"Accidental Racist": At least it's not "Honky Tonk Badonkadonk."

So . . . it seems the moment has come.  The explosive response to Brad Paisley and LL Cool J's "Accidental Racist" shows that country and hip hop still have a lot of . . . things to discuss with one another, let's say.  In the song, Paisley defends his wearing of the Confederate Flag "because he's a Skynrd fan," while LL offers to "forget about the iron chains" of slavery if white country boys will just stop thinking of him as a criminal because of how he dresses.  So yeah, there are a lot of problems, but at least the song is sincere, and a real dialogue.


By contrast, a few years back I was fascinated by this OTHER encounter between hip hop and country:

I was so fascinated by "Honky Tonk Badonkadonk," in fact, that it ended up being the subject of my first major scholarly publication.  In it, I talk about how country music actually IS black music, and how subtly fucked up it is when country musicians consider themselves to be making a generous gesture when they reach out to black people or black culture in any way.  And of course I try to make clear that, despite some public interpretation to the contrary, "Honky Tonk Badonkadonk" isn't actually any kind of attempt to reconcile country and hip hop - it's a country parody OF hip hop.

So, compared to that?  "Accidental Racist" is a step up.  I can see why people are getting upset, but I guess I'm inclined to give Paisley the benefit of the doubt.  I have no frame of reference for what he's saying - where I live and work, wearing a Confederate flag for any reason would probably get you worked over pretty quick, so it's hard to imagine doing it just because you're a Skynrd fan, but at least it feels like he's TRYING to be honest and engaged. 

Three Essential Works on Sound and Territory

After a conversation I've now forgotten, with a person I can no longer remember, I still managed to write down three amazing tips on books I need to follow up on for my work-in-progress on car audio and territorialization.

Julian Henriques, Sonic Bodies

Steve Goodman, Sonic Warfare

Peter Doyle, Echo and Reverb

Race and Technology: Okeh Records

Mamie Smith

I've just been poking through William Kenney's Recorded Music in American Life, and came upon a really amazing little tidbit.  Apparently Okeh records, which would go on to be early and vital popularizers of African-American music, were initially successful not because of their content - which at least in the early days Kenney characterizes as "uninspired" - but because of their technology.  The founder of the company pioneered a pressing process that allowed Okeh's records to be played on any turntable, whereas most companies at the time pressed in proprietary formats linked to phonographs that they also produced.  This was particularly important to the story of black music, because the Victor and Columbia companies, which held controlling intellectual property in the dominant lateral-cut pressing system, did not record black musicians due to supposed risks to the companies' respectability.

Okeh would go on, after the initial success bolstered by their technological leapfrogging of these barriers, to aggressively open markets in first Northern, then Southern black communities.  This began with Mamie Smith, but would culminate artistically with the recording of Louis Armstrong's Hot Fives and Sevens, which remain to this day one of the definitive statements of American musical culture.  This art might not exist today if not for the technological and structural paths of recorded sound development.

McLuhan would be delighted.

Japan is Run By Racist Idiots Who Prefer Robots to Brown People

Sometimes you just have to call 'em like you see 'em.  In this case, the strike zone is pretty wide.

On the one hand, you have the billions of yen over the years poured into programs to develop home-care robots.  I would be shocked to find that any remotely responsible health care expert could have thought this was a good idea even at its earliest stages.  Health care is not just about lifting and moving people - the CARE is right there in the name, and we're still quite a distance from developing any robot with that capability.


On the other hand, you have the intentional sabotage of a program intended to extend residency to highly-trained and carefully vetted nurses from the Phillipines and Indonesia.  This is reflective of a much wider resistance to any formal immigration liberalization.  Equally pathetic is the recent celebration of the arrival of a handful of individual and families from Myanmar as part of a U.N. resettlement program.  The latter is a more purely moral failure, where the former shows an inability even to act in rational self-interest.  I'm speculating a bit here, but I would bet short odds that the root cause of these ridiculous and shameful policy failures is the deep racism of a relatively small but powerful segment of the Japanese right wing.

I've been watching Treme, and in the second episode there's a moment where a lawyer who is trying to navigate the insanity of post-Katrina police bureaucracy simply loses her shit and starts screaming curse words into a pillow.  I can think of few more correct responses to such a patently ridiculous situation as this one.

Koreans in the Midst: Korean National Identity in Japan

A few weeks ago I went to a screening of two amateur films about the situation of Korean-Japanese, or Zainichi.  One of those films can be seen online (Japanese only):



Before discussing the film itself, there are a few things worth noting. This is not some jingoistic pro-Korean film, but even still it stands out from the truly dark background of widespread Japanese attitudes.  I actually had trouble finding this video after the event, because a search for "Korean High School" turns up mostly angry screeds by right-wingers.  Even among those who have found this video, a number of the comments are ambiguous and even hostile; some are simply along the lines of "go back to Korea," but others show the notable subtlety of Japanese racism.  For instance, one guy argues that all Zainichi couldn't possibly be descendants of forced laborers from the WWII era, implying that they're somehow inflating historical wrongs for personal gain (a favorite trope of the Japanese right). I haven't yet read the best-selling hate manga "Against Koreans," but I wouldn't be surprised if this was one of the elaborate 'theories' laid out in it.

The film deepens the image of Japan as shockingly regressive in its attunement to the situation.  On the one hand, the opening montage of young people shows how scant actual knowledge about the situation of the Zainichi is among average Japanese. In fact, as came up in discussion after the viewing, many Japanese aren't even aware that the Zainichi exist.  It's not quite fair to make the comparison to the awakening of America to the problem of minority rights - the Zainichi situation is much more recent - but it's still jarring to hear people in a modern nation profess this kind of ignorance.  Also extremely strange is that it was deemed necessary to offer masks or other means of hiding the identity of so many of the participants. The subject is genuinely inflammatory, especially to an extreme and sometimes violent fringe, but the idea that speaking about it would be either embarrassing or dangerous is, again, completely foreign to my American mindset.

But the film also demonstrates a lot about the Zainichi population that could be deemed to contribute to the problem.  First and foremost, it really is amazing that the Japanese government is funding high schools within its own borders that indoctrinate Japanese permanent residents to follow a military opponent of Japan. It's convenient for the Japanese right to obscure both the differences between North and South and the history - North Korea didn't actually exist when most Zainichi families were first brought to Japan - but I can certainly understand where the outrage is coming from. 

More subtly, the Zainichi given the chance to speak in the film express a range of personal opinions that are probably difficult for some Japanese to hear without flinching. Like most expatriate communities, it's clear they still have great loyalty to their homeland. And the association of Zainichi who have at least some sympathy for the North (Chongryon) promote an active anti-integrationist agenda, encouraging members to renounce any possibility of Japanese citizenship, as well as the right to vote. In the U.S., this is much less of an issue because the political tensions pulling on immigrants are largely insignificant, but try this one on for size - would Cinco de Mayo celebrations in the U.S. be nearly as fun if Mexico was firing test rockets over Florida?  Or, more to the point - how about a Muslim cultural center?

The situation is exacerbated by the lack of any concept, on either side of the debate, separating nationality from citizenship, or more generally, of multiculturalism.  Korean activist groups (whether affiliated with North or South) consider accepting Japanese citizenship as synonymous with abandoning Korean identity, leaving Zainichi with a rather grim choice.  While international politics continues to make Zainichi its unfortunate playthings, even sudden peace with the North wouldn't solve the underlying problem - how do we reconcile the reality of the mobile 20th century (to say nothing of the 21st) with mindsets unable to approach national identity as something complex and multidimensional?

Book Review: Daniel Pipes, "Conspiracy"

I just happened to see this on the library shelf the other day, and I thought I'd give it the rundown. For people with an interest in conspiracy (and/or the related social phenomena of New Age thinking, self-help, and racism), this book provides a solid and critical intellectual history, giving you the names you need to know if you're trying to understand where all these crazy ideas come from. Pipes also makes some contributions to the social analysis of the conspiracy phenomena, though he falls quite short as a philosopher. Specifically, his epistemology is hazy at best, so he has some difficulty drawing meaningful lines between "conspiracy theory" and real, if complex and sometimes overzealous, attempts by intellectuals and laymen to understand the broader forces that impact society. The most egregious of these slips is his characterization of perceptions of anti-black racism and misogyny in the West as paranoia, characterizations that are both deeply offensive and demonstrably wrong – institutional racism and sexism are about as real and widespread as it gets. Similarly, Pipes harries a false distinction by claiming that the proven, documented involvement of CIA operatives in the crack trade in Los Angeles in the 1980's is not the same as a conspiracy, and that therefore Black anti-government sentiments are unfounded. Such statements are simply ludicrous.

More generally, Pipes often blurs the distinctions between conspiracy theories that place immense power in the hands of a few individuals, and known "conspiracies" that take place across the globe because of how the economy, government, or culture are structured. So, for example, he will describe people's fears of the Rosicrucians and the Jewish conspiracy in the same terms, and apply the same explanations to them, as he does people's fear of Western imperialism. This looks particularly bad reading it ten years after the fact, as documents are increasingly readily available showing that many of the economic attacks that Pipes characterizes as conspiracy theories have actually taken place – for example, the fully intentional roles of the WTO and World Bank in destabilizing developing countries.

But despite the seeming tenuousness of Pipes characterization of, for example, Noam Chomsky as the equal of Lyndon LaRouche, he did succeed in getting me to ask some hard questions about the intellectual style of the left. It is undoubtedly true that, as Pipes points out, leftist Afrocentrism is far more institutionally accepted than right-wing Farrakhanism, even though each are based on tenuous concepts. Ultimately, how much responsibility do theorists such as Chomsky have to be rigorous in their diagnoses of wider political or social situations? Pipes provocatively quotes Susan Faludi's statement that misogyny is an ideology that has moved through "the culture's secret chambers" – and while clearly Faludi is speaking metaphorically, I think Pipes is fair in pointing out the parallels in style. Left-wing intellectuals do have a tendency to cast a very wide net in searching for causes of the problems they seek to diagnose, as well as attributing observable effects to causes both subtle and widespread – invisible, mysterious and often malevolent forces such as racism or exploitation. Sometimes this style of thinking can verge dangerously close to conspiracism; it is not enough that a system or statement be true in essence, it must be true in fact.

While he may be a lummox on more recent events, the benefit of hindsight makes Pipes a very good resource, as he recounts the history of conspiracism in high style. This is a shockingly long history, but measurable, with anti-Semitism and anti-Masonism having their starting points roughly in the 11th and then 14th centuries. The passage of these originary ideas forward in time is easily where the book is most useful and least controversial, as Pipes explains quite clearly and convincingly how the anti-Semitism of the Crusaders traveled through time to fuel the Nazis and, ultimately, over the sea to Japan (the popularity of anti-Semitism in Japan makes perfect sense if you've had much exposure to that culture).

Pipes also does a very creditable job of presenting some ideas as to why people chose Jews and Masons as the overwhelming targets of their suspicions, saying that these two groups represent the Modern – they are generally sophisticated and often powerful, thus fomenting resentment among people less likely to be dedicated to intellectual rigor. The only real problem with this thesis is that it is inconsistent with Pipes' millennia-long history of anti-Semitism – Jews were not always the successful, "model minority" they are now. They could hardly have been hated for their modernism, social advancement, or financial prowess in the 12th century, when most were living in segregated ghettos and were penniless.

The most important unanswered question, though, remains that of epistemology. How do we determine where "conspiracy" theories sit on the spectrum from concrete knowledge to broader, "spiritual" truth - is there a spot available somewhere between religion and science? Ultimately, how do we determine what is a 'conspiracy theory' and what is potentially valid speculation? It is because he fails to address such questions beforehand that Pipes occasionally stumbles in his classification of specific cases. But it is also what leads him to the very interesting choice to include left-wing theorists in the 'conspiracy' category, a move which I think is manifestly incorrect, but nonetheless sends a powerful message of warning to the most extreme indulgers in left-wing rhetoric that, if you're not careful, you might be mistaken for an Antimason.

The Resurrection of Amos n' Andy

I just heard a tiny little aside on Prairie Home Companion that caught my ear. As you might know, the show's creator and host, Garisson Keillor, is a great fan of golden age radio programs from the 30s and 40s. In a skit, he was running down a list of his favorite shows, hitting all the classics – The Shadow, Fibber McGee and Molly – and then he dropped in Amos n' Andy, along with one of his sound-men doing a short take on one of the characters, in what you might call audio blackface. This was clearly not intended to stand out or be remarkable in any way: Amos n' Andy was just another radio show of the era, its depictions of African-Americans little more than a matter of style.

This is significant because, of course, Amos n' Andy was, both in its own time and for a long period afterward, a hugely controversial show, opposed in particular by the NAACP for its alleged slights to the character of Blacks and Black culture. Whether this assessment was accurate, and whether it is responsible to consider Amos n' Andy primarily on its artistic merits rather than as something of social significance, is largely a question of contents. In the TV version especially, the show can almost seem anti-racist insofar as the main characters, though obvious scoundrels, move in a world where there are many black professionals, and what whites do show up treat the black characters as presumed equals. But the argument is that the TV incarnation in particular, since it was the only major television program featuring black characters and actors, was irresponsible and hurtful insofar as it implicitly constructed its good-for-nothing protagonists as representative of blackness.



But, increasingly, Keillor's perspective – that it should be appreciated as a work of art, its racial overtones only secondarily – is growing. The TV series is widely available on DVD, and it's hardly in the interest of DVD producers to label their product as "Possibly Racist!", so I imagine the show's artistic quality is a much better talking point. There are also good reasons for the re-evaluation, many of them stemming from the genuine achievements of the Black actors, set designers, writers (though most of the writers were white, there was one Black writer) and other creators who made the series one of the best ever. I doubt many people would say those creators' reputations should be tarnished in perpetuity because of their involvement in a controversial show.

But of course, the risk is that the very real, justified concerns over the show's impact on perceptions of African Americans will go by the wayside as everyone jumps on the bandwagon of celebrating it. That's a really unacceptable possibility. Ultimately, while I don't feel history should forget Amos n' Andy, I do feel that when it is remembered, its strengths and its flaws must be taken together.

Guns, Germs, and Steel: What it Means for Race

I'm sitting here watching the National Geographic documentary based on Jared Diamond's book "Guns, Germs and Steel," and it's fucking incredible – both on its own terms, and because of its implications for race studies. For those unfamiliar with the basics of Diamond's argument, it can be boiled down fairly clearly. The argument is that the historical dominance of European cultures over rest of the cultures on Earth boils down to the geographical accident that granted Europeans certain natural resources. Specifically, these are domesticated grains, such as wheat, and domesticated beasts of burden such as cows and horses. These, along with other geographic advantages, allowed for surpluses of labor that led, in time, to innovations in technology, such as steel swords and horsemanship. European domestication of animals also bred new human diseases, but prolonged contact increased immunity to them to levels not present in other populations. All of these, in turn, led to European military and, ultimately, cultural dominance.

Diamond's extremely compelling hypothesis is essentially the nuclear option of anti-racist argumentation – but without any of the negative implications of that phrase. Any historical thesis dependent on an essential difference between people, whether couched in terms of race or culture, is rendered absurd by Diamond's view of human history. All of the differences between human societies, and therefore all the differences between their accomplishments, arise not from any essential genetic or moral superiority, any surplus of bravery, intelligence, or creativity, but from natural advantages inherent in certain groups' homelands. In light of this, all previous explanations of certain groups' dominance are revealed as post-facto justifications of a geographical fait accompli that predates any race, much less individual.

A command of this material is an essential part of any rhetorical arsenal aimed at countering racialist or culturalist worldviews. Diamond explicitly describes the Europeans as "accidental conquerors," and this is the only self-understanding that can grant the dominant population groups a healthy distance from the mythology of their own superiority.

This is, incidentally, a perfect example of one of the unspoken driving principles of academic and intellectual life. Independent of its intellectual merit, Diamond's conceptual framework has gained a lot of traction because it can be reduced to a catchphrase. Although, ultimately, it's not a terribly accurate one – guns in particular are not nearly as valuable to European dominance as, say, grain, or horses. I guess grain isn't nearly as sexy as guns.