Salon.com > James Hannaham http://www.salon.com Mon, 28 May 2012 16:25:09 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 The good news about the Henry Louis Gates fiasco http://www.salon.com/2009/07/22/henry_louis_gates/ http://www.salon.com/2009/07/22/henry_louis_gates/#comments Wed, 22 Jul 2009 10:22:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2009/07/22/henry_louis_gates When I heard that prominent black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. was arrested for breaking into his own home in Cambridge, Mass., it made me proud of America. It may seem paradoxical to focus on the positive side of the preeminent scholar's public humiliation. This is, after all, a distinguished staff writer for the New Yorker, the man who helped Oprah find her roots. It may seem that there's no positive side at all. (His own neighbor, a Harvard magazine employee, didn't recognize him and called the cops. How pathetic is that?)

But last night I happened to be reading a book that put the whole incident into context, a volume that never fails to chill me: "We Charge Genocide," a petition brought before the U.N. in 1951 that makes a very convincing case for defining the treatment of African-Americans in the U.S. as a genocide. This remarkable book consists, in part, of a litany of shocking bias crimes committed against black citizens across the country -- and only documented ones occurring between 1945 to 1950. A typical entry reads: "February 13 -- ISAAC WOODWARD, JR., discharged from the Army only a few hours, was on his way home when he had his eyes gouged out in Batesburg, South Carolina, by the town chief of police, Linwood Shull ... [A]n all-white jury acquitted Shull after being out for 15 minutes." And so on, for 50-odd hair-raising pages. Believe me, Toni Morrison couldn’t top it.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/07/22/henry_louis_gates/feed/ 334 “Winnie and Wolf” http://www.salon.com/2008/11/25/an_wilson/ http://www.salon.com/2008/11/25/an_wilson/#comments Tue, 25 Nov 2008 11:29:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/must_read/2008/11/25/an_wilson  For sheer number of innocent people exterminated under an infamous regime, Hitler is no match for Stalin. Yet our fascination with the fiery, scary Führer as "the incarnation of absolute evil," as Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel once called him, far surpasses our interest in practically all other hateful villains in modern history. In his highly imaginative novel "Winnie and Wolf," prolific British novelist and historian A.N. Wilson has taken an intriguingly dispassionate look at Hitler's inner circle. The novel, which came out in the U.K. last year, was nominated for the Man Booker Prize. Despite this high level of acclaim, readers may wonder why Wilson would bother taking a sober, realistic look at Hitler and thereby risk humanizing him. But among Wilson's 35 books is a biography of Jesus that is mostly about the impossibility of writing a biography of Jesus; Wilson is not one to back down from a challenge.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2008/11/25/an_wilson/feed/ 32 Our biracial president http://www.salon.com/2008/11/06/biracial_obama_2/ http://www.salon.com/2008/11/06/biracial_obama_2/#comments Thu, 06 Nov 2008 11:48:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/news/opinion//feature/2008/11/06/biracial_obama  Voters across the United States and citizens around the world are calling the election of Barack Obama a historic moment, and it is indeed groundbreaking in many important ways. We have elected a man unashamed of his African blood into the nation's highest office. In historical terms, this is a milestone of race relations in the United States, a quantum leap unimaginable until this moment. For some cynics and paranoid supporters, it was impossible until the moment John McCain, in the most gracious and touching moment of his campaign, conceded.

Obama's presidency carries a huge burden of symbolic proof. As the president-elect's acceptance speech emphasized, his victory caresses America's image of itself as a place where equal opportunity exists for anyone who works hard enough. It helps erase a stigma against people of African descent that has lasted more than 500 years and included some of the lowest moments in our supposedly modern and enlightened age -- Jim Crow, apartheid, slavery. It allows people of all colors around the globe to point to Obama and feel as if their struggle may not be a dead end after all, and that someone who shares at least some of their experiences and perspectives can offer genuine respect and perhaps even empathy to millions who have so frequently been overlooked and despised. It is a sign to humanity that the United States can walk democracy like we talk it. This is no small thing.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2008/11/06/biracial_obama_2/feed/ 102 Racists for Obama http://www.salon.com/2008/11/03/racists_for_obama/ http://www.salon.com/2008/11/03/racists_for_obama/#comments Mon, 03 Nov 2008 12:04:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/news/opinion//feature/2008/11/03/racists_for_obama Sean Quinn, of the polling site FiveThirtyEight, respected for its obsessiveness and eerie prescience, recently posted a hair-raising story about a pair of Barack Obama supporters. Quinn seems ready to verify its source, but only after the election. At any rate, it goes like this: A man canvassing for Obama in western Pennsylvania asks a housewife which candidate she intends to vote for. She yells to her husband to find out. From the interior of the house, he calls back, "We're voting for the nigger!" At which point the housewife turns to the canvasser and calmly repeats her husband's declaration.

Ah, racism. It's always a step ahead of us. Even before the majority of Democrats decided that Obama was electable despite being the first openly black presidential candidate, pollsters began gradually raising the level of speculation about the tide of bigotry that might overwhelm white voters once they got into that private little booth and faced the prospect of pulling a lever that suddenly seemed to read "Some Black Dude."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2008/11/03/racists_for_obama/feed/ 112 Sarah Palin, ultimate reality TV star http://www.salon.com/2008/10/27/palin_confidence/ http://www.salon.com/2008/10/27/palin_confidence/#comments Mon, 27 Oct 2008 10:40:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life//feature/2008/10/27/palin_confidence Americans seem to agree that confidence is a good thing, a healthy part of that pop-psych cure-all, self-esteem. "It is confidence in our bodies, minds, and spirits that allows us to keep looking for new adventures, new directions to grow in, and new lessons to learn,” writes Oprah Winfrey on O magazine's Web site. In the Huffington Post, Deepak Chopra recently declared that confidence is the No. 1 factor in maintaining the world’s economic health. But can too much confidence be harmful? Definitely.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2008/10/27/palin_confidence/feed/ 94 “Fault Lines” http://www.salon.com/2008/10/21/huston/ http://www.salon.com/2008/10/21/huston/#comments Tue, 21 Oct 2008 10:30:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/must_read/2008/10/21/huston Nancy Huston's masterful and ambitious 12th novel, "Fault Lines," traces the legacy of a little-known Nazi atrocity as its victims pass down its damaging effects over the course of 50 years and four generations. She tells the tale while traveling backward in time, moving from the story of a contemporary 6-year-old boy, Sol, to the narrative of his father, Randall, when he was 6, followed by Randall's mother, Sadie, and then Sadie's own mother, Erra. With this clever structure, as well as a wickedly critical and smart view of world politics, Huston helps us see firsthand how history gets erased and reinvented, and hints at the way it might repeat itself.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2008/10/21/huston/feed/ 5 Semisweet “Chocolate News” http://www.salon.com/2008/10/15/chocolate_news/ http://www.salon.com/2008/10/15/chocolate_news/#comments Wed, 15 Oct 2008 10:30:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/tv/review/2008/10/15/chocolate_news With all the bad news flowing through the zeitgeist right now -- the economy, the war(s), the mud-slinging campaigns -- great satire is more abundant than credit card offers. Tina Fey, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and Bill Maher have all upped their games in inverse proportion to the fall of the stock market, and Chris Rock recently piled on with his uproarious HBO special "Kill the Messenger." With political spoofing moving at such a rapid pace, "In Living Color" vet and wacky character actor David Alan Grier's new Comedy Central series "Chocolate News," which premieres Wednesday night, will have to run like Usain Bolt to catch up with the pack.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2008/10/15/chocolate_news/feed/ 15 Why has it been so long since a black band ruled rock? http://www.salon.com/2008/09/30/tvotr/ http://www.salon.com/2008/09/30/tvotr/#comments Tue, 30 Sep 2008 10:49:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/music/review/2008/09/30/tvotr Let's refresh our collective memory: Black Americans invented rock 'n' roll. So it's frustrating to contemplate the nearly total segregation among bands who have played rock music since the early '70s. OK, there have been some flies in the buttermilk here and there. Some of those flies have been as large as Prince, who endured hostility from rock fans who threw chicken parts at him when he opened for the Rolling Stones in 1981. With the help of his mixed-race band, the Revolution, he crossed over into the promised land with "1999" and "Purple Rain."

The Revolution may have been televised (on MTV), but they did not cause a surge in the number of respected black rock bands out there. That very short list included hardcore punk trailblazers Bad Brains and Vernon Reid's group Living Colour, the flagship act of the Black Rock Coalition, which also nurtured Me'shell Ndegeocello and 24-7 Spyz. Bad Brains continue to chug along in a hardcore niche, and while Living Colour created a splash on the charts, they didn't break a lot of new artistic ground compared to forward-thinking black innovators like Sly and the Family Stone and Parliament-Funkadelic. (Living Colour's music was often categorized as funk rather than rock, which may have aided its ghettoization.) Fishbone, the raucous Los Angeles ska band, enjoyed a loyal cult following in the '80s, but never broke out; and we will not even discuss a certain embarrassing New Wave band called the Bus Boys.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2008/09/30/tvotr/feed/ 55 “Thank You for All Things” http://www.salon.com/2008/09/30/kring/ http://www.salon.com/2008/09/30/kring/#comments Tue, 30 Sep 2008 10:23:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/must_read/2008/09/30/kring Sandra Kring's delightful and nuanced take on Midwestern America in "Thank You for All Things" feels real and moving -- perhaps because it is so unpretentious.

Like the author's previous books, "Carry Me Home," about a brain-damaged teen who goes off to WWII, and "The Book of Bright Ideas," a tale of two eccentric young girls in the early 1960s, "Thank You for All Things" is set in Kring's home base. The time frame of the new book is contemporary, but some of the themes at work in her previous novels -- the difficulties of adolescence in small-town America, dysfunctional family problems -- have returned and taken even more prominence here. "Thank You" is populated by a deeply messed-up, quirky family comprising three generations. As a group, they are exceptionally intelligent but frustrated and poor, unable to overcome the legacy of violence that has been handed down from Grandpa Sam, who once put his wife Lillian's head through a wall, among other abuses.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2008/09/30/kring/feed/ 1 The miracle of Spike Lee http://www.salon.com/2008/09/25/spike_lee/ http://www.salon.com/2008/09/25/spike_lee/#comments Thu, 25 Sep 2008 10:30:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/feature/2008/09/25/spike_lee Do you remember the moment you gave up on Spike Lee? You might want to reverse your decision, because his new WWII epic, "Miracle at St. Anna," is the joint you've prayed he had in him all this time.

I gave up in 1992, during the overhyped and merely OK "Malcolm X," when Denzel Washington's voice-over describes the young Malcolm X's outrage at the way his teachers attempted to keep him in his place. He says something to the effect that he's been treated like a horse. As the speech concludes, Spike cuts to a horse. I was insulted -- this guy doesn't think I know what a horse looks like? I told myself I'd wait for some positive word-of-mouth before I dropped dollars on another Spike feature.

So I sat out duds like "Bamboozled" and "She Hate Me." Documentaries like the Oscar-nominated "4 Little Girls" suggested that his true talent lay there. But then came 2006's "Inside Man," Lee's ambitious effort to redefine the Hollywood blockbuster. Right, I thought, a staunchly independent cinema icon with an offbeat, cantankerous sensibility is going to pull that off. But to my surprise, Lee took a competent, clever bank heist film, infused it with his heterogeneous New York gestalt, and transformed it not only into a memorable examination of racism and sleazy post-9/11 politics but, above all, a sharp psychological thriller. The movie, a critical hit, took in $186 million worldwide. Instead of the customary "joint," Lee called it a "film."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2008/09/25/spike_lee/feed/ 19 Obama and the rules for Angry Black Men http://www.salon.com/2008/09/18/angry_obama/ http://www.salon.com/2008/09/18/angry_obama/#comments Thu, 18 Sep 2008 10:53:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/news/opinion//feature/2008/09/18/angry_obama By using the phrase "the angry left" in his speech to the Republican National Convention, George W. Bush pulled a classic bully move: provoke your opponent and then mock his rage. For if the left was merely irritated at the start of the last eight years, only W's puppet master, Vice President Dick Cheney, has done more to incite that anger -- or rather, to grind it, hone it, to plunge it headlong into a blazing kiln, to blast it through a Large Hadron Collider and create world-imploding black holes of fury. Republican presidential candidate John McCain has sucked up to the established kleptocracy, waging a Karl Rove-ish smear campaign, and cynically hired an ingénue, Sarah Palin, as a running mate not only because she has a vagina but because she believes it should be strictly policed. The "angry left" has an OED-size book of good reasons to be wrathful where it concerns the Republican Party. So why won't Barack Obama channel the outrage surging through his constituency and explode in fire-and-brimstone oratory?

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2008/09/18/angry_obama/feed/ 96 Dude, where’s my manhood? http://www.salon.com/2008/09/17/guyland/ http://www.salon.com/2008/09/17/guyland/#comments Wed, 17 Sep 2008 10:45:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/review/2008/09/17/guyland Imagine a world where you can't express your feelings. Where women are treated as objects or bargaining chips, and alcoholism and drug abuse are the norm. Where you must reject your own mother, and your father will rebuff you. You'll belong to a kind of cult that demands that you ostracize anyone who doesn't follow the group's twisted values. This cult may pressure you into physically and sexually abusing someone incapable of fighting back. If you're an American guy age 16-26, congratulations. You probably live there already.

This is especially true if you are white and heterosexual, according to SUNY-Stony Brook sociologist Michael Kimmel. "Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men," his study of young American men, is a bleak and urgent yet compassionate analysis of young manhood in the United States. Kimmel coins the term "Guyland" not to suggest a place as much as a state of mind, an ideology into which the 400 or so young men he interviewed in the course of his research find themselves indoctrinated. He also uses the term to describe a stage of life, "a kind of suspended animation between the dependency and lack of autonomy of boyhood and the sacrifice and responsibility of manhood" -- a phase that in recent years has expanded into many guys' 30s.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2008/09/17/guyland/feed/ 183 Wanna be on top? http://www.salon.com/2008/09/08/isis_banks/ http://www.salon.com/2008/09/08/isis_banks/#comments Mon, 08 Sep 2008 17:40:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life/broadsheet//2008/09/08/isis_banks

The CW

Isis

"America's Next Top Model," now in its 11th "cycle," jumped the shark so long ago that it is firmly lodged in the whale's baleen. This season's corny spaceship theme -- Tyra Banks and her minion pretend to be robots -- would probably have gotten a contestant rejected if she'd come up with it. But there's one new twist among the overconfident undereaters, including a Harvard English grad unable to name any literary heroines, an Alaskan greenhorn eerily paralleling Sarah Palin and a bunch of other shrieky, gawky gamines. Her name's Isis, and she's a preop transsexual.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2008/09/08/isis_banks/feed/ 25 Blockbuster blackface http://www.salon.com/2008/08/25/blackface/ http://www.salon.com/2008/08/25/blackface/#comments Mon, 25 Aug 2008 15:10:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/feature/2008/08/25/blackface Amid the vocal protest launched by advocates for the mentally disabled regarding the use of the word "retard" in Ben Stiller's box-office-topping meta-comedy/action film "Tropic Thunder," we seem to have missed something. The passionate outrage of groups like the Special Olympics and the American Association of People With Disabilities, which rallied outside the premiere of the film and demanded a boycott, has successfully diverted any negative attention from Robert Downey Jr.'s outrageous turn as an Australian actor who undergoes an unusual skin-darkening process in order to play a black American soldier.

By definition, a white actor like Downey playing a black man amounts to a minstrel act. During slavery, white Southerners began the entertainment tradition of dressing up in slave costumes and makeshift makeup and performing songs and skits that mimicked black musical styles while degrading their servants, portraying them as lazy, stupid and promiscuous. To bring the humiliation and abuse of power at the heart of this gesture to the present day, imagine a group of wealthy California housewives forming a mariachi band and taunting the Latino workers at an orange grove. Even today, long after post-Civil War minstrelsy set black entertainers on the road to the mainstream, any hint that white people are performing in blackface can send black people into paroxysms of anger.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2008/08/25/blackface/feed/ 59 “The Rocker” http://www.salon.com/2008/08/20/rocker_2/ http://www.salon.com/2008/08/20/rocker_2/#comments Wed, 20 Aug 2008 10:30:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/review/2008/08/20/rocker Can Generation X grow old gracefully? Now that nearly half the generation that gave us grunge has turned 40, the question of whether slackerdom can mix with maturity looms. Adulthood implies many of the things this aging bunch has tried to reject, or at least question: marriage, parenthood, responsibility, authority. "The Rocker," a shaky vehicle for Rainn Wilson, most famous for his role as Steve Carrell's uptight sidekick Dwight Schrute on "The Office," does little to suggest that there might be something creepy about an aging heavy metal drummer playing in the same band with teenagers. Instead it massages the delusion that, unlike the hilarious awkwardness Amy Sedaris' aging high-schooler Jerri Blank experiences on HBO's "Strangers With Candy," geezers can start all over again, even in a field as youth-obsessed as the music business.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2008/08/20/rocker_2/feed/ 27 My fair gangsta http://www.salon.com/2008/08/04/gs_to_gents/ http://www.salon.com/2008/08/04/gs_to_gents/#comments Mon, 04 Aug 2008 10:15:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/tv/feature/2008/08/04/gs_to_gents Today's kids can have everything they want, but first they need to learn some manners, if we're to take the message of a new crop of reality shows to heart. Even as Donald Trump's company prepares a "Pygmalion"-style makeover show for the ladies, MTV is airing "From G's to Gents," a stirring reality TV competition that pits 14 street toughs in a furious, angry, man-to-man battle to become ... genteel?

The show may or may not have taken its inspiration from the British program "Ladette to Lady," but the two series play against each other in peculiar ways. "Ladette" tossed crass, tarty, mainly white working-class women with a penchant for belching, cursing and flashing their boobs into haughty finishing schools, complete with crabby English schoolmarm types who tried to "Simon Cowell" the female hooligans until they came over all polite. The first season culminated in a fashion show, during which the ladettes attempted to pass for aristocracy among actual landed gentry, including a few posh bachelors who might accidentally marry them -- or so the presumption went.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2008/08/04/gs_to_gents/feed/ 12 Chewing the fat http://www.salon.com/2008/07/30/fat_study/ http://www.salon.com/2008/07/30/fat_study/#comments Wed, 30 Jul 2008 20:05:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life/broadsheet//2008/07/30/fat_study According to a study published this week in the Archives of Internal Medicine, fat women need to exercise. This assumes, of course, that they want to lose weight. The findings of this study, headed by a doctor from the University of Pittsburgh, might seem utterly intuitive, but the real mystery this two-year inquiry intended to solve was how much fat women need to exercise in order to keep off that weight. (Apparently 150 minutes a week is recommended.)

But why "fat women"? It seems clear that these doctors had something in mind -- though the text does not make that clear -- when they focused on this demographic for their study. And I suppose that, in a subsequent experiment, they might round up a bunch of beer-gutted linebackers, attach electrodes to their asses and make them work the Stairmaster. Yet it does give one pause to note that the media has, for the most part, declined to question whether the same findings might hold true for overweight men. Instead it has reported the nonstory with headlines like "Obese and Overweight Women Told to Exercise 55 Minutes a Day" or "Overweight Women Have to Work Out Twice as Hard," giving the findings a strange tinge of sexism and schadenfreude, especially since the results don't suggest that obese women need to work out harder than slimmer ones, just that of the overweight women in the test group, those who extended their workout time lost more weight. Duh. Sadly, we're told, not all of the 170 women who completed the experiment kept off the weight. Oh well. They can always try out for the next study.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2008/07/30/fat_study/feed/ 100 Ripping Nine Inch Nails http://www.salon.com/2008/07/28/nine_inch_nails/ http://www.salon.com/2008/07/28/nine_inch_nails/#comments Mon, 28 Jul 2008 10:42:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/music/review/2008/07/28/nine_inch_nails While unknown bands try desperately to get record deals, famous bands often work just as hard to get out of them. Trent Reznor, the only official member of industrial-rock band Nine Inch Nails, has chafed and waged war against his labels from the beginning of his 19-year career. When he discovered in 2007 that in Australia, the label had priced his album higher than other releases simply because his fans would pay more, he angrily encouraged a concert audience to download illegally. "Steal, steal and steal some more," he raged, "and give it to all your friends and keep on stealing."

For his latest album, "The Slip," fans won't have to steal anymore. It's available for free. "This one's on me," Reznor blogged -- although a physical version of the LP, including a DVD and a high-design booklet, in an edition of 250,000, is also available in stores. Predictably bleak and oddly simple, the new NIN record certainly isn't as well crafted as 2007's excellent high-concept "Year Zero," an imaginative tour through a dystopian America ruled by a totalitarian Christian regime, but Reznor created the new set of tracks for fans to download, remix and share on his Web site. So who cares if it isn't a great NIN record? "The Slip" could turn out to be one of your best albums.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2008/07/28/nine_inch_nails/feed/ 16 The good humor man http://www.salon.com/2008/07/21/jokes/ http://www.salon.com/2008/07/21/jokes/#comments Mon, 21 Jul 2008 10:42:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/int/2008/07/21/jokes A few years ago, wiry, loquacious New Yorker writer Jim Holt scrapped an ambitious philosophy book about "the puzzle of existence" when more practical matters caught up with him -- he was broke, having spent his big advance. Paradoxically, he decided to get out of that jam the same way he'd gotten into it -- by proposing another book. This time he chose not to pursue the cosmic joke of existence, but the history and philosophy of jokes. But the joke was on him. He thought it would be a "quick and appealing" book to write, and that he'd find a solid base of similar books about the history of jokes to use as source material, but there was, well, nothing. "Being terribly lazy, this was extremely irksome to me," Holt grumbles.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2008/07/21/jokes/feed/ 21 Let us now praise Jesse Helms http://www.salon.com/2008/07/11/helms_hannaham/ http://www.salon.com/2008/07/11/helms_hannaham/#comments Fri, 11 Jul 2008 11:12:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/news/opinion//feature/2008/07/11/helms_hannaham The death on July 4 of Jesse Helms, the polarizing North Carolina senator who bathed all forms of open-mindedness in the acid bath of his contempt, sent shudders of guilty relief through the spines of liberals everywhere. Few Americans care to imagine that anyone's death might bring them glee, and it is of course bad form to speak ill of the dead however little mercy the deceased may have shown to the hundreds of thousands of people who died as he denied funding for HIV/AIDS research.

Helms hailed from the small town of Monroe, N.C., and he took its Norman Rockwell façade to heart, if we are to believe his bracingly style-free 2005 memoir, "Here's Where I Stand." "The good old days ... were indeed the good old days," he wrote. The senator's depiction of a Depression-era boyhood makes poverty and strife sound idyllic. In the memoir, his police chief father reconciles thieves with their victims and gives late-night succor to hobos. Also, young Jesse raises chickens as pets, then eats them.

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