Colson Whitehead & Twitter

Back in 1999, when Colson Whitehead's first novel The Intuitionist appeared, it wasn't immediately clear (at least not to me) just how humorous and witty he was. Not on the first read. The Intuitionist is a deep and difficult book, with "a whole lot of big words," to quote some of my peeps. So reading that first novel alone would hardly lead folks to characterize Whitehead's work as funny.

But then after reading his subsequent books, it became necessary to re-read his first one with an awareness of his fondness for humor. The subsequent books and essays like The Perfect Gift, Visible Man, and most recently The Year of Living Postracially make it clear that Whitehead has always been a thoughtful joker, a trickster all along.

These days, you can catch him on twitter, where he's prone to toss out some zingers in less than 140 characters. One day, he dropped a pop culture-inspired haiku, showing a familiarity with 24 as he tweets

Who doesn't love TV haiku? #24 "Release Jack Bauer! / Quickly they reconsider / Arrest Jack Bauer!"

Now, this next one was kind of harsh (too soon?), but whatever the case, on that fateful day this past June, Whitehead tweeted:

Michael Jackson had a heart attack. Someone told him he was black.

Ah..but fans of Ralph Ellison have to appreciate when Whitehead tweeted this one:

Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I tweet for you?

It's hard to say at this moment what tweeting might mean for how we perceive African American novels and novelists. So for now, we'll keep watching.

Some other novelists who tweet:
Mat Johnson
Nichelle Tramble
Tayari Jones

The Trouble with Diversity?

Over the last weeks, some of us have had conversations about Orlando Patterson's Race and Diversity in the Age of Obama and his discussions of segregation. According to Patterson, "In private life blacks are almost as isolated from whites today as they were under Jim Crow."

I recently came across an article in Newsweek Even Babies Discriminate, which explains how racial biases emerge among very young people. One elaboration about struggles concerning diversity and segregation really caught my attention. The writers note that

The unfortunate twist of diverse schools is that they don't necessarily lead to more cross-race relationships. Often it's the opposite. Duke University's James Moody—an expert on how adolescents form and maintain social networks—analyzed data on more than 90,000 teenagers at 112 different schools from every region of the country. The students had been asked to name their five best male friends and their five best female friends. Moody matched the ethnicity of the student with the race of each named friend, then compared the number of each student's cross-racial friendships with the school's overall diversity.

Moody found that the more diverse the school, the more the kids self-segregate by race and ethnicity within the school, and thus the likelihood that any two kids of different races have a friendship goes down.

Moody included statistical controls for activities, sports, academic tracking, and other school-structural conditions that tend to desegregate (or segregate) students within the school. The rule still holds true: more diversity translates into more division among students. Those increased opportunities to interact are also, effectively, increased opportunities to reject each other. And that is what's happening.

As a result, junior-high and high-school children in diverse schools experience two completely contrasting social cues on a daily basis. The first cue is inspiring—that many students have a friend of another race. The second cue is tragic—that far more kids just like to hang with their own.

If increased diversity leads to segregation then how do we really address the biases and divisions?

PDI and Outliers

Although the title of chapter seven, “The Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes” appears disengaged from the previous ones, as Malcolm Gladwell begins to narrate the activities of a tragic Korean Air flight, readers get a sense of how the interactions between pilots and co-pilots relates to the larger discussion of cultural legacies. Gladwell posits that some airplane crashes can be linked to the modes of communication, and lack thereof, among the officers within the cockpit.

In addition to pointing out that airplane crashes are the result of a combination of several factors, Gladwell identifies Geert Hofstede’s concept “Power Distance Index" (PDI) – a measuring system “concerned with attitudes toward hierarchy, specifically with how much a particular culture values and respects authority” – as a crucial issue for understanding why, for example, pilots from some nations may have been at a cultural disadvantage for effective and essential communication in an airplane cockpit.

For those us concerned with academic failures and not only airplane crashes, perhaps we should take a closer look at communication problems and PDI in our immediate context. What is one important way that PDI or a distinct mode of communication comes into play positively or adversely concerning how students here at SIUE interact with professors or the university in general? What makes the issue you address so important to academic success of failure?

Highest Paid College President

An article "23 Private College Presidents Made More Than $1 Million" in today's New York Times identifies highly paid leading executives. The top one caught my attention:

The highest paid private university executive was Shirley Ann Jackson, president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., with a pay package totaling $1,598,247 in fiscal 2008. Ms. Jackson, a physicist and former chairwoman of the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission, has been at Rensselaer since 1999, and first became the highest-paid university president just two years later.

Admittedly, I wouldn't have expected a black woman to top the list in pay. What about you?

Cultural Legacies and Outliers

In chapter 6 of Outliers Malcolm Gladwell provides an entry into a larger discussion about cultural legacies. He opens with disturbing descriptions of how longstanding cultural patterns and beliefs influenced violent conflicts among generations of families in Kentucky during the 19th century.

The compelling research findings concerning long-term and deeply held values led Gladwell to the conclusion that

Cultural legacies are powerful forces. They have deep roots and long lives. They persist, generation after generation, virtually intact, even as the economic and social demographic conditions that spawned them have vanished, and they play such a role in directing attitudes and behavior that we cannot make sense of our world without them.

He goes on to note the possibilities of “taking cultural legacies seriously” in order to learn “about why people succeed and how to make people better.”

It’s worth noting that highlighting cultural legacies can easily give way to problematic racial and gendered generalizations—generalizations we have necessarily been inclined to critique or avoid.

Having said that, how might taking cultural legacies seriously hurt or hinder our understanding of high academic achievement at SIUE? That is to say, how would a concentrated focus on cultural legacies enhance or limit our view of those who succeed at college?

The Lessons of Outliers, Pt. 1

Over the last two months or so, we've been having an extended conversation about Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers as part of our larger efforts to increase collaborative intellectual activities beyond the classroom involving students of color.

We've discussed a wide range of thought-provoking and fascinating issues such as accumulative advantage, practical intelligence, meaningful work, and something known as the 10,000 hour rule.

Now that we're halfway through the book, I was wondering: what lessons or issues stand out most to folks based on what we've read and discussed on the blog so far?

Or, what important or overlooked issues concerning Outliers would you want to bring more attention to? Why?

The Economics of Black Studies, Pt. 1

How much funding goes toward African American educational and intellectual projects--projects that occur beyond conventional classroom spaces? How much should universities provide Black Studies programs? What steps should the programs take to secure more funding, and how do we optimize the support we already receive?

Mike Sell's Triple Front essay reminds us to consider the importance of addressing the three interrelated components of culture, politics, and economics. In many respects, we have always done a better job of discussing the culture and politics of Black Studies than its economics. Yet funding and the lack of funding have been vital to the rise and fall of programs, respectively.

And of course, to have a really serious conversation about the economics of black studies, we would need to move beyond only issues of funding and consider a broader set of concerns, including how black studies is produced, distributed, consumed, and valued and how programs struggle to develop a place and status on university campuses.

At the moment, I'm trying to collect more information on what we should be thinking about right here, right now concerning the economics of Black Studies. If you have suggestions or contributions, do drop me a line or leave a comment.