Henry Rollins for President...no...really.
That's probably the last thing I thought I'd say...and then I heard an interview with Henry yesterday on Air America's Ring of Fire.
Now...I'm a child of the 1970s and a teenager of the 1980s...So I've actually been a fan of Rollins for years...Of course, he was in one incarnation of the hardcore punk band Black Flag from 1981-1986, and I really got into The Rollins Band (thanks to friend and mentor Shawn Chapman) in college at Memphis State University ...I loved Rollins' all-or-nothing take on punk sensibility...Does anybody else remember the video to Liar off of the mid-1990s Weight album?
Then I lost track of Henry...I didn't really follow his books, spoken word stuff or even his film show on IFC (although I was aware that it existed)...hey, I was in graduate school...I was busy.
Then yesterday came...Mike Papantonio interviewed Rollins and he gave very smart answers with a post-punk attitude...he was angry, he was righteous....but he was also well reasoned, smart and not prone to the Ann Coulter/Rush Limbaugh/Sam Sedar/Randi Rhodes name-calling silliness (that's right...I'm calling out both righties and lefties)...he was swinging hard and swinging carefully. He was exactly the kind of person the left needs...I don't see Henry rolling over as the Democratic leadership has been doing in congress since they took the speakership...
Rollins is a patriot....not the status qou, conforming kind of patriot that politicians and media anchors have been talking about since 9/11...Rolllins is a patriot in the mold of Patrick Henry or Samuel Adams...passionate, smart, eloquent and thinking outside the box while breathing fire at the opposition.
Henry Rollins for President…Oi!
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Labels: black flag, patriot, politics, president, radio, rollins
Archaeologists for Social Justice...Upon returning from the
SAA meetings in Austin, Texas, I was talking on the phone with
James Davidson, one of my closest
colleagues. We were talking about how different the
SAAs feel from other meetings--such as the
Society for Historical Archeology meetings or the humongous AAA meetings (for the non-anthropologists out there, that's the
American Anthropological Association, not the American
Automotive Association...we can unpack your
dominant discourse, but we cannot change your tire).
What's the difference between the conferences?..well, it might best be explained with a story...James and I were talking about overhearing a conversation between prehistoric archaeologists who were saying "historical archeology was o.k.....but all that politics seems to get in the way of the archeology."...Wow...
The mandate for political engagement is one thing that I love about what I do...yes, sometimes I lament that I could move faster if I did not need to arrive at some consensus between the various elements in the descendant communities that I deal with...and, yes, sometimes it can be scary knowing you are about to make a political stand that will make you very unpopular with a large part of your audience...but overall, the idea of archaeologists for social justice is something that makes archaeology "a good thing to do"...that takes it beyond just finding cool things in the ground (which is, of course, a selfish pursuit)...
My generation of archaeologists witnessed the transition--
NAGPRA and the reverberations of the
African Burial Ground project in the early 1990s. Our mentors often took great offense at these developments...my generation was clearly split--either they thought that political responsibility was a long time coming (like James & I did), or they decided to stand with their mentors to protect the power of science to speak as it pleases. That is what James and I were feeling at the
SAAs...to play off of the title of a friend
's SAA symposium...it was the "great divide" of political
engagement (she was attempting to address the "great
divide" between historical and prehistoric archaeology).
I for one am proud that there is a new generation of
archaeologists out there that see our
discipline as clearly linked with politics and social justice...They became anthropologists in a post-
NAGPRA world and for them it is second nature not only to consider the political implications of their work, but also to consider ways that their work can make a difference in the world...a couple of examples (who are
friends and
therefore not randomly chosen)...
Ed Tennant (
Ph.D. candidate at the
University of Florida) turned his interest in the history of
Chinese labor migration into an interest in worker's rights and "hidden slavery" around the world...and
Carl Carlson-Drexler (
Ph.D.
student at the
College of William and Mary) united his Quaker upbringing with his passion for battlefield archaeology to reinvent conflict archaeology as an explicitly anti-war
endeavor...
there are many more that I know and could mention...
I see folks like Carl and Ed (and Mary Brennan and
Colleen Morgan) as the fulfilment of a prophesy that I heard from Tom Green (co-author of "
NAGPRA is Forever") back in 1996...He
said "wait...when the next generation of archaeologists come around, consultation with tribes will be second nature."...It looks like some of the next generation are taking it one step further.
Labels: archaeology, nagpra, politics, SAA
White/Black America, White/Black Obama
A month or so back I watched
Tavis Smiley's Black State of the Union on
CSPAN...I watched Al
Sharpton and (the always cool)
Cornel West warn
Barak Obama that he cannot count on Black America's vote...he had to
demonstrate his
loyalty (or his worthiness?)
through paying attention to the needs of the African-American community. In short, he was not necessarily "the" African-American
candidate (
Obama was not at the event in
Williamsburg, VA as he was announcing his candidacy in Springfield,
Il...
Lincoln's birth place...I'm sure that contributed to some of
Sharpton's tone).
Following that event, media debate about
Obama's "blackness" (or at least "African-American-
ness") en
sued. I saw it on CNN, I read about it in
The Nation and I heard it on
Air America.
Obama's mother is white, his father in Kenyan and (according to Chris Matthews on
MSNBC) he thus has "no history of Jim Crow, no history of anger, of slavery." Top it off with the fact that (according to Senator Joseph
Biden)
Obama is "articulate and bright and clean" and we magically have a debate about how "white"
Obama is...this is, of course, complicated by past discussions about how "black" Bill Clinton was (does this extend to
Senator Clinton?)
Air America's
Rachel Maddow pointed out the contradictions on a brief CNN appearance--on one hand
Obama has to prove he has broader
America's interests at heart if he is to become a mainstream candidate...on the other hand if he does not pay enough attention to black issues he may alienate African-American voters (as
Sharpton warns).
Here I am reminded of Carter
Woodson's discussion of the tensions between black folks who have been educated and "equipped for a life in White America". . ."he must be both social and
bisocial at the same time. While he is a part of the body politic he is in
addition to this a member of a particular race... While serving his country he must serve within a special group (
Woodson 1933:4). This
dilemma seems the same for
Obama as it was in 1933 for
Woodson (In fact, a recent lecture at SAU by Dr. Walter Kimbrough, President of Philander Smith College, touched upon this tension as well).First, let's
dispense with the"
Obama without history" quote (with all
apologies to Eric Wolf). Were Abner
Louima or
Amadou Diallo (both immigrants and, in the case of the Guinean
Diallo, without a history of American racial prejudice) asked for their papers before they were shot and/or tortured by the police? One's own identity is only a
part of the manifestations of American racism. The problem is not with
Obama, but with the cultural memories and expectations of Joe
Biden Chris Mathews and, perhaps, Al
Sharpton.
Patricia Williams takes this point in an unexpected direction when she points out (in
The Nation of March 5
th) that "at a more complex level...American
identify is defined by the experience of the willing diaspora, the break by choice that is the heart of the immigrant myth" and African-Americans, by and large, have been excluded from the "essential page of the American
narrative" (p.13).
Obama is a black American that can be counted among the
willing immigrants.
There are lots of discussions about how
Obama will "
transcend race"...this is usually read as "
transcending blackness"...but
Obama must also (as Williams alludes to) "
transcend" his whiteness and the increasing narrow expectations and contradiction of what makes a leader and "a black leader."
Labels: blackness, obama, politics, race, whiteness
