Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Blue Glow
Salon's TV picks for Monday, Oct. 25, 1999
Fall Premiere
Jennifer Love Hewitt gets her very own “Party of Five” spinoff, Time of Your Life (8 p.m., Fox), in which her character, Sarah Merrin, moves to New York to search for her biological father (and have a few single gal in the big city adventures along the way). Head Trip (9:30 p.m., MTV) is a part live-action, part animated sketch comedy series that takes aim at pop music.
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Series
Ally McBeal (9 p.m., Fox) starts its new season with a bang — literally. On the way to work one morning, Ally succumbs to temptation and has sex in a car wash with a handsome stranger (guest Jason Gedrick). Everybody Loves Raymond (9 p.m., CBS) introduces us to Debra’s sister Jennifer (guest Ashley Crow), a “bohemian” who has undergone a surprising lifestyle change. On Family Law (10 p.m., CBS), an aging actor (guest Alan King) sues for libel when a newspaper column erroneously reports his death, and a woman fights for custody of her granddaughter after the girl’s parents’ death.
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Specials
In the six-part series Wonders of the African World (check local times, PBS), author Henry Louis Gates, head of Harvard’s black studies department, tours the sites of great ancient African cities and civilizations and challenges the Western view of Africa as a “dark continent” civilized by white Europeans. The BBC-A&E miniseries Vanity Fair (8 p.m. EDT/9 PDT, A&E) concludes.
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Sports
Football:
Falcons at Steelers (9 p.m., ABC)
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Talk
Rosie O’Donnell (syndicated) Jennifer Love Hewitt, Gloria Estefan
David Letterman (CBS) Jimmie Walker, Buena Vista Social Club
Jay Leno (NBC) Gov. Jesse Ventura, Ricky Martin (rerun)
Conan O’Brien (NBC) Mayor Rudolph Giuliani (rerun)
Joyce Millman is a writer living in the Bay Area. More Joyce Millman.
White voters and Obama’s slide in the polls
What role does race play in who likes the president? A statistical look at when and why his white support slipped
Barack Obama made his name by telling us that there aren’t two separate Americas, black and white, but just one United States. Still, knowing the color of a voter’s skin offers a fair amount of information about how that voter feels about the president. Among white voters, it’s been dropping since this spring. Joan Walsh discusses some of the likely reasons, and some of the possible inflection points, in her blog; here, we’re simply going to look at the numbers, and then look at what was happening in the political world while those numbers were being collected. Using Gallup polling data, the following charts show how President Obama’s approval rating broke down among white, nonwhite, black and Hispanic poll respondents, and how those figures changed as specific key events occurred.
Continue Reading CloseGabriel Winant is a graduate student in American history at Yale. More Gabriel Winant.
The Gates-Crowley public sitcom
While Americans screamed insults at one another, Obama lost two weeks in the effort to pass healthcare reform
U.S. President Barack Obama (R) sits down for a beer with Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates (2nd L), Cambridge, Massachusetts, police Sergeant James Crowley (2nd R) and Vice President Joe Biden in the Rose Garden at the White House in Washington, July 30, 2009. Only in America: Now that the dust and feathers have settled from the nation’s latest interracial pecking party, professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s daughter reveals that she thinks the wicked racist cop Sgt. James Crowley is, like, really hot. Writing in the Daily Beast, Elizabeth Gates, her distinguished father’s confidante and amanuensis during the recent unpleasantries, confides that when they met at the White House “Beer Summit,” the Cambridge cop’s 13-year-old daughter said she’d found aspects of her father’s sudden celebrity unsettling.
Continue Reading CloseArkansas Times columnist Gene Lyons is a National Magazine Award winner and co-author of "The Hunting of the President" (St. Martin's Press, 2000). You can e-mail Lyons at eugenelyons2@yahoo.com. More Gene Lyons.
The White House and beer diplomacy
President Richard Nixon, left, meeting with Elvis Presley on Dec. 21, 1970, in Washington. Today, President Obama is scheduled to engage in a little beer diplomacy. Cambridge, Massachusetts police Sgt. James Crowley and Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. will join the President at the White House for a beer in order to extinguish the firestorm of controversy that has engulfed all three men since Crowley arrested Gates in front of his own home — and Obama commented that the police “acted stupidly.”
Continue Reading CloseVincent Rossmeier is an editorial assistant at Salon. More Vincent Rossmeier.
Black men, white cops and media mind readers
There's one person to blame for Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s arrest: Henry Louis Gates Jr.
So a Harvard professor who reportedly played the “you don’t know who you’re messing with” card to a cop got an unscheduled ride downtown. Boo hoo hoo. Maybe he learned something. Or would. If he’d get over himself, which appears unlikely. Anyway, when the police come to your door, always step outside. It puts everybody more at ease.
Also, be a regular Joe. They don’t know how many awards you’ve won, and, frankly, they don’t care. Silly misunderstandings are their favorite kind of domestic call. So just answer their questions and they’ll go away. Furthermore, people get arrested in their homes every day. It’s usually the easiest place to find them. If you’ve no experience of the law enforcement world, watch a few episodes of “COPS.” (Programming note: It’s not on PBS.)
Continue Reading CloseArkansas Times columnist Gene Lyons is a National Magazine Award winner and co-author of "The Hunting of the President" (St. Martin's Press, 2000). You can e-mail Lyons at eugenelyons2@yahoo.com. More Gene Lyons.
Right-wing racism on the rise
Even as a few GOP leaders try to dial back the crazy, Limbaugh and Beck spew hate, claiming Obama is a "racist"
First, credit where it’s due: A few lonely Republican leaders are belatedly trying to clean up the party’s mess of crazy, from the racially tinged character attacks on Sonia Sotomayor to the unhinged rhetoric of the Birthers to the overall vicious and fact-free spew of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. It’s not working yet — Beck’s claiming Obama “has a deep-seated hatred for white people” on Tuesday might be a new low — but at least someone’s trying.
Continue Reading CloseJoan Walsh is Salon's editor at large. More Joan Walsh.
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