• Who is Callista Bisek Gingrich, and why does she appear to be a strangely convincing Mad Men-era historical reenactor?  Ariel Levy offers some insights:  “She does not seem like a forty-five-year-old, or at least not like a forty-five-year-old of this era. She has the style and smile of an astronaut’s wife, even in her downtime. Once, in Cedar Rapids, I happened to run into her in the women’s bathroom at the airport. In her suit and pearls, with her stiff coiffure, she looked as if she had just exited a beauty parlor in 1962.”  (My theory:  it’s all in the coiff.  She may have been a wash-n-wear kind of gal back in the day, but once you’re spending that kind of time and money on an oddly unfashionable hairdo, you’re all in.)
• From the right Alana Goodman argues that the Stepford Wife persona doesn’t actually make voters forget she’s Newt’s third wife.  Rather, it makes the Gingrich marriage appear even stranger and more off-putting.  I think the public should leave the spouses of the candidates alone, since after all they’re not running for anything, and if their wives or husbands win they won’t not be offered a paid position in the government.  But Goodman is probably right that the deadeye Pat Nixon impersonation is only going to invite unwanted speculation.  And those of you on the left may well think it only fair play given the ugliness that Michelle Obama has had to deal with, which has been clearly and persistently racialized. 
• Who would have thought that Mommie would turn out to be one of the more interesting and powerful First Ladies on the Republican side?  Give me Nancy Reagan any day, in her off-the-shoulder Galanos gown over Nixon or Barbara or Laura Bush.  Cue the Dynasty soundtrack!
• In “Who in God’s Name is Mitt Romney?” Frank Rich argues that the mystery in the riddle wrapped in the enigma that is Willard Mitt Romney is in fact his religion, which although agressively evangelical is also famous for keeping its secrets and sacred rites to members only.  Romney has devoted a great deal of his time and treasure to the Latter-Day Saints in his lifetime.  Until he finds a way to talk about his faith more specifically and openly, Rich argues that Americans on the left, right, and center will continue to see him not as a man, but rather as as a disturbingly lifelike hologram of a presidental candidate.
• I don’t know if that’s true, but it has worked in the recent past when candidates have explained to the voters what their beliefs are and how those beliefs jibe with their politics.  (See for example:  John F. Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush.)
• With Romney on an anemic rise and no plausible challengers to his right , it’s no wonder that many on the right are praying for a “Sweet Meteor of Death” to rescue them from a Romney run in the fall.  Too funny!  I’ll say this about the 2008 Dem primary:  as nasty as that got, I don’t think any but the most die-hard Obamabots or Hillary Clinton fan boys and girls were praying for planetary devastation so as to save them from having to support the other candidate’s nomination.  Keep your eyes on the prize, my Republican friends!  There’s always the chance that the Eurozone will pull the U.S. economy off a cliff again, and/or that Sweet Meteor of Death will strike.  Remember, think like Ronald Reagan:  sunny optimism, sunny optimism!

My advisors had always told me that there is something about being a black male in academia that attracts well intentioned but often embarrassing special attention from some white faculty. I had not experienced this while at Little College because my professors seem to have been the most socially conscious, social justice oriented and culturally sensitive teachers ever. They were never patronizing or imposing and always critical but kind. Indeed, there were other professors at Little College who were known for being inappropriate or “too much” but I never studied with them. I was not prepared to not have this happen in graduate school, however.

.       .      .      .      .      .      .      

Prof. X is not so much inappropriate as he is overly paternalistic. Prof. X wants to “rescue” me intellectually, which is both nice because he is supporting my work, but weird because sometimes he talks down to me. In class, Prof. X points to me when he discusses any and all things “African American.” (This I can at least understand because my work is on the African American family but it has become a running joke in the class because he doesn’t realize he does it.)

Prof. X once asked me if I played basketball because I’m so much taller than him. I told him I used to play football. In front of the whole class, Prof. X then proceeded to tell me how he graciously helped (almost rescued) his previous inner city black student-athlete from his inability to read and write and guided the young man to become a multiple fellowship award winner (Fulbright, White House Internships etc.).

Hathaway’s experience is probably all too common given the absence of faculty of color on most faculties, let alone in top graduate programs.  As I recall, I worked with three black faculty in my decade-long college and graduate school career and no other faculty of color, compared to dozens of white faculty. 

Hathaway’s commentary is also a fascinating sociology of whiteness, particularly with respect to a major quirk among white faculty-types today:  obligatory dog companionship at all times.

I confess I’ve never been a dog person. Before I went to Little College, I had never known a friendly dog and I never knew anyone who had a dog. As a child I was taught to run or at least stay far away if I saw a stray dog because it probably had rabies or would attack me. (My Jamaican parents were convinced that there was something fundamentally different in American dogs as distinct from the dogs they owned “back home.”)

My parents and I thought it was crazy and sort of funny that on my freshman move-in day, a number of dogs were roaming the dorm halls and resting on the couches because a few students had brought their pets to see them off. (My father concluded that this was evidence of Little College’s “liberal” policies.) So, imagine my surprise when I visited my first year advisor’s office during freshman orientation and realized that her dog stayed in her office!

Advisor: Are you okay with dogs?
Me:……Sure…….

She lets the dog out of the pen and I sort of freeze up in my seat as it walks to me, sniffing my shoes and my bag. At this point I’m only half listening while my advisor is introducing herself because I’m trying to look as comfortable as possible around a dog that has quickly grown fond of my book bag. I missed most of what she said in the meeting but that day I learned that dogs are part of academic life.

Those of you who have been affiliated with a college like Hathaway’s will understand what he means.  In addition to a White Thing, the dog fetish must be a SLAC and elite school affectation–teaching at a public Aggie means that the only animals on my campus (aside from the occasional service dogs and Seminar, my commuter horse) are the patients in the off-campus Vet School emergency department and the ones hanging upside down in the Animal Science building awaiting their appointment with the meat cutting students.  In other words, animals have their uses here–and hanging out in faculty offices ain’t one of ‘em.  (And this is not the case because we on the faculty aren’t white, of course.  Like pretty much everywhere but at HBCs, we are overwhelmingly a white faculty.)

Go read the whole thing.  Good luck, Herlin Hathaway, and dog bless.

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President John Tyler, 1841-45

I clicked on this link over at Politico yesterday, as it was billed as “Tyler’s Grankid:  Newt’s a ’jerk‘.”  Who the hell is Tyler, I wondered?  Surely not President John Tyler (1790-1862).  Could anyone alive today really have a grandparent who was born in the eighteenth century?

Most Americans think Newt Gingrich is a jerk–that’s hardly news.  It seems to me that the bigger headline should be that Tyler, who after all ran for Vice-President 172 years ago and became President in 1841 upon the death of William Henry Harrison, still has two living grandchildren!  That’s some pretty solid DNA he passed on, for a dude who was referred to in campaign slogans limply as just, “Tyler too!” 

Take that, Tippecanoe!

Doesn’t President Barack Obama’s speech at the University of Michigan remind you of the time that George W. Bush went to Notre Dame and Bob Jones and told them to stop being such one-issue whiners about abortion?  Or like that time he went to Haliburton and lectured them about keeping costs down, otherwise he would de-fund the National Security State?  Yeah:  just like that!

Personally, I liked this response– mysteriously, it was the final paragraph in the Denver Post this morning, rather than the lede:

Although I have nothing against her politics, I’m glad that Gabrielle (Gabby) Giffords finally resigned.  Her recovery appears to be remarkable so far, but it’s been apparent for months that she is not up to really serving her district in the way it deserves.  It’s monstrously unfair, and I still think her shooting and the deaths of so many others should be discussed in terms of a political assassination attempt, but still:  she can’t represent Tucson at this point in her life.

Some bosses offer dating tips. Diane Sawyer counsels her colleagues on freezing their eggs.

The anchor of ABC’s World News has long been a sounding board for her famously hard-working staff on a host of personal issues, from dating to the more complex realities of a demanding career. A recurring theme with women: finding time away from the office to meet a partner and have kids before they hit 40. It doesn’t always happen, as Sawyer, who first married at age 42, well knows. When it doesn’t, Sawyer sends her workers to New York University’s Fertility Clinic.

.       .       .       .       .       .      

Three quarters come in because they aren’t ready to have children yet. Some are sent by their parents: I know you want to work, but I want grandkids someday. Many are furious their doctors didn’t tell them about egg freezing sooner. “I want to send Diane a basket of flowers for what she’s doing,” says one childless 40-something in the media.

The idea that one could be a woman in her 40s in the media and not be aware of fertility issues is just completely laughable.  This is the same news media that for at least thirty years has been bullying women to get pregnant before they’re 25 or else!!!  That “childless 40-something in the media” probably spent her college internships back in the 1980s writing scripts that scolded women who didn’t get pregnant by 25, then worked as a producer for TV segments in the 1990s discussing the heartbreak of infertility and the joy of international adoption/IVF babies/donor eggs/babies via surrogacy, and then was promoted to create shows in the 2000s recycling these scripts and story lines on daytime TV, the nightly news, and evening news magazines.

Never mind that women in their 30s or 40s who don’t have children might not have them because they don’t want them.  I wonder how many of Diane Sawyer’s employees submit to this expensive procedure because they’re afraid to tell their bosses or co-workers, “no, thank you, I don’t want children.”  I wonder how many women in their 50s and 60s feel pressure to cast their decisions not to have children as some kind of bad luck or physiological failure, because of the opprobrium they might face if they say, “I’m really not into children, so I didn’t have them?”

But, really:  the notion that these stories offer some kind of secret wisdom that women have never heard of before is just too stupid to believe.

We had one suggestion–and only one–from a student who suggested that next time we might consider offering the course with one man and one woman professor, instead of two women.  Right–because our male colleagues are just lining up to teach this course, and it will be soothing and more objective if a male professor is in the room.  (I occasionally get comments like this about the sex of book authors on my evaluation forms that went something like this:  “I thought that this course was biased because we read mostly female-authored books, but then we read some books by men that seem to agree with the women, so I guess the books in this class aren’t biased.”  I really must ask my male colleagues if they ever are informed that including women-authored books on their syllabi is reassuring because it means that the information presented by a male professor and male authors isn’t biased after all.)

A few students suggested that next time we don’t talk about rape so much, but then they didn’t like the one book we assigned that focused on married heterosexuality either.  But the truth is that none of the books in the history of sexuality are super-sexy, because the historiography of sexuality is very Foucaultian and is therefore about the distribution of and challenges to power, challenges that frequently hurt the challengers more than the reigning system of power distribution.  I think the students were surprised that studying sex could be so depressing, although I warned them from the beginning that I think I teach the most depressing courses in the Baa Ram U. history curriculum.

I think the problem is that most modern college students experience sex as liberating, and they don’t want to think about the constraints on sexuality or even the sexual abuse that was a much more widespread experience of most people transhistorically, even in the present.  (I know that’s how I would have thought about these issues as a 20-year old, so I’m sympathetic to this view.)  I get it that the class turned out to be kind of a bummer for them, even if the reading assignments hadn’t been so heavy.  (But quite frankly, the last thing I’d ever want to be accused of is a lack of rigor when teaching anything, let alone a pilot class on the history of sexuality.)

It’s the first day of classes in the second term for me, folks. Keep yourselves out of trouble. And remember: Aaaaaaaaaaa!

Please enjoy this crackling fire while you warm up after your local MLK Jr. Day Parade. Touré is here in Potterville! That’s pretty big news.