Racing Jesse Jackson: Leadership, Masculinity, and the Black Presidency

In June of 1983, the New York Times published a survey revealing that nearly one in five white voters would not vote for a black candidate for president, even if that candidate was qualified and was the party nominee.2 For some readers, such a revelation might have induced shock or even outrage; for others the poll would merely reflect an obvious and ugly reality. The survey was prompted by the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s attempt to become the first black, Democratic nominee for president. A news story exploring the prevalence of white racism in the United States was not uncommon when Jesse Jackson campaigned for the presidency in 1984 and 1988. The mainstream press framed Jackson’s candidacies as an index for measuring racial progress, and in some cases, as an outright referendum on race in the United States. Jackson’s own critiques of white establishment politics helped assure that his race—his blackness—would seem to foreground all representations of him. Discussions of Jackson during this time were particularly complex since the continuation of civil rights battles finds itself in “multicultural” and “multiracial environments” complicated by “social, political, and legal constructions of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and religion, among others.”3 The symbolic generation and exchange of identity markers therefore has a particular rhetorical significance for contemporary “race” studies that Jackson’s presidential campaigns are uniquely suited to bring to our attention

“Weekend Update” and the Tradition of New Journalism

“Weekend Update,” like much of SNL, saw itself as a show talking back to the media, as “television’s antidote to television, to all the bad things–corrupt, artificial, plastic, facile–that TV entertainment had become.”3 The show sought this influence in a period of heavily publicized official corruption: it’s not a coincidence that the segment, which Chevy Chase hosted on SNL’s first show, debuted on the heels of Nixon’s resignation over Watergate and Johnson’s lies about Vietnam. These abuses of power led not only to widespread disappointment with Washington politics and politicians, but to a kind of skepticism about journalism and questions about its capacity to check political power. Hellman’s observation above reads as a pretty good paraphrase of the frustration expressed about the Bush administration by people from across the political spectrum during the post-9/11 years. What’s most surprising is that he was writing in 1981. The underlying question, then and now, was fundamental one about democratic practice and the press: how was it that the “fourth estate” had failed to expose the lies and corruption of another presidential administration

Unruly Bodies: The Rhetorical Domestication of Twenty-First Century Veterans of War

Veterans of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq with visually identifiable injuries possess ‘‘unruly’’ bodies that render the story of war in efficient, emotional terms. The injured veteran’s explicit connection of war with injury motivates state and mainstream news discourse that domesticates veterans’ bodies, managing representations of injured veterans through three dominant strategies. First, dominant discourses invoke veterans’ bodies as metonymy of the nation-state at war*bodily well-being operates as a metonym for both the nation’s health and for the condition of the war. Second, veterans are domesticated by strategic placement in contexts that regulate their range of movement, especially amputees, who are often framed as having already overcome any limitations imposed by their war injuries. Third, dominant visual discourse domesticates veterans’ bodies by ascribing a strategic telos to them, shifting the meaning of the injuries away from their origins in state policy and toward wholeness and ‘‘normalcy.’’ Representations of whole-bodied and injured veterans tame the harshness of war and erode the argumentative grounds for questioning it

McCarthy Hearings

What have become known as the “McCarthy hearings” refer to 36 days of televised investigative hearings led by Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1954. After first calling hearings to investigate possible espionage at the Army Signal Corps Engineering Laboratories in Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, the junior senator turned his communist-chasing committee’s attention to an altogether different matter, the question of whether the Army had promoted a dentist who had refused to answer questions for the Loyalty and Security Board. The hearings reached their climax when McCarthy suggested that the Army’s lawyer, Joseph Welch, had employed a man who at one time had belonged to a communist front group. Welch’s rebuke to the senator—“Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”—has been called one of the most devastating lines in American history. McCarthy was censured for his conduct by the Senate a few months later, and in 1957, he died. Though he has become something of a pariah in the annals of history, the enduring value of studying and understanding the hearings that bore his name in undeniable

The Slave, the Fetus, the Body: Articulating Biopower and the Pregnant Woman

Many slaveholders attempted to justify the institution of slavery in the United States by claiming that the practice of slavery was actually in the interests of the slaves themselves. Not only are these arguments invalid because they justify inhumane treatment and the imprisonment of innocent human beings, they also contain a dangerous paternalism (a “speaking for”) that has not vacated the social sphere. Indeed, this same logic—the notion that bodies can be regulated and controlled for their own protection—is presently being used to speak for the fetus in order to justify fetal rights. Borrowing from Berlant (1997), these fetal rights arguments work against the interests of the mother, constituting pregnant women as chattel and reinforcing the governing logics of a fetal and infantile citizenship. In the spirit of W.E.B. Du Bois, we contend that, “she must have the right of motherhood at her own discretion,” regardless of deployments of fetal citizenship (2007, p. 121). A pregnant woman should have the right to abort the fetus just as those enslaved had and have the right to freedom. Following Koppelman, we note that abortion restrictions result in the involuntary servitude of women to the fetus and effectively impede pregnant women from exercising their right to break a contract with the fetus. Consequently this essay argues that we have the responsibility to defend reproductive freedom based on the concept of prohibiting involuntary servitude

African Americans\u27 Opinions about Human-Genetics Research

Background: Research on attitudes toward genetics and medicine registers skepticism among minority communities, but the reasons for this skepticism are not well known. In the past, studies linked mistrust of the medical system to historical ethics violations involving minority groups and to suspicions about ideological premise and political intent. Methods: To assess public knowledge, attitudes, and behavior regarding human-genetics research, we surveyed 858 Americans onsite in four community settings or online in a geographically nonspecific manner. Results: Compared to participants as a whole, African Americans were significantly more likely to believe that clinical trials might be dangerous and that the federal government knowingly conducted unethical research, including studies in which risky vaccines were administered to prison populations. However, African Americans were also significantly more likely to believe that the federal government worked to prevent environmental exposure to toxicants harmful to people with genetic vulnerabilities. Conclusions: Our data suggest that most Americans trust government to act ethically in sponsoring and conducting research, including genetics research, but that African Americans are particularly likely to see government as powerfully protective in some settings yet selectively disingenuous in others

Management of pulmonary hypertension

Pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH) is a potentially lethal disease mainly affecting young females. Although the precise mechanism of PAH is unknown, the past decade has seen the advent of many new classes of drugs with improvement in the overall prognosis of the disease. Unfortunately the therapeutic options for PAH in South Africa are severely limited. The Working Group on PAH is a joint effort by the South African Heart Association and the South African Thoracic Society tasked with improving the recognition and management of patients with PAH. This article provides a brief summary of the disease and the recommendations of the first meeting of the Working Group

Comedy in Unfunny Times: News Parody and Carnival after 9/11

Comedy has a special role in helping societies manage crisis moments, and the U.S. media paid considerable attention to the proper role of comedy in public culture after the 9/11 tragedies. As has been well documented, many popular U.S. comic voices were paralyzed in trying to respond to 9/11 or disciplined by audiences when they did. Starting with these obstacles in mind, this essay analyzes early comic responses to 9/11, and particularly those of the print and online news parody The Onion, as an example of how “fake” news discourse could surmount the rhetorical chill that fell over public culture after the tragedies. By exposing the news as “mere” production and by setting an agenda for learning about Islamic culture and Middle East politics, The Onion avoided violating decorum and invited citizen participation. This kind of meta-discourse was crucial after 9/11, when shifting rules for decorum created controversy and as official voices in government and media honed frames and narratives for talking about the attacks

Dr. Paul Achter – Faculty Author Interview

Dr. Paul Achter, Associate Professor, discusses his recently published article in the Quarterly Journal of Speech entitled, “Unruly Bodies: The Rhetorical Domestication of Twenty-First Century Veterans of War.” This article focuses on the news coverage of injuries sustained by veterans of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and how those injuries motivate state and mainstream rhetoric that recuperates veterans’ bodies. View and listen to the video version to hear Dr. Achter discuss the “domestication” that structures the dominant coverage of veterans in the 21st century. The work of domestication is accomplished in visual culture, including photojournalism, video games, websites, gaming devices etc. An audio-only version is available at the bottom of this posting