As we near the end of the first Black History Month in age of the first black president, I want to quickly share with everyone the arrival of an important and timely book:  Watch This: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Black Televangelism, by Jonathan L. Walton.

In case you didn’t already know, President Obama’s road to the White House revealed most clearly that African American religion continues to occupy a most pivotal place in the American cultural imagination.  Moreover, his dramatic falling out with Jeremiah Wright (I know, this conversation is already exhausted) confirmed that the common assertion of the United States as a Christian nation is a claim in need of further clarification.  While African Americans have long inserted themselves into the Christian story, the Obama-Wright show served to illustrate that not all forms of American Christianity (really, protestantisms) achieve equally footing in the public culture of the U.S.

Jonathan Walton’s “Watch This” provides a compelling a critical account of the varieties of black Christianity that now dominate airwaves both in the U.S. and around the globe.  I’ve had the privilege of dialoging with the author as the project moved from dissertation to book, and I know him to wield one the sharpest and most insightful interpretations of African American religion, in particular, and religion and culture in America, more broadly.  While I’ve just started to get into the book myself, I am confident that anyone who picks it up will learn something new about religion and race in America.

Kudos, Congratulations, and Thank you, Jonathan!

What follows is the beginning of his discussion of the book on the website ReligionDispatches:

 Ten Questions for Jonathan Walton on Watch This! The Ethics and Aesthetics of Black Televangelism

What inspired you to write Watch This?

My interest in African American religious broadcasting came from what I perceived to be the gaps in the fields of African American religion and Religion, Media and Culture. For the most part, scholars of African American religion in general and black theology in particular theorize about Afro-Protestantism in America according to a particular historiography that privileges liberal Protestantism in general, and civil rights motifs in particular. But the prevailing narrative of the freedom fighting “black church” is in many ways inconsistent with a number of African American Christians whose view of the faith is informed by Trinity Broadcasting, the Word Network, and Streaming Faith.com. Just the same, for sociologists and communication theorists who have examined the world of evangelical religious broadcasting, it is predominantly framed as the domain of the white, Religious Right.

This book, then, is my attempt to illumine, unpack and interrogate the theological and social orientations of prominent black religious broadcasters in order to understand them as a source of attraction and ethically evaluate their dominant messages…

To continue reading go to ReligionDispatches.org.

To purchase book, go to www.nyupress.com

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It has been exactly one year since I made my last blog entry – can I still really call myself a blogger?  Anyway, 2009 was quite an eventful year for me both professionally and personally.  With regards to the latter, I entered the land of parenthood as my wife and I welcomed our son into the world on January 26.  As for the former, less than six months later I walked across the commencement stage at Harvard with the university’s first class of Ph.D.s in African American Studies (and thousands of other graduates as well).

As both a black father and a recently-minted Ph.D. in African American Studies there was perhaps no more intriguing event in 2009 than the historic election of Barack Obama.  Personal background aside, Obama’s rise to the presidency was arguably the biggest headline around the world, rivaled only by the economic collapse that serves as the background to this week’s festivities, around the world.  So much has been written about Obama that I’ve been reluctant to weigh in -  Seriously, what more can be said!  As a good friend, and colleague in the study of religion, recently bemoaned, “Since when did Obama become the arbiter of the black religious experience?”  Moreover, given the culture of celebrity and the fascination with the entire Obama family (we love you Michelle, Sasha and Malia!), they have also become the poster image for the African American family.  Want to know about black love, black parenting, etc – there’s sure to be scores of articles available on each topic that begin with an Obama invocation.

Despite being overwhelmed by Obama-mania (how quick does it take to become an empty signifier?), I’d be lying if I did not admit that I too will be celebrating this Tuesday, or acknowledge how often I’ve considered the question, as a new parent, of what it will mean for my son’s first memories of the White House will be occupied by images of a black family.  As a scholar of African American religion, there is still much that can be said of the subtle ways that Obama appealed to, but also superceded, black church traditions in his campaign.  And, as a historian I still wonder, given the current academic interest in re-thinking Black Power, what it will mean that the man who heads the United States—the last super power—is African American.  Can American imperialism also be a form of black power?

Anyway, at this point I will leave these preliminary thoughts as they are, as simply questions. But I do want to direct attention to one article that I recently read that stood out for me in the sea of stories on Obama, blackness, and the so-called “post-racial” era. Hua Hsu, a colleague and friend of mine from Harvard, who teaches at Vassar College and also happens to be formidable behind the turntables, recently examined what the Obama phenomenon says about the current state of whiteness in America.  The header to his article reads as follows:

“The Election of Barack Obama is just the most startling manifestation of a larger trend: the gradual erosion of “whiteness” as the touchstone of what it means to be American. If the end of white America is a cultural and demographic inevitability, what will the new mainstream look like—and how will white Americans fit into it? What will it mean to be white when whiteness is no longer the norm? And will a post-white America be less racially divided—or more so?”

To read the entire essay, click on the following link to The Atlantic on-line.

This excellent piece is certainly worth reading in its entirety.  Perhaps you’ll turn to it after coming down from the inauguration high, as we celebrate this historic moment and consider the continued promises of American democracy.  Then all of us who live our lives in the many worlds between black and white will begin the difficult work of figuring out what the Obama era will truly offer.  In the meantime, for now I will return to singing “We Shall be Free” with my wife and son, along with Garth Brooks, Shakira, Stevie Wonder and the rest of the pre-inauguration party cast.  GOBAMA!

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The final season of HBO’s The Wire is set to begin in about 10 minutes.  Enough Said!  As they say, if you don’t know, you better ask somebody!

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In recent years, references to Creflo Dollar, arguably the most popular black prosperity preacher of the day, have become a visual and verbal fixture in Hip Hop music. Such instances include a cameo appearance in Ludacris and Jermaine Dupri’s “Welcome to Atlanta” video, an invocation in a song by Fifty Cent, a professed pastoral affiliation by Mase, and a shout-out from Lupe Fiasco in his underground re-mix of Kanye West’s “Jesus Walks.” This would seem to suggest, at least within the culture of the bling, that Christianity has become as much a signifier of wealth and power as it is evidence of any specific type of theological vision. Evidently Dollar – for whom wealth is a core spiritual value – seems to embody, for many Hip Hop artists, the essence of Hip Hop’s hustle doused in holy water. Interestingly, Pastor Dollar also has a rap video in the works, performed a by a group of rappers, the Ziklag Boyz, who belong to his church and record on his Arrow Records label. A surprise to no one, the song’s refrain is simply, “Money, money, coming down!” (see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFyMEnXDG4g ). While the video draws much resemblance to Lil’ Wayne and Fat Joe’s tale of the strip club, “Make It Rain,” – with dollar bills floating across the screen – noticeably absent from the Ziklag Boyz’ video are the bodies of scantily clad black and brown women. For male rappers, it is the bodies of black females that often make their rap videos so profitably seductive, but Dollar insists that the power to get “bling” can just as easily be achieved dropping bible verses like they’re hot. The mutual resonance between much of rap music and Dollar’s prosperity ministry is but one instance where Christianity seems to function as an explicit form of social capital in popular culture . . .

For the entire article go to: http://faithinmotion.net/

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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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As many of you know, the vast majority of my working hours these days are spent trying to grind out a dissertation that looks at the ways black artists have engaged questions of religion and spirituality in their personal lives, creative writing and critical work. Currently, my mind is occupied with the 1960s-mid-1970s, the era of the radically black pronouncements of artists such as Sonia Sanchez and Larry Neal, along with the “omni” Americanist critiques of folks like Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray. This was the period that would give birth to the formal field of Black Theology… and so much more. One of the most prominent writers of the period would be Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka. In 1975, in his black marxist phase, Baraka offered his own critique of Christianity in the poem, “When We’ll Worship Jesus,” claiming -

“we’ll worship Jesus when mao do, when toure does, when the cross replaces Nkrumah’s star Jesus need to hurt some of our enemies, then we’ll check him out, all that screaming and hollering & wallering and moaning talking about Jesus”

This was the Black Arts Movement!

Although the angle of engagement has continually shifted, the substance of religion and spirituality have remained a source of compelling critique and/or dramatic celebration for artists, black, white and other.

While I struggle right now to sort through the sixties, my next chapter will involve a close look at the shift from black power advocates to generation Hip Hop. To this end, I wanted to share with you a review I’ve published on line for popmatters of a book that encapsulated much of the confusion and conflicts that often surface at the intersection of religion, race and the arts. What follows is an excerpt from the article:

“While the rise of gangsta’ rap to national prominence in the late 1980s led some critics to claim that hip-hop suffered from a nihilistic crisis, those who have followed the music more closely remained unmoved in their insistence that hip-hop’s spiritual core maintained a steadfast strength. Over its history, including its public evolution from rap music to hip-hop culture—or vice versa depending upon whose telling the story—religious and spiritual themes have continued to occupy a central place in this now global phenomenon. From MC Hammer’s gospel tribute “Son of the King” on his first album, through the Afrocentric musings of X-Clan, the Nation of Islam-informed lens of Public Enemy, the five-percent philosophies of Brand Nubian, the Islamic orthodoxy of Mos Def, and the return of explicitly Christian content in the words of DMX and Kanye West, religious diversity has been the rule of rap music.

The complexities of hip-hop’s religious vision crystallized most dramatically in its two most iconic figures and most memorable martyrs, Tupac and Biggie…” For the full article, click here: popmatters.com

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The old adage that all black popular musicians get there start in the church has been played out to the point of cliche. Nonetheless, with the exception of Hip Hop - although many folk will make the claim that the mc is linked to a lineage that traces back through the preacher to African griots - cultural idioms nurtured in black churches have played an all too formidable force in the formation of popular cultures the world over. What follows is an insightful recent article from the New York Times that captures some of the creative ironies that emerge at the intersections of “sacred and secular.”

—————————-

NEW YORK TIMES - August 5, 2007
Music
Singers Grounded by Sacred Roots
By GEOFFREY HIMES

BALTIMORE

WHEN Ryan Shaw performed at the Artscape festival here last month, he brought a refreshing authenticity to the soul-revival movement that has made stars out of Amy Winehouse, Joss Stone and John Legend. Mr. Shaw, 26, could shake the oldies dust off songs from the late 1950s and early ’60s because he came to the music the same way the originals did: in the black church. And when he sang “Nobody,” his own composition and the new single from his debut album, “This Is Ryan Shaw” (Columbia/One Haven/Red Ink), it resembled the hymns that Ray Charles and Wilson Pickett once turned into pop hits by changing a few words.

Mr. Shaw, who was born in Georgia and now lives in Brooklyn, invited the sun-baked fans to imagine themselves with him in the Free Church of God in Christ of Atlanta, where he learned to sing. Sporting a black shirt with red piping and a bundle of thin braids with burnt orange tips, he sang the familiar words to “If I Had a Hammer,” delivered in the soul style of Sam Cooke. And when he led the crowd in a call-and-response sing-along, he swooped his outstretched arms as if he were still a choir director.

But he’s not a choir director anymore, and he would have trouble returning to the post given the mixed reactions to his pop music career. While some of his fellow churchgoers have been supportive, others have told him that he’s going to hell for singing secular music. Mr. Shaw acknowledged that he couldn’t sing the way he does if not for all those years in church, but he added that such criticism can make it difficult to grow as an artist.

“It’s that Catch-22,” he explained backstage at Artscape. “The traditions of the church allow it to preserve musical styles that might otherwise be lost, but it can also make for stagnation. Things are always changing in youth culture, especially in black music, and young people want to hear those changes in church.

“If the church gives in too easily to those changes, gospel music will lose its identity,” he said, “but if it resists those changes too much, it will alienate the youth. That’s why you have all these battles about what is gospel music and what God wants to hear.”

It’s a familiar story: A musician tries to take the music he learned in church out into the pop marketplace, and the church reacts by shutting its doors on the apostate. From Georgia Tom Dorsey, the minister’s son who played the blues for Ma Rainey in the 1920s; to Al Green, who gave up pop stardom to become a minister himself in the 1970s; to Robert Randolph, who was barred from playing in church after becoming a jam-band star in this decade, hundreds of artists have taken their turns as protagonists in this tale.

It is usually told in terms of a forward-thinking youngster and a hidebound institution, but it’s more complicated than that. If Mr. Shaw’s church, for example, hadn’t been so stubbornly old-fashioned, he never would have mastered the art of melodic shouting and never would have sounded so natural when he turned to retro-soul. Maybe these churches provide a valuable service by being narrow-minded about music.

“There are so few areas in popular culture that remain untouched by the mainstream,” said Peter Guralnick, author of “Sweet Soul Music” and “Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke,” “that any area that remains separate and retains its attachment to a tradition is going to sound pure and distinctive.

“Some churches are more untouched than others, but all of them tend to preserve older styles of American music, whether you’re talking about soul music or bluegrass. That’s especially true in this era of hip-hop and rap, which are really the first popular forms of black music in my lifetime that haven’t sprung directly from the church.”

It’s funny, Mr. Shaw said, what churches will and won’t accept. “When R&B started using jazzy chords like 7ths, 9ths and 13ths, you couldn’t use them in church because that was ‘the devil’s music,’ ” he said. “But as soon as R&B moved on to something else, suddenly it was O.K. to use those chords because the devil wasn’t using them anymore.

“Just like in the clothes world, where some stores will sell last year’s fashions, the church often ends up using the last decade’s R&B fashions.”

Thus stars like Kirk Franklin and Da’ T.R.U.T.H. might bring funk and old-school rap to the gospel charts, but there’s still a time lag between the sounds on urban radio and those on gospel radio. And in more conservative churches you’ll find the styles of ’60s soul, ’50s doo-wop or ’40s quartets perfectly preserved. If you want to learn the craft of those genres, the church is the place to study.

“My church was very traditional,” Mr. Shaw said, “and for a long time the only songs I learned were gospel songs. It was a very aggressive kind of singing. We didn’t warm into a song. We were in it full throttle from the get-go. When I moved to New York and got a job at the Motown Cafe, those Motown songs felt like the music I’d been singing all my life, even if the lyrics and melodies were different.”

Sometimes a black church incubates a style that doesn’t exist anywhere else. That’s the case with the House of God, which adopted the steel guitar, an instrument associated with Hawaiian and country music, and adapted it to its liturgy.

If you had attended the House of God’s national assembly in Nashville in 2000, you might have seen a 22-year-old nobody in a brown pinstripe suit sitting behind a pedal steel guitar. As the preachers thundered and the congregants shouted back, he laced it all together with vocal-like swoops across the 13 strings of his tablelike instrument and wild, psychedelic digressions in the distinctive style known as sacred steel.

That nobody was Robert Randolph, and within a year, thanks in part to John Medeski and the North Mississippi Allstars, who recorded with him as the Word, he was headlining at rock clubs. When he came with his Family Band to the Sonar Lounge in Baltimore in December, his signature song, “I Need More Love,” didn’t sound all that different from the processional and offertory hymns he used to play in the House of God. Mr. Randolph, who still lives in his native New Jersey, was wearing a sports jersey rather than a suit, and the lyrics spoke of love in terms of universal brotherhood rather than obeisance to a deity, but the impact was much the same.

Sitting in his tour bus before the Sonar Lounge show Mr. Randolph kept glancing at the football game on the television because he had told the story of learning to play black gospel music on an unlikely instrument dozens of times before. But when asked about playing in the church today, his expression darkened and he gazed directly at a reporter.

“We were kicked out of playing in church in 2001,” he said. “They said we were playing the blues and our songs didn’t talk about God. But my goal was to take the sound I learned in church and show that that sound can find a place in the secular world. I wanted to prove that a young kid doesn’t have to talk about drugs, guns and booty. He can be successful singing about love and happiness.”

“When blessings keep coming down on this band,” he continued, “when we get calls from Eric Clapton and Dave Matthews, when people who have listened to thousands of records hear something special in what we’re doing, I know this is what God has carved out for me. It’s not up to anyone else to tell me what his plan is.”

Maurice (Ted) Beard is one of the sacred steel guitarists that Mr. Randolph learned from during his church’s national assemblies. Today Mr. Beard, a 72-year-old Detroit pastor, is minister of music for the Keith Dominion of the House of God, and he describes Mr. Randolph as a “very gifted musician.” He said that he regrets that the younger guitarist can no longer play in church, but that he understands the decision, which came down from the chief overseer of the church.

“We really feel our musical style is something God gave us to use to enhance our worship,” Mr. Beard said, “so we should really keep it in the church. If you play out in the so-called world, you’re barred. There are different thoughts on the policy, but that’s what it is. It’s because we developed our music in the church and kept it in the church that it sounds so different from everything else.

“I’ve had offers to play out in the world, but I made a promise to my grandmother to stay in the church, so I did.”

Mr. Clapton and Mr. Matthews are both guests on “Colorblind” (Warner Brothers), the new album from Mr. Randolph, who will play at the Stone Pony in Asbury Park, N.J., next Saturday. Mr. Shaw frequently performs at all-ages festivals like Bumbershoot in Seattle; he’ll play there on Sept. 2, and he’ll play at Radio City Music Hall on Sept. 18 as part of the multi-artist Dream Concert.

Both Mr. Shaw and Mr. Randolph say they don’t care what their fellow churchgoers think of their secular careers, but neither is very convincing. They are obviously pained by the criticism and argue that far from abandoning their religion, they’re furthering it.

Mr. Shaw insisted: “As long as I’m singing about love and not being derogatory to anyone, I feel my music is still a part of Christianity, even if the songs don’t mention God. It’s the spirit behind the music and how it’s delivered that’s important.”

Mr. Randolph would agree. “Church is about spreading the word, and that’s what we’re trying to do,” he said. “Even though some of our songs have more of a secular sound, it’s all about life, love and understanding. Sometimes we’re in church preaching the word and we think it only applies to us in the church, but there’s a whole world out there.”

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In case you happened to miss the news, let me be the one to inform you of a tragic death; actually, two deaths to be exact. It appears that the “N-word” was buried at least twice during the last seven days. First on July 7 in small-town Texas, and then again on July 9, in the motor city metropolis of Detroit, the N-word was laid to rest. The first funeral – with a real coffin, cemetery plot and burial – took place with little fanfare in Pearland, TX. However, the second – dare I call it a home-going celebration – took place as the culmination of a march through the city of Detroit, with all the pomp and circumstance typical of the NAACP’s annual convention. Amidst the stories documenting the ceremonies, I have yet to find out whether the word buried within the coffin was “Nigger” or “Nigga.” I guess the NAACP, and the folks in Pearland has decided for us all once that there is no difference between the two.

Call me a hater – an accusation typically assigned to individuals who make their mark finding fault with and critiquing any kind of efforts to engage in constructive cultural work – but these symbolic ceremonies certainly deserves to be deconstructed. Simply put, this can’t be the most promising or productive project to place our energies. Years ago, in 1944, a similar service was held in Detroit for Jim Crow, symbolic of the organization’s commitment to killing the system of separate and unequal, as it was beginning to wage legal battles that led to the success of Brown vs. Board and the Civil Rights laws passed in the 1960s. But it must be asked, where will we go now – just days after the Supreme Court more or less repealed Brown – that the N-word has officially been buried?

Perhaps it is this kind of observance that led the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF) to split from the NAACP (the civic agency) during the 1950s, so that the former could focus more on the business of addressing the needs of the vast majority of colored people, rather than cleaning up the image of black culture to make it more palatable for the white mainstream. While the NAACP and onlookers mourned, as “Die N-word, and we don’t want to see you ’round here no more” was the shouted from the podium, the LDF was most likely busy in legal efforts to rebuild New Orleans or eliminate predatory lending practices that have devastated so many of Detroit’s foreclosed upon former home owners.

My sense is that such an act is little more than a continuation of black folks provoked by the aftermath of the Imus debacle to police problems of the underside of our own public discourses. Y’all know the refrain, “Since you people refer to each other “_______” (fill in the blank with your favorite word: nigga, hoe, etc), it should be okay for us to do the same…” By this standard, I guess I should stop referring to my close male friends as “my boys,” because slavery and Jim Crow refused to acknowledge black manhood. I know that the American public could stand to possess a little more cultural literacy – we’ll call it diversity training – and that their are certain black cultural practices that need not be celebrated; but I don’t believe that anyone is any more fooled by the different meanings of such troubling terms in black and white, than we are by the obvious implications of the Supreme Court’s ruling on racial criteria in educational placements,

Even more ironic is that the NAACP’s N-word funeral was presided over by Detroit’s Hip Hop Mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick, and eulogized by one the most prominent Hip Hop preachers, Rev. Otis Moss, III who is in the process of inheriting the prestigious pulpit at Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ, of recent Obama controversies. As much as I respect both of these men, both of my generation and trailblazers in their own right, that Kilpatrick and Moss are both members of a cohort of rising hip hop elites (is that the right word?), and have billed themselves as such, adds to my growing skepticism with the things that “Hip Hop” seems to signify. While Hip Hop’s ability to sample from any number of sources – be it jazz, disco, R&B, Metal or a Moslem prayer – is a decided strength, I’m no longer sure I even know what we’re referring to if KRS ONE and Keisha Cole, Rich Boy and Remy Ma, Scott Storch and Saul Williams can all equally lay claim to the adage “I am Hip Hop.” But who’s to say they can’t? Is Hip Hop a mood, musical form, message or formula for increasing profit margins, a claim essentially made a last month by T.I. in the June issue Essence magazine? This ambiguity tends to also define the thinking of many of the artists and intelligentsia that identify with Hip Hop, myself included.

While I don’t buy the argument that Hip Hop was once purely a voice of protest against a white supremacist capitalist system, I do have trouble understanding how the music and cultural form once hailed as the voice of black youth vented freely with no regard for what white folks, or anyone else for that matter, think has signed on to public censorship. Somebody please explain to me who the NAACP’s dramatic display was intended to reach. And while the distinction is never this clean, for the sake of my sanity, let me know if the word “nigger” can at least be used when teaching its historical and symbolic significance in American history; and if “nigga” can be framed within black cultural traditions of playing with and re-inventing the scraps of a society shot through with racism.

For more on each of the N-word deaths, check out either of the following links:

The N-Word Transitions in Texas
The N-Word Dies in Detroit

PS – Evidently the N-word’s burial didn’t reach the boardroom of HBO executives who endorsed its usage three times, in its original historical form, on the show I highlighted last week. In the most recent episode of John from Cincinnati, the racial politics of Imperial Beach are made plain, beyond the vague references to immigration policy, as Butchie Yost participates in two of the United States favorite fantasies – black masculinity and sexuality – in his enraged reference to interracial pornography scenes. Yes, I’ve cleaned this up major-ly! But no need to worry, Ramon the motel manager continues to clean up and cook for his white folks and the now-resident drug dealer helps everyone relax as he plays “My Favorite Things,” a la John Coltrane, on his saxophone amidst divine revelations.

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Let me begin with a confession, my wife and I have an addiction. Or maybe it’s just the closest thing we have to a date night or family ritual. For the past several years, every Sunday evening from roughly 9pm on, we’ve done everything in our power to find ourselves parked on the couch or sitting up in bed, tuned in to HBO.

While the shows have changed, the writing and characters have remained troublingly endearing.

There have been sitcoms full of the seductions of celebrity culture, such as Sex and the City and it’s more recent male equivalent, the Mark Wahlberg-inspired Entourage.

In contrast, there have been a series of heavier, dare I say “darker,” series; including Carnival, The Station Agent, The Sopranos, Big Love, The Wire and the deliberate meditation on death, Six Feet Under, from which too many scenes to mention remain fixed in my imagination…

But as this summer approached I began to have pre-withdrawal symptoms. The Sopranos was coming to a final end - an end which would disappoint us all; and The Wire was not scheduled to return for at least another few months. This meant that I would have to be sustained through the summer heat by thirty minutes of the superficial Hollywood stylings of Vinny Chase and his motley crew. I’m ambivalently loyal at best to Big Love, but that’s a moot point since its recent move to Monday nights.

Do you feel my pain yet?

Anyway, much to my surprise, my cravings have been staved off by the newest arrival to HBO’s portfolio: enter John From Cincinnati, the story of a ghost town of a surfing community in Southern California. Never mind that my race politics continue to complain, “No Black People?” - it’s at least more plausible than the paucity of color in older shows set in New York City (i.e. Friends and Seinfeld).

Nonetheless, this show has it all.

“Great” Acting: Bruce Greenwood (Double Jeopardy et al) Rebecca DeMornay (continuing her work in The Lords of Doggtown), and two 90s sitcoms legends: Ed O’Neill (best known as Al Bundy) and 90210’s Luke Perry.

Painful Dialogue: Actually it’s more like juxtaposed monologues, full of phrases that are fragmented and incomplete, which quickly turn into enraged outbursts that produce emotional shutdowns on the part of their “victim.” These are truncated conversations in which it’s never quite clear that any shared meaning is achieved. This, in fact, is what brings the community of Imperial Beach together - their shared confusion amidst efforts to make sense of the mess of their lives. Thus far the show’s clearest human connection – where folks actually appear to be on the same page – is between trickster-figure John and surf-prodigy Shaunie Yost, in the form of a silent session of “scratch feet on ground and spin around” that produces mutual smiles. Maybe this a nod to Gospel stories of Jesus’ privileging child-like faith? Who knows, but here are a few of my favorite “religious” phrases thus far from the show’s namesake:

John- “the end is near,” “See God…” and “We are all frail vessels… Room 24 will give up its dead and the debt shall be forgiven.”

and one from Luke Perry’s Link- “Trust the devil you know, Mitch.”

Spirituality: there are resurrections, miraculous healings, ghosts, trances, visions and levitating bodies that will capture the attention of religious traditionalists, spiritual searchers and those just fascinated by “paranormal” occurrences.

Human Complexity: All of the deep questions, suffering, loss, death, dying dreams, community, family conflicts, and, of course, drugs, rock and roll and sex (strangely without gratuitous sex scenes). All without the aid of black and brown youth and their blasted rap music! Who knew?

A couple of closing thoughts: Set in Imperial Beach, CA - which I’m told is the first U.S. outpost north of Tijuana - Mexico is the shows constant “absent presence.” The show’s only non-white characters are either Spanish-speaking or speaking with Spanish accents, presumably of Mexican descent, and they show up as prisoners, gang-bangers and “illegals” shuffling just north of the border. The one recurring non-white character is the manager (played by Luis Guzman) of a motel with only one tenant - the squatting, drug-addicted surf legend, Butchie Yost. Between Butchie and the motel’s psychotic owner, poor Ramon’s day job is simply to clean up the shattered lives of broken white folks. While he is no “Magical Negro” - a character ubiquitious to the big screen (i.e. Will Smith in Bagger Vance, Michael Clark Duncan in The Green Mile, etc) making possible the salvation of “the man,” there is a clear family resemblance. The only magical person on this show is John (from Cincinnati?) , who arrives mysteriously from nowhere, produces cash from empty pockets that always corresponds to the dollar amount requested of him, carries a platinum credit card incapable of being maxed out, and enables others to performer miraculous healings.

A Few Questions

While the show’s driving “religious” metaphor is clearly a new age spirituality of the surf, does John represent a subtle endorsement of the popular prosperity gospel? Or perhaps the writers are aware of the historical overlap in the United States between these two traditions?Does the show’s disjointed, never resolved dialogue denote a nod to a postmodern spirituality that accents fissures and breaks and takes a nod from Rilke’s word’s to the young poet, “love the questions…” - community of seeker-surfers?

Must focusing upon spirituality (i.e. John) require a denial or downplaying of politics (i.e. U.S. immigration policy)? Must they be mutually exclusive? Must spirituality, as a contrast to both the religious right and left, be so deeply personal at the expense of emptying out any political consciousness? Or maybe the writers mean to critique the blind-spots of white privilege that shape the largely self-absorbed concerns of the show’s central figures, almost all of whom find it difficult to step out beyond their individual agendas.

These are just a few preliminary thoughts on a great new show. I know there must be some book out there on surfing as a metaphor for life, but for now I have refrained from researching it, content simply to ride the wave of my new HBO fix. Check it out and let me know what you think.

Official HBO Site: www.hbo.com/johnfromcincinnati/

Fan Site: home.earthlink.net/~mypix2007/jfc/index.html

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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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