The Living Consequences

Conservative commentator Armstrong Williams has a perplexing column in tomorrow’s Washington Times in which he claims that with the election of Barack Obama, “all the ‘-isms’ that were born from racism, reparations, and white guilt are now dead and buried.”

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A new study by researchers at the Harvard Business School finds that consumers who highly desire a pair of jeans or sneakers are significantly less likely to be concerned about sweatshop labor or other moral issues involved in their manufacture.

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Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North will be re-broadcast in the Boston area on Sunday, February 1 at 9:00pm on WGBX (known locally as PBS channel 44).

John Bell of Ebb Pod Productions has created a map of the United States, showing the locations of selected past and future screenings of Traces of the Trade:

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In a revealing moment, a committee of the Arkansas House of Representatives yesterday rejected a resolution congratulating Barack Obama on becoming president, on the basis that the United States should not be described, even in that context, as “a nation founded by slave owners.”

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The Los Angeles Times has a review out about films exploring the subject of teenagers and race at the Sundance Film Festival.

The films covered include Prom Night in Mississippi, about the practice of holding racially segregated high school proms in Charleston, Miss.; Don’t Let Me Drown, a drama about racial and other tensions in the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001; Push, a brutal yet hopeful examination of the cycle of poverty and despair in Harlem; and Toe to Toe, a drama about racial prejudice set at an elite private school.

Prom Night in Mississippi is perhaps the most shocking of these films, especially for those previously unaware of the ongoing practice of racially segregated proms in smaller towns in the Deep South.

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Barack Obama was just sworn in as the 44th, and first black, president of the United States.

I watched his inauguration in the Philadelphia airport, en route from a speaking engagement on slavery and race to an audience of five hundred on Martin Luther King Day in State College, Pennsylvania.

I was privileged to be able to join a roomful of Transportation Security Administration (TSA) employees as they watched the inauguration on a television set. There were absolutely no tears in the room — until the audience in Washington was asked to stand for the swearing-in, and the entire room in the Philadelphia airport rose to its feet. I’m sure that the applause, cheers, tears, and camaraderie which we exchanged after he took the oath of office were mirrored in locations across the land.

Tomorrow, the Boston Globe offers a review of Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North, entitled “Facing up to a family’s past as slave traders.”

The review is occasioned by the screening of the film tomorrow night at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, as part of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival. The film will be screened at 8:00pm, and afterward, Katrina Browne and I will participate in a question-and-answer period, along with editor Alla Kovgan and co-producer Elizabeth Delude-Dix.

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The news is now official: Samuel Huntington, the eminent political scientist best known for his views on the “clash of civilizations,” died on Christmas Eve at the age of 81.

I knew Sam well, and worked closely with him until his retirement from Harvard last year.

Sam was a towering figure in political science, having written landmark works in civil-military relations, political development, global politics, culture and identity politics.

Henry Kissinger described him several years ago as “one of the West’s most eminent political scientists,” while Robert Putnam, the Harvard professor who wrote Bowling Alone, lauded Sam yesterday as “one of the giants of American intellectual life of the last half century.”

In the public arena, Samuel Huntington would typically offer unconventional scholarly conclusions in stark and unflinching terms which revealed little about his personal opinions. As a result, his views attracted a great deal of attention, in the U.S. and especially abroad, but were frequently controversial and widely misunderstood. I will have a bit more to say later about those controversies, and their significance for the main theme of this blog.

In person, Sam was a kind and gentle man. As a scholar, teacher, and mentor, he was typically fierce in his articulation of his own views but always eager to hear and consider the views of others. His expectations for scholarly discourse were high, but he was modest about what he did not know and unfailingly respectful and encouraging of the work of others. Perhaps the strongest indication of these qualities was the deep respect and abiding loyalty which he consistently inspired in those around him—particularly in those who, like me, often disagreed with him so strongly.

Traces of the Trade has been named the best documentary in the “Courage in Filmmaking” category for 2008 by the Women Film Critics Circle.

Gender played a central role in our discussions of race and privilege during the filming of Traces of the Trade, even though this issue did not appear in the finished film. So I think that this award, by an organization promoting the voices and perspectives of women in film, is a particularly fitting tribute to the work that Katrina Browne and everyone involved with the film has done.

The awards ceremony will be broadcast live on Wednesday, December 31 at 11am on WBAI-AM (New York) and streamed online at wbai.org.