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it is difficult to tell much about what juan williams (juan williams? what?) might have to say from the nyt puff piece above---when i used to watch tv, he was among my least favorite talking heads, seeming prone to one-dimensional analyses of complex situations, topped off with a steaming bouquet of conservativism...but who knows....
from the article, though, i am already suspicious in that there seems to be no particular place for disparities in power--what you have instead is a kind of depressing sequence of statements that appeal more to class biais than analysis (middle-class horror at what poorer folk get up to)---which makes me wonder if the book will blur class in general into feature of nature ---which of course leaves essentialism as the logical remainder (wnt a good example of what trying to avoid class does? think rush limbaugh and other parallel fuckwits on the topic of poverty)--o those terrible poor folk and their "lowlife" ways (from the article)---they do not co-operate with those fine fellows in law enforcement (which is presented simply as a noun, as if saying the words "law enforcement" constitutes an analysis of the social functions of the police, particularly in poorer neighborhoods--social functions that are routinely not at all like the friendly cop on the block--but hey, why bother with that detail? for a conservative middle-class readership, "law enforcement" is an adequate signifier)--they are alienated from the educational system---they see no particular future for themselves (if you strip the two preceding factors out of a class analysis, you--again--end up blaming the poor for their own exclusion from the american system of social reproduction--which is cheap and easy--but which says nothing, really)---worse still, these poor folk do not stop with the fact of being-excluded--no, they even attempt to fashion some sense of positive identification outside the reach of the bourgeois order and--worse still--they try to hide these patterns of identification...
williams, like many middle-class writers before him, offers what amounts to the classic middle class lament in such cases:
where is their bourgeois redeemer?
which can be translated into the real lament: why cant everybody be like us?
or
why cant everybody know their place and stay there?
the litany of leaders is indeed strange: w.e.b. dubois' work--particularly his sociological work on the african-american community in philadelphia and "the souls of black folk"--demonstrate in great detail the fiasco that has been the american treatment of african-americans in general since the civil war---the systematic intertwining of race and class discrimination, etc.--du bois was a strong marxian analyst who is now being reduced to some bizarre exemplar of "leadership" within a system that his work never ceased to oppose.
douglas' speech on the hyporcrisy of the 4th of july still resonates politically--but not here, where he too is reduced to an empty proper name strung up by middle class writers as an example of a defender of a system that his writings endlessly criticizes for its complacent acceptance of racism...
read almost anything by or about the main jazz players and you get nothing like this cheerleading for an endless bourgeois america...
i dont know---there are alot of bad signs presented by this article, and, like a said, i cant think of a television talking head i would less think able to deal adequately with the complexity of race-class intertwining and the ambiguities of relations to power/authority shaped by them than juan williams--except maybe john stossel or geraldo rivera.
maybe i'll read the book if i see it in a library, though: i am certainly not going to buy it, not based on this nyt piece at least.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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