John L. Jackson

IN MEDIAS RACE (AND CLASS): Post-Jim Crow Ethnographies of Black Middleclassdom

“Race is the modality in which class is lived” (Hall et al., 1978 , p. 394). Thats how Stuart Hall evocatively put it, emphasizing the extent to which class relations can actually and substantively “function as race relations” for working class Black Brits (and others). He was arguing, amongst other things, against the neatly reified distinctions scholars traditionally policed between class-based analyses and racial ones.

Return of the reflexed: film-making and the aesthetics of social science

I remember watching Marlon Riggs dying. It was 1994, and I was in graduate school quite literally so: scrutinizing his image in a classroom in Schermerhorn, a building on the campus of Columbia University. The dying, the death, was no less real for its televisuality, for its offscreen finale, for my experiencing some small portion of it by way of a rolled-out video console’s totemic stacking of TV monitor atop VHS player, audio/video wires and power cords dangling carelessly off to the sides. In a form of filmic reflexivity far more rigorous than anything I had seen before, Riggs, a controversial documentarian who had already been denounced as a pervert undeserving of government funding on the floor of the United States Congress for his previous film, Tongues Untied (Riggs 1989), a meditation on black gay manhood, had decided to use his final documentary, Black Is, Black Ain’t (Riggs 1994) (a film on the openness, though not the emptiness, of blackness as a signifier) to chronicle his own end, his own death, his body more and more emaciated from the AIDS virus with every passing scene. Black Is, Black Ain’t, anthropological in its luscious holism, flags and chronicles all the erstwhile and over-determined markers (even clichés) of purported blacknesses: hair textures, bone structures, skin tones, striding gaits, musical genres, political histories, vernacular assumptions, existential anxieties, stereotyped burdens, sexist acculturations everything, including, literally, shots of kitchen sinks, the preparation of gumbo being its central metaphor of African American eclecticism. By the end of the film, however, a couple of images haunt most: (1) out-of-focus shots of a bony Riggs, naked and alone, jogging, as Ethnic and Racial Studies Vol. 35 No. 4 April 2012 pp. 637 642

POSTRACE 101: Teaching and Unteaching Race in America's High Schools

There are some telltale signs that we might really be living in the kind of moment that academic provocateurs have labeled “postracial” (i.e., indifferent to historically self-evident expectations about race relations and racebased identifications): Duke lacrosse players, all of them White, who taunt a Black collegian-cum-stripper with carefully crafted quips better suited for a comedy club than a Klan rally (“Thank your grandpa for my cotton shirt”); a Black Ivy League professor testifying under oath that a baseball bat-wielding White vigilante who begins pummeling a Black man in Brooklyn by calling his victim a “nigger” does not necessarily harbor any race-specific animus; a former Education Secretary seemingly shocked and appalled that African Americans would be shocked and appalled by his comments regarding the hypothetical abortion of African American babies as a technique for lowering crime rates; and any of the dissenting judicial opinions penned by the lone Black justice on the nations highest court. Race is doing some very strange things these days.