via inside higher ed.

• The magazine Radar has just published a series of transcripts designed to show how the children of the rich and famous are catered to, even if they don’t deserve special treatment. The magazine had a writer pose as an assistant to various wealthy people, calling on behalf of their fictional offspring to see whether they would receive favorable treatment in landing a Congressional internship, or a book contract or ... some assistance from Wesleyan University’s admissions office. For lucky Wesleyan, the magazine posed as someone calling on behalf of Jake Quiznos, the (imaginary) heir to the Quiznos sub empire. When Jake’s representative tells the (unnamed) Wesleyan official that he’d like privacy on his tour, he’s assured that he can have a private tour by an admissions official who notes that “when Mr. Spielberg came to visit, I gave him the tour myself.” The admissions official says he’ll try to get time for Jake with the university’s president (possibly to discuss donations), and reassures Jake’s aide that the young Quiznos will have no problem finding vegan food on campus. Naturally, the Quiznos heir needed reassurance that he wouldn’t encounter a Subway on campus, and receives it. The Wesleyan official doesn’t appear concerned after being told of Jake’s low SAT scores (at least for Wesleyan), low grades, or “some shoplifting issues” that Jake’s assistant says are definitely in the past and are now just the subject of Jake’s poetry. Says the Wesleyan admissions official of these qualities: “I don’t think they necessarily disqualify him off the bat. Is this someone who’s able to show redemption? The admissions process is a very holistic process. We look at you from your grades to your recommendations to what you’ve shown that you’re capable of doing. We don’t see it as a one-factor kind of thing.” Asked about the magazine’s feature, a spokesman for Wesleyan told Inside Higher Ed Wednesday that the person who spoke to Radar was someone in the admissions office but declined to say who. The spokesman said that the person suspected the call might be a joke and “didn’t want to be rude” in his answers.

Meritocracy indeed.

Ah, racial politics.

Tom Schaller at Tapped

And it is historic, no doubt. What I'm about to say is not meant in any way to diminish the significance of his nomination. However, and without wading too deeply into all the complex issues of racial identity, it must be said that Obama is not exactly your average African American politician—and I’m not just referring here to his unique rhetorical skills.

Yes, yes, we know, he's so clean and articulate! Joe Biden much?

What I mean is that his ascendancy also marks an historical departure from African American politics itself. As just a starter list, there are at least five ways that he is different:

First, he is half-black and, consequently, light-skinned. Second, his black half is Continental African and more recent in its migration to America, through his father, as compared to slave-descendant and centuries-old in its genealogical origins. Third, he does not come from a clerical background, the occupation which (especially prior to the civil rights movement) was responsible for producing a disproportionate number of black leaders. Fourth, though he later became a Southside Chicago organizer, his upbringing was middle-class Midwestern, not underclass and urban. And, finally, Obama is Ivy League-educated, as opposed to a product from an historically black college.

There are American black leaders who share many of these biographical characteristics, and a few who may fit all five. (Quick quiz: Can you name even one other?) But there are not many, and certainly none who reached the political summit Obama did yesterday. And that, I would submit, is no coincidence.

"African American Politics" seems rather circumscribed here, no?

Home Stretch

I figured i'd do another quick post of some youtube videos. This time, I give you Ann Peebles' "Trouble Heartaches and Sadness," one of my favorite songs, which I discovered on a greatest hits compilation that was an impulse buy a few years ago. I realized today though that one of the reasons the song was eerily familiar was that I'd heard snippets of it before...

Ann Peebles, "Trouble, Heartaches, and Sadness," 1972

Genius/GZA, "Shadowboxin'" 1995

RZA as Bobby Digital, "Throw Your Flag Up." 2001

more youtube procrastination

(Marlena Shaw, "Woman of the Ghetto")

(Phyllis Dillon's version of the same song, which I grew up with via an old Heartbeat/Studio One comp i bought when I was fifteen.)

(Ken Boothe and Stranger Cole, "Arte Bella."

(Prince Buster, "Shaking Up Orange Street.")

ack

Last night i realized that word was counting footnotes in the word count, and I dropped from 7,000-something to 5300, which is scary, because it means i hadn't gotten as much done as I thought I had, but also potentially helpful because it means I still have a lot of space to expand and add in the next 29 or so hours. Oy.

more cool stuff from youtube.

Some Roots-era Mayfield...


Mary Timony Band's "Sharpshooter" (2007)

And finally,

serendipity.

In the process of trying in vain to track down an old article from the Yale student publication The New Journal on the 13 latino replacement workers who joined the September 2003 picket lines, I came across a scholarly article on the '84 strike that I'd never heard of before - Pushkala Prasad's "Organizing Culture in a Union," from the Journal of Applied Behavioral Sciences, 1991. I guess the reason I hadn't come across the article before is that it's disciplinary sociology, which is not where I'd locate my own research methods, and it came out significantly later than most of the scholarly literature on the strike, from Herbert Janick's "Yale Blue" to Molly Ladd-Taylor's "Women Workers and the Yale Strike" and Linda Anderson''s article in Fronteirs to On Strike For Respect. By 1991, GESO had already struck once.

But Prasad's article's pretty interesting. There's a discussion of tensions between HERE officials and strikers over whether singing on the picket line removes focus from the economic issues, which is fascinating. And the early 90s social constructivism approach does interesting work to resolve some of the questions Josh Eidelson raised in an excellent term paper he wrote about the strike a million years ago and was nice enough to share with me when I was doing some research on the clerical worker labor movement shortly less than a million years ago.

Back to work.