes by no stretch a believer, but someone who at least accepts ‘’such a thing as sacredness.” Sometimes he can even envision a God who might watch over him and care what happens. As a teenager he convinced himself that even when he was alone in his house, the girls he had a crush on could see him, so he listened to David Bowie and brushed his teeth in a ”rakishly nonchalant manner” to prove he was worthy of their attention. This is how he experiences God now.

God as Mean Girl. It’s not exactly biblical, but it’s not nothing.

For all I know, Jacobs is already back to his old ways He never gives the impression that, God forbid, his soul is at stake, or anything else of much importance. Certainly his isn’t the kind of transformation any real fundamentalist would accept. But for many of us who would never even try, walking with Jacobs is the closest we’ll come to knowing what it feelslike to be born again.

Hanna Rosin is the author of ”God’s Harvard: A Christian College on a Mission to Save America.”

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From the vantagepoint of the “modern” world, religion has often been viewed as a lingering artifact of ancient times. Over the course of the 20th century all too many folks have argued that the world was witness to an ongoing process of secularization, leading some to proclaim that “God is Dead!”

Much to the contrary, however, religious traditions have remained robust, bearing witness to the reality of something more breaking through human experience. In this light, to be religious in the modern (and postmodern) world has meant a delicate negotiation of one’s tradition with the novelties of the world’s new technologies. In my last blog entry, this balancing act was performed on the steel guitar used as an instrument of worship in Sanctified churches…

… but it has also been seen throughout U.S. history in the creation of segregated (along lines of race and/or gender) pews

… in the recording of sermons by C.L. Franklin and others on vinyl

… at the intersection of Christian scripture and black power in Albert Cleage’s “Black Messiah” and James Cone’s “Black Theology

… and in the more recent blending of break beats and bibles in the formation of Gospel (aka Holy) Hip Hop

Such mixtures have often involved an ironic - and at times apparently contradictory - creolizing of things old and new, all testifying to what it means to be called a religious modern.

Recently, while spending time with my nephew and niece I had the chance to suffer, while admittedly laughing, through the profane hilarity that is Eddie Murphy’s humor in his recent film Norbit, only to the see the movie end and seemlessly transition into the credits while Kirk Franklin ’s gospel played in the background - for some this is a no doubt a troubling example of modern religion.

Only a few days earlier, however, while reading the Sunday New York Times, I was introduced to an image that I just had to share. What follows is an incredible example of urban religious modernity twenty-first century style: a mass street baptismal service hosted by Harlem’s United House of Prayer for all People - the church founded by Charles “Daddy” Grace. See the below article and check out the video footage at the following link: Reborn in Harlem and let me know what you think.

———————————–

NEW YORK TIMES

August 12, 2007

New York In Focus

Doused for the Lord

By EMILY BRADY

LAST Sunday, an 82-year-old woman from Jamaica, Queens, named Beatrice Vaughn, dressed all in white, donned a straw hat covered with brightly colored plastic pompoms and set out to cleanse her soul. It was time for Ms. Vaughn and the other members of her church, the United House of Prayer for All People in Harlem, to be baptized.

On this and every other first Sunday of August since the 1930s, hundreds of church members clad in white have gathered on a closed-off section of West 115th Street near Fifth Avenue to wash away their sins and absorb the healing power of a blessed water that rains down on them from a fire hose.

Ms. Vaughn danced out in front of the crowd, shuffling her feet and bobbing her unmistakable hat to the infectious sound of a brass band. Around her was a sea of white.

“I have the Holy Ghost and fire in me,” she said later.

Occasionally, a pair of hands would rise above the crowd and shake, palms forward, as if soaking up the energy.

At midday, three cars inched through the gathering. Out of one of them popped the church’s national leader, Bishop S. C. Madison, who is 88 and is affectionately known as “Daddy Madison.” A frail man in black robes whose gray hair grazes his shoulders, the bishop was helped up the stairs to a small wooden stage. He, too, began to clap and shuffle.

“All you gots to do,” instructed a man standing nearby, “is stand there and let the heavens open.”

Minutes later, an arch of water gushed out of a hose onto the crowd. Under the downpour, the band continued playing, the faithful kept dancing, and a year’s worth of troubles of the soul were washed onto the hot asphalt.

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Hello Everyone!

Thanks once again for the generosity of feedback in the week leading up to the launch - the love is much appreciated.

By now perhaps you a have a theory; if not, hopefully you’ve at least asked yourself: “Why did this brother choose to launch his site on 07.07.07?” Well, since you ask, indulge me for a moment…

Whether it’s the poetic appeal – never mind if you’re a biblical literalist or Darwinian by design – of the earth being spoken into existence in six days followed by one of divine rest…

Or you’ve been out on those corners praying for that lucky roll of the die,

Whether you were listening to Minister Farrakhan move the crowd at the Mall in 1995 when he started laying down those numbers…

Or you’re a gospel music loyalist waxing nostalgic of Fred Hammond - before he
signaled the move of black churches to praise and worship music - on his second to last
album with Commissioned (circa 1991),

Whether you witnessed pre-break up Erykah Badu and Andre 3000 name their first born…

Or you’ve had to fight the itch of that long seventh inning stretch in your marriage,

There’s just something about that Number – a near universal appeal that appears to be attributed to the number seven.

Now, I’m no numerologist, but it was still all too difficult for me resist the resounding resonance with which the number seven seems to be celebrated. And just in case none of the examples in my above litany sold you, let me share, more personally, just a few reasons why I chose to launch my site on this the seventh day of the seventh month of the seventh year of the new millennium.

First of all, I am nearing the start of my seventh and hopefully final year (pray with me!) of what has been an extremely rewarding time of doctoral studies at Harvard University. They say seven years is average at Harvard… so call me average!

Second, seven is a number that many religious traditions treat as significant – just check out wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_(number) – so this choice also reflects the fact that religion and spirituality, in all their diverse manifestations, take a primary place in both my personal biography and intellectual journey.

And third, it has also been seven months since the passing of my mother, Patricia Ann Wallace, and amongst other things this site has afforded me the opportunity to memorialize her life on the web and to acknowledge the tremendous wealth of her spirit, to which I am an heir. Check out the page dedicated to her (www.josefsorett.com/patricia-ann-wallace-tribute/) on this site to learn more about this remarkable woman. We miss her dearly!

At the church I grew up attending, seven was believed to be the number of completion – and thus of new beginnings as well. In a year that promises us all a host of new beginnings – as well as important endings – I am excited to start this on-line dialogue.

Staying steady with the number seven, I’ve decided to define my launch into the blogosphere by an initial series of seven blog entries. Don’t worry, not all at once.

Here’s a glimpse of what you can expect from posts in the days and weeks to come:

Today: Reflections on Human Frailty: Life, Death and My HBO Addiction

Coming Soon:
Towards the (Post) Hip Hop Intellectual
Race, Religion and Politics in the City University of New York
“I Ain’t Here to Argue About His Facial Features…”
Left, Left, Left, Right, Left: Culture Politics, Policy and the Poles of Public Morality
The Art of My Eclectic (Personal) Fashion Sensibility
Muhammad Walks an Underground Freeway to the Club

Before I get to the first post, I want to quickly acknowledge one of my closest friends, who also happens to be my personal technology consultant: Joselin Mane. If you like what you see on this site, check out www.litbel.com for the best techie I know (website design, hosting services, etc.). While academic trends of late have highlighted the history of intersecting afro-latina/o diasporas (See: Future of Black Studies), this site has been an exercise in building black & Latina/o partnerships. In the process of learning to work this website, Joselin claims that he has been teaching me to fish… bacalao, I guess? If you can’t swing the cod fish, then try some Platanos and Collard Greens.   Either way, Mucho Amor a mi hermano dominicano de otra madre!

Okay, enough with the self-less plug. It’s now official, www.josefsorett.com has been launched. And while it’s surely anti-climactic at this point, check out my first blog entry, Reflections on Human Frailty: Life, Death and My HBO Addiction, which will post at 7am.

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Welcome to my blog! As I post interesting stories and current events and pose questions along with random musings, I invite you to conversation. Please read on, let me know your thoughts, and make recommendations for future discussions. Looking forward…

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