sunday absolutions on imus
Music: Not Drowning, Waving: Tabaran (1990)
One of my favorite rituals is Sunday morning with coffee, the newspaper, and political talk shows. Yesterday morning I was somewhat astonished to see Meet the Press devote 45 minutes to a discussion of race and Imus, or rather, a discussion of Imus rather than race. I was astonished by the time devoted to the issue, not that the discussion predictably directed the country's racial atrocities into one, solitary man with a history of slurring.
Over at Working Blue Jenny advances a compelling argument about how Imus' name-calling represents the cruelty of redescription. Rorty suggests that "cruelty" is to describe another person or group with a vocabulary that is exclusively foreign or exclusionary (which helps to explain, for example, why a person traditionally the victim of the n-word uses it in a politically resistant way, while another white person using the word just continues a cruelty). In a sense, this is the clash Gates discusses in terms of "signification" versus "signifyin'"---and in some sense the fantasy of traversal that underwrites a lot of political discussion these days (if not the Gates project itself).
Because well-meaning cruelty can result from enacting the fantasy of semiotic traversal (sound bite: Rodney King's tearful plea), I found myself cringing watching Russert field questions from his experts. The discussion was interesting but not terribly productive. Gwen Ifill was on the program as---well, lets just say it---as the token, credentialed victim of Imus' racist language. The gist of the discussion revolved around David Brooks' assertion that capitalism and comedy were the root motives of Imus' statement and Gwen Ifill's smug indignity to those suggestions. She came off as too righteous and unable to suggest anything positive, while Brooks' attempts to "move on" came off as "that white guy who just doesn't get it." The show concluded in that mode of sentimentality that Kirt Wilson's recent research has worked to critique. Russert, clearly proud that NBC allowed the roundtable to go on for almost an hour about the topic, concluded the show in a series of self-congratulatory phrases and gestures that sigalled---perhaps as Whitney Houston might have sung today---the greatest cruelty of all: back to television business at usual. Or, it's like what Barthes' says about photography: let Gwen Ifill get angry for forty-five minutes so that you can "take a sound-bite" and forget it.
Outside of the classroom and blogsphere, is a dialogue and/or discussion about racial problems in our society possible? Clearly it's not possible on television: whither the discussions of race and Katrina?
Whither the discussion of race on this blog? What more can I say?