Radio Free Newport

A few local notes:

* The Ohio Brewing Company, located downtown on Main Street, is open. They have no online presence yet, so my post from back in February has become the first Google hit when you search on “Ohio Brewing Company and Akron.” Amy and I may go there tonight to celebrate our birthdays (my 42nd is today, her 41st is tomorrow) — I’ll report back if we do.  (more…)

The dominant sociological paradigm about whites’ racial attitudes is Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s “colorblind racism.” In short, Bonilla-Silva, building from the work of other scholars, argues that the racial ideology of whites has entered a new phase in the post-Civil Rights era. In this era, racism is less overt and more subtle. Rather than using older, Jim Crow-era forms of racism — e.g., blacks are biologically inferior to whites, they are subhuman, etc. — whites now use a variety of rhetorical frames to blame blacks for their collective place in our socioeconomic hierarchy without sounding explicitly racist.

When you ask whites about residential segregation, for example, you will often get answers along the lines of “it’s natural to want to live with their own kind.” Further, whites will criticize race-based programs such as Affirmative Action by claiming that they go against our national ideas of egalitarianism, equal opportunity, and democracy. And so on. This leads to a society that is full of, as Bonilla-Silva’s book is titled, Racism Without Racists. (If you are interested in more on this, Rachel’s Tavern has a nice discussion on “Colorblind Racism vs. Old Fashioned Racism.”)

As a story in today’s Washington Post demonstrates, however, old-fashioned racism is alive and well, particularly in response to the Obama campaign. Here are just a couple of the racist anecdotes documented in the article by Obama campaigners in Indiana and Pennsylvania:

* For all the hope and excitement Obama’s candidacy is generating, some of his field workers, phone-bank volunteers and campaign surrogates are encountering a raw racism and hostility that have gone largely unnoticed — and unreported — this election season. Doors have been slammed in their faces. They’ve been called racially derogatory names (including the white volunteers). And they’ve endured malicious rants and ugly stereotyping from people who can’t fathom that the senator from Illinois could become the first African American president.

* Victoria Switzer, a retired social studies teacher, was on phone-bank duty one night during the Pennsylvania primary campaign. One night was all she could take: “It wasn’t pretty.” She made 60 calls to prospective voters in Susquehanna County, her home county, which is 98 percent white. The responses were dispiriting. One caller, Switzer remembers, said he couldn’t possibly vote for Obama and concluded: “Hang that darky from a tree!”

* On Election Day in Kokomo, a group of black high school students were holding up Obama signs along U.S. 31, a major thoroughfare. As drivers cruised by, a number of them rolled down their windows and yelled out a common racial slur for African Americans, according to Obama campaign staffers.

What is especially sickening about this is the extent to which the Clinton campaign has encouraged this through their surrogates and via Senator Clinton’s most recent comments on the matter:

“I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on,” she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article “that found how Sen. Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me. There’s a pattern emerging here,” she said.

There sure is, Hillary.

np: John Coltrane with the Red Garland Trio - Traneing In

No energy to write today, so here is a batch o’ good reads for a lazy Sunday:

- In the cover story of today’s NYT Magazine, Alex Kotlowitz (There Are No Children Here; The Other Side of the River), one of those rare journalists who writes like a sociologist, investigates a relatively new program that treats gang-related violence like an infectious disease. The program was developed by public health researcher and epidemiologist, Gary Slutkin, who has extensive experience combating tuberculosis and AIDS in Africa.

- Time Magazine reports on a new study on Americans and chronic pain, published in the Lancet:
Americans in households making less than $30,000 a year spend nearly 20% of their lives in moderate to severe pain, compared with less than 8% of people in households earning above $100,000, according to a landmark study on how Americans experience in pain. The findings, published Thursday in the British journal the Lancet, also found that participants who hadn’t finished high school reported feeling twice the amount of pain as college graduates. “To a significant extent, pain does separate the classes,” says Princeton economist Alan Krueger, who authored the study along with Dr. Arthur Stone, a psychiatry professor at Stony Brook University.

Krueger notes that the type of pain people reported typically fell on either side of the rich-poor divide. “Those with higher incomes welcome pain almost by choice, usually through exercise,” he says. “At lower incomes, pain comes as the result of work.”

(more…)

- Some friends emailed to ask how the Walk a Mile in Her Shoes march turned out. Amy has pictures and a summary here. The Akron Beacon-Journal and Canton Repository also did nice stories on the event (I’m in the Canton paper’s slideshow). My friend Ann said she couldn’t decide it I looked more like the Mother of the Bride or Janet Reno, but I thought I struck just the right balance between sassy and classy in my stylish silver-and-gold combo. In all seriousness, it was a great event that raised several thousand dollars for the local women’s crisis centers. Thanks again to the Kent-Akron chapter of SWS for organizing our participation.

-  Via Chris Uggen: NASA reports on an explosion from deep, deep space that was visible to the naked eye:

At 2:12 a.m. EDT, Swift detected an explosion from deep space that was so powerful that its afterglow was briefly visible to the naked eye. Even more astonishing, the explosion itself took place halfway across the visible universe!

Never before has anything so far away come even close to naked-eye visibility. The explosion was so far away that it took its light 7,500,000,000 (7.5 billion) years to reach Earth! In fact, the explosion took place so long ago that Earth had not yet come into existence.

Heavy. My mind is officially blown. I love stuff like that.    (more…)

As Joe Feagin notes, Rev. Jeremiah Wright was correct in his descriptions of racism and racial inequality on the Bill Moyers show. Wright’s appearance on the Moyers show (I didn’t see it, but scanned the transcript) appeared to be a mostly positive development, a way to further national discussions of race by explaining his ministry and putting his sermons into context.

And then Wright spoke at the National Press Club, and the wheels pretty much fell off the bus. You’ve surely read about it by now — the short version is that Wright went on the offensive and repeated some of his most unfortunate remarks about AIDS, Louis Farrakhan, and 9/11. Obama clearly had no choice to but to quickly and sternly denounce him.

I don’t consider myself a political expert, but I’ve been reading about politics pretty closely since I was 16 (so, for about 26 years). This is truly one of the most mind-boggling series of events I’ve ever seen at the level of national politics. Wright could have taken many paths, and somehow chose the one that damage Obama the most. He could have stood his ground without denigrating Obama as “doing what a politician does,” or furthered his ministry without promoting his most controversial remarks, or even retired quietly without further comment. (more…)

Do a search on The Constantines here, and you’ll see that I’ve written about them a number of times, including a rave review of their July 2005 show in Covington, KY. They have been one of my favorite bands since I came across their Shine A Light release back in 2003.

Amy and I, along with our pal Jimmy The Saint, saw The Constantines at the Grog Shop in Cleveland last night. The show starts around 9:15 with the obligatory local act, Akron guys who have a kind of cool Gil-Scott-Heron-fronting-Fugazi thing going on. I dug parts of their set, but ultimately wasn’t up for a sonic bludgeoning that early in the night. My complaint isn’t with them, but with the club: why do booking agents insist on adding a third band to a 9pm weeknight show?

Oakley Hall is next. They’re running late because they “left half their band down the road” (not sure why, but half of their band wasn’t there). The Constantines’ bassist does their whole set, and eventually four Cons join them for the last couple songs. I haven’t gotten around to checking out their records yet, but will soon. I dug their updated Fairport Convention sound, and at times, they reminded me of Eleventh Dream Day. But they play another three songs after what seemed to be the climax of the set and they’re starting to get jammy in a self-indulgent way. Now it’s midnight, the Cons haven’t gone on yet, I’m getting tired, I’m looking at a 14-hour day the next day because I’m doing a guest spot in an evening graduate class, we have a 45-minute drive back to Akron, and lastly, I make the mistake of checking the news to find out that Clinton is up 10 in PA. Yeah, I’m getting crabby. (more…)

From today’s NYT editorial page:

April 23, 2008
Editorial
The Low Road to Victory

If that was supposed to bolster Mrs. Clinton’s argument that she is the better prepared to be president in a dangerous world, she sent the opposite message on Tuesday morning by declaring in an interview on ABC News that if Iran attacked Israel while she were president: “We would be able to totally obliterate them.” (more…)

Here is a roundup of topics I was hoping to get to individually this week, but just have not found the time.

- Tomorrow morning, I will participate in Walk a Mile in Her Shoes, the “International Men’s March to Stop Rape, Sexual Assault & Gender Violence.” I am marching with a couple other faculty members and a number of graduate students from Kent State and Akron. Our department’s participation was organized by our graduate students’ chapter of Sociologists for Women in Society. If you are interested in donating money, email me for my PayPal or snail addresses. Yes, I have heels and I do believe my outfit is pretty fetching. Thanks to Alyssa, a student in my Race course, for asking me to participate.

- Last week, I mentioned that our neighborhood was featured in a Wall Street Journal video on the Black Keys. Yesterday, it was featured in the NY Times, in an article about a forthcoming book by Akron Beacon-Journal columnist David Giffels (whose columns I dug as soon as we moved here). Gifflels and his wife rehabbed a 1913 Tudor that was in disastrous condition. His new book, All the Way Home: Building a Family in a Falling-Down House, comes out next month on HarperCollins.

- On a less happy note, I was sad to read that WKYC is ending the Akron-Canton newscast. Eric Mansfield does a terrific job as anchor, and his blog has really helped us learn the local turf over the past year.

- Barack’s got game! Check out a fun piece on Obama’s love for hoops from Bryant Gumbel’s Real Sports.

- Legendary political scientist Theda Skocpol on Clinton’s charges that Obama is elitist:
I have been in meetings with the Clintons and their advisors where very clinical things were said in a very-detached tone about unwillingness of working class voters to trust government — and Bill Clinton — and about their unfortunate (from a Clinton perspective) proclivity to vote on life-style rather than economic issues. To see Hillary going absolutely over the top to smash Obama for making clearly more humanly sympathetic observations in this vein, is just amazing. Even more so to see her pretending to be a gun-toting non-elite. Give us a break!…

This has to be one of the few times in U.S. political history when a multi-millionaire has accused a much less wealthy fellow public servant, a person of the same party and views who made much less lucrative career choices, of “elitism”! (I won’t say the only time, because U.S. political history is full of absurdities of this sort.) In a way, it is funny — and it may not be long before the jokes start.

- The NYT’s Roger Cohen questions why we have a national museum on the Holocaust, but not slavery and racial injustice:
Let’s be clear: I am not comparing Jim Crow with industrialized mass murder, or suggesting an exact Klan-Nazi moral equivalency. But I do think some psychological displacement is at work when a magnificent Holocaust Memorial Museum, in which the criminals are not Americans, precedes a Washington institution of equivalent stature dedicated to the saga of national violence that is slavery and segregation.

- Edited to add: It’s a sad day in rock & roll, as E Street keyboardist Danny Federici passed away at 58 after a three-year battle with melanoma.

…is that my Congressional representative is no longer someone who thinks it is fine to call an African-American presidential candidate “boy.” Via Newsweek:

This is the latest story setting the blogosphere on fire: Kentucky congressman Geoff Davis “compared Obama and his message for change similar to a ’snake oil salesman.’ He said in his remarks at the GOP dinner [on Saturday] that he also recently participated in a ‘highly classified, national security simulation’ with Obama.”

“‘I’m going to tell you something: That boy’s finger does not need to be on the button,’ Davis said. ‘He could not make a decision in that simulation that related to a nuclear threat to this country.’”

Nice racially-coded language there, Geoff. From a thoughtless, insulting conservative to Betty Sutton — I think we made out pretty well in that deal.

np: iTunes on shuffle, current Donald Fagen - The Nightfly

Our neighborhood, Highland Square, is featured in a Wall Street Journal video about the Black Keys, Akron natives who are promoting their new record Attack & Release, which was produced by Danger Mouse. Though I think Auerbach and Carney are very good musicians, I’m not much of a fan. I saw them once — opening a few years back for Ted Leo, if I remember right — but the recent retro-garage-blooz trend just isn’t my thing. But I’ve heard that they’re good guys and I love that they’re staying in Akron and supporting, producing and recording other bands. I’ll check them out again.

Anyway, the strip you see at the beginning and the end of the video — with Alladin’s, Angel Falls Coffee, Annabells, Highland Theater, and Square Records (right next door is Red Square, a bar we close down about once a week) — is a couple blocks from our house. Pretty neat to see our neighborhood get some national attention. The accompanying story is here. [Hat tip to Love and Blunder for the links.]