Commentary: Don't Hold Obama to Race Agenda
by Melissa Harris-Lacewell
On May 24, TV One aired the latest installment of [Tavis} Smiley's accountability campaign: a two-hour documentary titled "Stand." Recycling Spike Lee's Million Man March film, "Get On the Bus," Smiley assembled a group of prominent black male public figures for a bus ride through the South.
Ostensibly, this bus trip would provide Smiley, professors Cornel West and Michael Eric Dyson, Dick Gregory and others an opportunity to reflect on the meaningful upheavals in American society and politics in the summer of 2008. "Stand" was an enormous disappointment.
Its low production value, wandering narrative, flat history and self-important egoism did little to reveal the shortcomings of the Obama phenomenon. Instead, the piece exposed and embodied the contemporary crisis of the black public intellectual in the age of Obama.
Read the Full Essay @ CNN.com
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Melissa Harris-Lacewell is associate professor of politics and African-American studies at Princeton University. She is the author of the award-winning book Barbershops, Bibles, and BET: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought, and writes a daily blog titled The Kitchen Table.
by Melissa Harris-Lacewell
On May 24, TV One aired the latest installment of [Tavis} Smiley's accountability campaign: a two-hour documentary titled "Stand." Recycling Spike Lee's Million Man March film, "Get On the Bus," Smiley assembled a group of prominent black male public figures for a bus ride through the South.
Ostensibly, this bus trip would provide Smiley, professors Cornel West and Michael Eric Dyson, Dick Gregory and others an opportunity to reflect on the meaningful upheavals in American society and politics in the summer of 2008. "Stand" was an enormous disappointment.
Its low production value, wandering narrative, flat history and self-important egoism did little to reveal the shortcomings of the Obama phenomenon. Instead, the piece exposed and embodied the contemporary crisis of the black public intellectual in the age of Obama.
Read the Full Essay @ CNN.com
***
Melissa Harris-Lacewell is associate professor of politics and African-American studies at Princeton University. She is the author of the award-winning book Barbershops, Bibles, and BET: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought, and writes a daily blog titled The Kitchen Table.
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