Ta-Nehisi Coates

by G.D.

I want to thank the ever-gracious TNC for letting me help guest-blog here for the week. The commenters here have a rep of being smart and thoughtful. Rare is the internet cohort with whom you can thoughtfully chop it up about the Civil War, pro quarterbacking, and the finer points of beer.

Before I route, though, I'mma throw on my geek hat right quick. The most important news of this last week was the announcement that Nickelodeon is planning a follow-up series to Avatar: The Last Airbender. (Mild spoilers at that link.) Don't let the horrible reviews given to Shymalan's movie version trip you up --- the cartoon on which it was based is as good as any American animated series ever aired. It's an even more impressive accomplishment when you consider just how hard it it must have been to pitch it. Avatar's creators somehow managed to get Nickelodeon to sign on to a kid's show that dealt  forthrightly with the consequences of war (villages and towns completely emptied of adult men) the genocide at its center, with some pan-Asian mysticism thrown in for good measure. (The DCAU, the cartoon gold standard, was based on characters like Batman and Superman that were already iconic.) This is no mean feat.  Excellent plotting and character development, some tremendous action set pieces, and a great score. The whole series is available on Netflix Watch Instantly. Seriously. Y'all need to get up on that if you haven't already.

Alright. I hope I represented the PostBourgie fam well. Please drop in and holler at us.

Be easy.

by Ricardo Gutierrez

and thanks for all the fish.

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by G.D.

Essence magazine's decision to hire Elliana Placas, who is white, to finally fill its long-vacant fashion director position, has sparked one of those depressingly by-the-numbers controversies on race. Racism! Reverse racism! Placas's whiteness has been taken as a sign that Essence is going through a fundamental change, and that Time Warner, the magazine's corporate parent, is planning to reposition and re-imagine the magazine for a wider audience, and this is just the first step. 

The most quoted voice in the conversation has been that of Michaela Angela Davis, who used to hold the fashion director title back in the day at Essence, and who took to her Facebook page to voice her disappointment on the move to hire a white woman.

There is one precious seat at the fashion shows that says Essence the magazine for black women. When asked, "What is your unique perspective for black women?" How is that answered?

But this is a pretty ridiculous question. How could anyone, black or otherwise, answer this question in a way that wasn't gauzy and sort of silly? ("Well, my unique fashion perspective for black women entails..." ) This goes a little beyond the structural issues that Placas's hire highlights--a white fashion director will serve as the public face of a prominent black women's magazine for a fashion industry that has never particularly welcomed black women's voices or faces--and suggests that something ineffably but essentially black will be missing from her work. But this needn't be a hypothetical. Placas has been the magazine's de facto fashion director, as a freelancer, for a hot minute now--she started six months ago. If the blackness she lacks was so important to the way the magazine looks, wouldn't folks have picked up on it before?

(For her part, Angela Burt-Murray, Essence's editor responded to the criticism in a particularly tone-deaf way, saying that the opprobrium the magazine has received for its decision has been louder than the fedback it has gotten for its coverage of issues like H.I.V. and sex trafficking. This is a tried-and-true derailing tactic. You're complaining about this, when what's really important is... As if people can't be concerned with all those issues and what this hire means at the same time. Unlike discussions about, say, H.I.V. or domestic violence, aiming ire at Essence is the most appropriate response for this editorial decision. Many of Essence's readers have responded to the Placas hiring as uncharitably as possible, but Burt-Murray seems to be assuming the worst of her readers as well.)

To widen the scope a bit, I think there's a problematic tendency to conflate the health and robustness of black institutions with the welfare of black people in general. The travails of Essence, or a specific HBCU, get used as shorthand for larger issues affecting black folks. So Essence hires a white woman in a prominent role, and black people can't never have nothin' for themselves. Essence, of course, isn't some kind of co-op, nor are its readership and subject matter representative of the diversity of black women and their concerns. But since it's been out there more or less alone, its importance is perhaps dangerously inflated in the larger cultural conversation. There's no reason there can't and shouldn't be other dynamic voices in the conversation so that Essence (and its readers) don't feel like it needs to be all things to all black women at all times. The paucity of black women in positions of authority at prominent "mainstream" magazines and in fashion, which Davis alludes to, is a really  serious issue. But we should also be asking why there aren't more prominent, black-targeted publications around to hire fashion directors to begin with. No one mag should have all that power.

by Ricardo Gutierrez

Last one y'all. This has been fun. I'll get a post up later with all the downloads. After being mostly chilled out the last few days I wanted to get you a little amped for Friday. Here is a little something to get you in the mood to party or do whatever weekend warrior things you do.

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by Sara Mayeux

Every successive American racial regime, beginning with slavery, but continuing with the taking of the Indian lands, the establishment of segregation, and the development of American immigration restrictions, expended a great deal of energy making its racial notions appear so natural that they could not be comprehended as contradictions to a society ostensibly based on equality. The same point needs to be made about colorblindness, which needs to be seen not, as it is popularly constructed, as the celebrated end of racism but as a racial ideology of its own, one that can, like any racial project, be turned to the service of oppression.

So the conclusion I would draw is that if we should constantly be on guard against the charge that something is "unnatural" (whether it be interracial marriage in the 1890s or same-sex marriage in the 1990s), we should also be on guard against the belief that if white supremacy is the problem, then colorblindness must be the solution. Late-nineteenth-century white supremacists believed that there was no discrimination at all in the racial hierarchies they took as a natural given; to their minds, miscegenation laws were perfectly compatible with American notions of equality. This history shows that equality, like nature, should never be taken for granted.

David Blight on the stakes of the Civil War:

by 1860, there were more millionaires (slaveholders all) living in the lower Mississippi Valley than anywhere else in the United States. In the same year, the nearly 4 million American slaves were worth some $3.5 billion, making them the largest single financial asset in the entire U.S. economy, worth more than all manufacturing and railroads combined. So, of course, the war was rooted in these two expanding and competing economies - but competing over what? What eventually tore asunder America's political culture was slavery's expansion into the Western territories. 

After the Mexican War in the late 1840s, with the opening of the vast new Southwest - added to the massive remainder of the Louisiana Purchase territories from Kansas and Nebraska to the Western high plains, Americans now had to decide which kind of future their country would embrace: a free-labor society, where every small farmer's or urban immigrant's children could get a fresh start with cheap land, or a slave-labor society where an oligarchy of large landowning slaveholders would dominate the West's economy and politics.

Dissenting Justice says the USDA is a better target than Breitbart for Sherrod's suit:

In order to prevail, she will have to prove that Breitbart acted with actual malice. This standard requires that Sherrod prove that Breitbart published information about her that he knew was false or that he acted with reckless disregard for the truth. Although this is normally a tough standard, Sherrod might prevail, given the circumstances of the scandal. It will be difficult, however, given the First Amendment interests at stake. 

Sherrod probably has an even stronger lawsuit against the government. USDA officials forced her out of her government job without due process of law. She was not given the opportunity to explain herself, nor did her supervisors listen to the full speech before demanding her resignation.

by Ricardo Gutierrez

The compression arms race (I am looking at you Justice and Justice imitators). My ears cannot stand the highly compressed "dance-rock-blog-house" tracks of 2007-present day. I understand the motivation of making tracks like that (standing out in the fray, better suited to MP3 compression) but I think this is doing a disservice to music and to the physiology of our ears. With all the technological abilities at everyones disposal why, oh why, are we making "loud" tracks with such limited dynamic range? I think at least one reason is the death of HiFi in favor of the tiny compressed sound coming from the ubiquitous ipod ear buds.

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by G.D.

A few weeks ago, I was in D.C. and hopped off the Metro or whatever cute little name Washingtonians call the subway, when I looked up and saw a giant billboard emblazoned with the image of Donovan McNabb, who had been the longtime signal-caller for my beloved Eagles, peering over his shoulder in an ad for the Washington Redskins. I'd gotten used to the McNabb trade chatter that reliably bubbled up every offseason, but the Eagles brass went from publicly declaring that he'd be their starter before the draft to trading him to a division rival within a matter of days. It had been a hot minute since the trade, but looking at 5 in Redskin colors still felt like a punch in the gut.

Not that that sentiment would've been a universal response among Birds fans. He was famously booed the day he was drafted for not being Ricky Williams, starting his career as the latest entry in a long line of supremely talented, polarizing Philly sports stars (Wilt, Schmidt, Cunningham, Barkley Iverson...) who struggled to win over the city's fans. My cousins and I got into long arguments at Thanksgiving over McNabb. Like a lot of folks, they wanted him gone. They complained about his tendency to throw balls in the dirt and away from his receivers. They thought he was a showboat and aloof, that he made bad decisions with the ball. I'd point out that he played in a maddeningly unbalanced offense that asked him to throw the ball 65 to 70 percent of the time, that he played years with special-team caliber players on the outside, got hit a ton, and still went several games at a time without throwing a pick. (He has the second-best TD-to-INT ratio ever.) But it was like we were watching different players. My boy, a Giants fan who saw dude make his team work twice a year, used to ask what all the hate was about. I never knew how to answer him. I honestly didn't know.

Last weekend, the Inky ran a story detailing what happened behind the scenes before the trade, and it's a lot less dramatic than trading the face of the franchise might seem from the outside; the Birds liked what they saw from Kevin Kolb, and with both his, McNabb's, and Vick's contracts up next year, felt like they had to secure their future and couldn't run the risk of both leaving for nothing. The younger guys liked him, but not fond of the fact that it was more or less his team. Fair enough. But playing quarterback in the N.F.L. is so toweringly hard, that even people who play it competently but unspectacularly have long, lucrative careers (see Kerry Collins). But McNabb has had a borderline Hall-of-Fame career, and is still one of the five or six best QBs playing. In my football-watching lifetime, few teams have successfully replaced a franchise QB with his franchise understudy seamlessly (Montana/Young; Bledsoe/Brady, maybe Brees/Rivers).

My friend and blogmate Joel, a native Houstonian, said he never got over seeing Warren Moon in another uniform after he parted ways with the Oilers. Real talk: I feel like McNabb got such a raw deal from Philly's fans over his career that it wouldn't be terrible if he lit up the Birds up twice a year for the next few seasons. I'm not saying I'd cheer for the Redskins. That would be distasteful, and my family might disown me. I just wouldn't be broken up if the Eagles took Ls in those games.

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by Ricardo Gutierrez

Today we are switching gears a little bit. This one is in honor of our host, who is probably hiking through the woods and doing pull-ups on tree branches as you all read this. TNC mentioned he had been fienin' for some old Reggae, so here it is.

Hearing late 70s/early 80s Dancehall always reminds me of summertime and puts a smile on my face. Back in my DC days I remember rolling with my friend Neil to Adams Morgan and squeezing into this sweatbox named Tameri (I'm not sure of the spelling). There is something magical about a whole room of people bouncing in unison to slow bass-heavy music. I love how old Dancehall plays on so much negative space with it's sparse instrumentation and enough delay and reverb to make you feel like you're falling into a cave.

By the way, all you NYC folks, my girl Sam is DJing tonight (and every Wednesday) at this cool little bar/restaurant in Soho called Lucky Strike (not the bowling alley). She plays an eclectic mix like I do.

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by Sara Mayeux

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by G.D.

If you haven't had a chance to read Now The Hell Will Start, the gripping historical thriller by Brendan Koerner (who guested here last week), I humbly importune you to get up on that. Much of the book, about an epic manhunt for a black soldier during World War II, takes place in Burma far far away from frontline combat. The Army needed warm bodies to throw at a dubious boondoggle that they hoped would make supplying China easier, and so they sent battalions full of black troops who had been drafted—but who weren't allowed to fight or do much else—to build a road. Think about that. The Army conscripted men who were doctors and mechanics and engineers in their civilian lives, but because of its policies, couldn't find much use for them in wartime besides having them crush rocks in the jungle. There are all manner of compelling moral and ethical arguments against codifying inequality, but there are obvious practical ones as well: institutions that do so are wasteful and inefficient.

This oddly comes to mind whenever I watch Mad Men. You have Joan, who is hypercompetent and discreet, playing the back to twits like Harry and Pete. Does anyone doubt that she could do their jobs better than they do? The soap opera project from a few seasons back hinted that this, and she's every bit as charismatic and shrewd as Don is. In the season premiere, we first catch her behind a desk in her own office (!) which hopefully augurs big things for her at the fledgling Sterling Cooper Draper Price, which is struggling to drum up business. Maybe with their backs against the wall, they'll finally let Joan and Peggy loose.

Peggy also seems newly empowered in the new digs. Don tries to pull rank on her, and she deftly claps back at him. Lest we not forget that Don is a fairly despicable cat, he lets her know she's getting uppity by barring her from a meeting. "I just think it would be better not to have a girl in the room." See? Wasteful and inefficient.

The drama on the show shifts back to the office, which is a smart and probably necessary pivot. The central dramatic tension at home for Don Draper—that he isn't, you know, Don Draper—came undone when Betty finally found out his secret. The subtext, that the two of them quietly loathed each other, became all text, which had the potential to become both soul-crushing and dull very quickly. The scene in which Betty finds out about Don was a high point for both the character and for the show, but it didn't seem to slow her slow devolution into caricature. Betty's new husband is showing signs of having a white knight complex; he seems less interested in her than feeling like he's saving her from some terrible fate. (Peep the way he practically mauls her in the car after Don comes to pick up the kids.)

Back at work, though, the Don Draper masquerade is still intact, and SCDP have tethered their wagons more tightly to his reluctant star. Don rolls his eyes at the suggestion that he has to be the new company's face, but by the end of the episode, he finally accepts this, and gives a reporter a swaggery portrayal of how the principals at SCDP jumped ship. But you can already see the storm clouds. All that fresh scrutiny on Madison Ave. for a dude who is perpetrating an elaborate, untenable fraud? It's not just Don's marriage at stake now, but a bunch of people's entire lives.

What did y'all think?