Why is Elie Mystal so annoyed at the Stanford lawprof who wrote a book called "Is Marriage for White People?"?

I'm reading this blog post over at Above the Law because Instapundit linked to it.  Instapundit did one of those ultra-sleek posts shorn of all opinion: "ELIE MYSTAL has a question for Stanford." That points us to a question that is the post title — "Stanford Law School: Why Are Your Professors Writing Books That Sound Like They’ve Been Written By Bloggers?" — but the post isn't mainly a challenge to Stanford to do something about lawprofs writing books that are insufficiently larded with citation and sober rumination. Mystal's post is mainly about the specific content of a book written by Ralph Richard Banks and aimed at general readers and — it's pretty obvious — TV and radio talk shows. Want to talk about black people and marriage? Bring on Professor Banks. He'll say some provocative things in language that will charge up the audience.

Maybe Mystal is a little jealous:

Now, if I were a blogger looking to make a quick buck, that’s exactly the kind of book I’d write. In fact, look for my upcoming book, “Why White People Can Afford To Piss Away Time & Money in Law School, But Blacks Can’t.”

But Ralph Banks isn’t a blogger, he’s a Stanford Law professor. Shouldn’t we expect less sensationalized bullcrap from him?

Here's Ralph Banks, who is, like Mystal, a black male writer with an elite legal education, and he's writing a book about marriage and black people, and he's also a Stanford law professor, while Mystal is writing for a blog. Moreover, Banks — if we're to believe an advance review (the book's not out until September) — is arguing that black women can "shift the power balance" by marrying white men. Mystal states more than once that he is married to a black woman, but:

For what it’s worth, I have no problem whatsoever with interracial marriage...

So whether or not Professor Banks has a worthwhile point, my objection rests with the way it was stated. I do this every day. I know a sensational headline when I’m looking at one. I’m familiar with how one writes generally reasonable arguments for 90% of a piece interspersed with ten percent of barely coherent hyperbole. We live in a culture where getting heard over the white noise sometimes requires you to shout a little bit. I get that.

I just don’t see why we need that from Stanford Law School, and I don’t see why we need it on a topic where there has been so little top-notch scholarly work.... Couldn’t the Stanford Law professor give us something a little bit more than Is Marriage for White People? Couldn’t the SLS prof tell his publisher (who, dollar-to-donuts, is the one who came up with this title): “Come now, that’s dumb. After the initial shock value, people will just say I’m being dumb, and that’s not going to be good for sales.”

Look, it's a great title, and people are going to stop and pay attention — in part because of the title and in part because of Banks's status as a high-level lawprof. Now, maybe that feels unfair to Mystal, who toils as a blogger unassisted by lawprof status. (But Mystal didn't build his own blog traffic; he stepped up onto a writing-platform built by David Lat.) Maybe it also seems unfair that lawprof-bloggers get some initial attention as bloggers because they are lawprofs. (But the information superhighway is littered with little-read blogs written by lawprofs who thought lots of people would want to know what they had to say about this and that because they are lawprofs. It's not that easy!)

I think it's fine for lawprofs to speak to the general public about a variety of public issues. We need smart and interesting people contributing to the national dialogue. And some of these people are law professors. I wouldn't want to say to law professors — especially to the lawprof named Althouse — you need to crawl back into the stereotypical lawprof box and write books and articles that look more like something conventional people can glance at and say: Scholarship!

"Halle Berry may have chosen the wrong words but she makes the right point."

"It is important to read past her ugly custody case to have a larger conversation about race (one the baby's father apparently does not want to have). Her daughter will have to choose a racial identity, the way she had to choose a racial identity. In America, that means it will probably be chosen, at least in part, by the way people react to her. In America, her skin color (black or white) will be something that people use to define her. I applaud Halle Berry's courage, if not her choice of words. When she says, 'I believe in the one drop theory,' of course, she does not mean to endorse racism. But she does have the courage to do something so few Americans can: talk about race."

Either that or she's using whatever weapons she finds at hand as she fights for what she wants in her child custody battle.

"Black History Month: What I've Learned."

"From Al Sharpton to Al Green, seventeen headliners reflect on the journey, the experience, and the future of being a black man in America."

"No people of color have been nominated for Oscars."

"... You have a very powerful industry run by liberal Democrats, very rich liberal Democrats, and they have their top ten best movies, nominated best movies, and not a single person of color nominated for anything, not even best supporting stooge...."

Said Rush Limbaugh today, prompting Bo Snerdley to go on the air and comment:

Rush, there is something tremendously insidious and vile underneath this resegregation, resegregation of Hollywood. Our leading Hollywood producers -- and we all know who they are -- the Spielbergs, the bigwigs are simply look at black and Latino America in the face, especially black America, and you know what they're saying to 'em? They're saying, "Look, we gave you people enough. We elected him president. We did that. We don't have to put any of you people in movies anymore."

RUSH: You people?

"Wow! Jimmy Dean. He was pretty cute when he was young!"

What I exclaimed, after seeing that Jimmy Dean had died and Googling "Jimmy Dean" and seeing this...



... and it took me a couple seconds to recover from the dazzle of male beauty and realize the essential stupidity of Google.

What I was really looking for was the old TV show, "The Jimmy Dean Show." What passed for entertainment in 1964:



Was Rowlf the Dog the original Muppet? He was the first Muppet star!

I remember watching that show. I don't have much to say about Jimmy Dean. He seemed like a nice man — I've heard otherwise, but I won't pass the story on. He's dead. Here's a piece about whether, now that Dean's dead, Dean's song "Virginia" ought become the Virginia state song:

Virginia is one of the few states that has no official tune. It's been without one since 1997, when the General Assembly retired "Carry Me Back to Old Virginia," because its lyrics were deemed racist. 

"Deemed racist"? "Virginny" was "where the old darke'ys heart am long'd to go."

The state has repeatedly tried to choose a replacement, notably by appointing a 12-member committee that sifted through 400 suggestions and whittled them down to eight finalists.

One of those finalists was the appropriately titled "Virginia." It was a ditty played for legislative committees by its composer, song-writer and Varina resident Jimmy Dean.

Is the song any good? I can't find an on-line video rendition of it, and apparently neither could the author of the linked column. There's video there, but not of the song "Virginia." It's a video of Jimmy Dean singing his hit song "Big Bad John." Which he didn't write. (It's by Dean and Roy Acuff.) [CORRECTION: Dean co-wrote the song. Somehow I managed to read "Dean and Roy Acuff" as referring to Roy Acuff and some other guy named Dean Acuff! Ha.] And it's a big, big song. I love it. I listen to it every time it comes on "60s on 6" (my favorite satellite radio channel). Go listen to it. I don't think there's a better storytelling song. 

Do I have to mention the sausage too? (NSFW:)

"Why has Twitter become a black thing?"

"I think this word-of-mouth sharing by black tweeters could be the continuation of the griot tradition (the keeping of tribal history) brought to America by West African slaves who, according to Paul Oliver's book Yonder Come the Blues, 'extemporize on current events, chance incidents and the passing scene.' The Edison study found that 'many of the 'trending topics' on Twitter on a typical day are reflective of African-American culture, memes and topics.'"

The iconic Lena Horne.

"Lena Horne, who was the first black performer to be signed to a long-term contract by a major Hollywood studio and who went on to achieve international fame as a singer, died on Sunday night at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York. She was 92 and lived in Manhattan."

Eugene Robinson on Tiger's women: "What's with the whole Barbie thing?"

"No offense to anyone who actually looks like Barbie, but it really is striking how much the women who've been linked to Woods resemble one another. I'm talking about the long hair, the specific body type, even the facial features. Mattel could sue for trademark infringement."

Really? Here's Barbie. Here's a montage of faces that have horizontally faced Tiger's. I'm sorry, Eugene, but these women are just not that pretty. Barbie is very pretty and glossy and made-up, but in a daytime, cheerleadery way. The Tiger women are all made-up for nighttime, indoor work, and they are not all that pretty. Tiger's wife is the Barbie. Tiger's women to cheat on Elin with are all getting away from Barbie/Elin. It strikes me as a touchingly ordinary search for sex that feels dirty.

A Woody Allen joke: "Is sex dirty? Only if it's done right."

Robinson rambles on:

If adultery is really about the power and satisfaction of conquest, Woods's self-esteem was apparently only boosted by bedding the kind of woman he thought other men lusted after -- the "Playmate of the Month" type that Hugh Hefner turned into the American gold standard.

Which Elin is, but — what is wrong with you, Eugene? — these other women are not!

But the world is full of beautiful women of all colors, shapes and sizes -- some with short hair or almond eyes, some with broad noses, some with yellow or brown skin. Woods appears to have bought into an "official" standard of beauty that is so conventional as to be almost oppressive.

What is wrong with Eugene Robinson? He is seeing race, race, race. The Tiger women look white to him — are they? — and, beyond that, some big hair, big makeup, and big boobs makes them Barbie. Hardly.

His taste in mistresses leaves the impression of a man who is, deep down, both insecure and image-conscious -- a control freak even when he's committing "transgressions."

I don't think so. I'd say he's a man who went for the Playmate ideal in choosing a wife and aimed low for cheating. He was the opposite of image conscious and controlling, and that's one of the reasons his fall from the god-like stature he had for us is so very long and hard.

***

If you clicked on the Barbie link and heard the voice of Barbie, don't you think she sounded an awful lot like Mira Sorvino in her Oscar-winning role — as a prostitute, naturally — in the Woody Allen movie "Mighty Aphrodite"? I say "naturally," because they are always handing out Oscars to actress who take on the amazing challenge of playing a whore.

Barbie, sluts, Woody, Woods...

I'm in the NYT.

And they give me the last word about Tiger Woods and race.

It's the "Special Wood-Themed" Edition of Bloggingheads!

With me and Hanna Rosin!



Topics:

The racial angle to the Tiger Woods saga
Will high-status men invariably cheat on their wives?
Is lack of sexual desire in women an illness?
The impossibility of writing a non-awful sex scene
Hanna: Sorry, Tolstoy—happy marriages are fascinating!
Ann: Don’t give books as holiday gifts

"Curb Your Enthusiasm" gives Michael Richards his (hilarious) absolution.

Last night's new episode of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" — which has been working the "Seinfeld" reunion theme all season — finally got around to doing something with the painful subject of Michael Richards's disgrace over the shouting of racial epithets at some hecklers in a comedy club. Spoiler:

After learning that he suffers from the fictional Groat's disease (last mentioned in Season 2 of "Curb Your Enthusiasm"), Michael Richards once again finds himself in the line of fire for a racially fueled attack on an African American ... who just happens to be Larry's house guest Leon (the always hysterical J.B. Smoove), who posed as Groat's disease sufferer Danny Duberstein but who looked more like Louis Farrakhan from the Nation of Islam than a Jewish CPA.

Skewering Richards' brush with notoriety, Larry David has Richards angrily confront Leon in full view of several dozen camera phones, leading to him proclaiming that he wished he could call Leon a word that would make him as angry as he was right then. It's a savage parody of Richards' race-fueled rant to an African American heckler during a 2006 stand-up performance ... which happened to be captured on a cellphone.

Brilliant. Highly satisfying.

"Tyra Banks Puts 'Top Models' in Blackface. When Did This Become OK?"

Tyra has our attention.

"[W]hat is hip-hop studies, and what would a hip-hop studies program offer that is not already available on campus?"

The debate here on campus.

Katrina Flores, arts and education director for First Wave, a student organization that focuses on involving students in hip-hop culture on campus, said hip-hop studies allows for an interdisciplinary connection between departments because students can study hip-hop from a sociological, anthropological or scientific perspective.

“You can’t just come in and study somebody’s culture. You have to live it, you have to breathe it and you have to be doing it,” she said.

Flores added that she is currently working with the UW-Madison physics department to encourage them to do more interdisciplinary research between science and culture.

“I struggled with physics ... but if it can relate to my world and if we can be interdisciplinary in that way then there are so many more possibilities for engagement,” she said.

Maybe you should struggle with physics. Think about it: If the physics teachers on their own had decided to meld hip-hop with their classroom presentation on the theory that it would make it more accessible to you, you would have — or should have — felt insulted and outraged. And yet you want to make them do it to you.

Gethsemane Herron, a UW-Madison freshman, said she does not see why UW-Madison wouldn’t have a hip-hop studies program, highlighting its importance in today’s society.

“How can we ignore something that has permeated American culture,” Merron said. “I feel like to not have hip-hop studies is to offer an incomplete education.”

So what is it? The answer, Ms. Herron (Merron?), is precisely that pop culture permeates the world of young Americans. Why pursue even more of it in college? Learn new things. Get what you can't get just living in the world soaking up the things you naturally love and enjoy. What is the point of going to college?

Harry Connick Jr. is "pleased with the way [he] handled the situation."

Australia is a little different from America. There was Connick, guest judging on "Hey Hey It's Saturday"....

Four men in blackface and with Afro wigs sang and danced behind a Michael Jackson impersonator wearing white makeup. Connick gave the performance a zero score....

Some Australians said they were embarrassed such a racist sketch had been broadcast, while others said detractors were too politically correct and that the skit was funny.

Connick said he canceled an autograph session and interviews in Sydney after the show to let the controversy die down.

ADDED: Here's the video of the performance and Connick's handling of the situation. (Via MadisonMan, in the comments.)

The Obamas selected a work of art that's an outright copy of Matisse — done by an African-American woman.

Michelle Malkin shows the 2 pictures side-by-side and reprints this bilge from Art in America:

A good place to begin thinking about Alma Thomas’s ravishing late work might be the moment in 1964 when, close to paralysis and bedridden, the 73-year-old artist found herself staring at the hollyhock shadows she had known her entire life and calculating how to use them in her paintings. A year earlier, she had seen the late Matisse cutouts at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Matisse’s work had prompted her to paint an acrylic-on-canvas version of his collage The Snail (1953), in which nearly all the original colors were reversed. Thomas named her painting Watusi (Hard Edge), after Chubby Checker’s dance hit “The Watusi.” As well as marrying high modernism with the popular culture of black America — then entering the American mainstream — the title she chose noted Matisse’s debt to African art.

You know, the dance hit, which is actually titled "Wah-Watusi," was by The Orlons. It's not a Checker hit (though he may have covered the song). The Orlons are black too though, so it's as if it doesn't even matter to Art in America, as it makes up its inane explanation of what the old woman was doing.

Anyway, it's really sad to see this sentimental stretching to identify African-American artists. There are plenty of real ones, and mistakes like this make it seem as though there are not and that patronizing — which really ought to be called racism — is necessary.

"Naomi was the first. She was the great ambassador for all black people. She broke down all the social barriers."

Naomi Sims, the model, dead at the age of 61.

Two images of Ms. Sims — one from the 1967 Times fashion magazine cover and the other from a 1969 issue of Life — are in the current Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition “The Model as Muse.” In a catalog, the curators Harold Koda and Kohle Yohannan wrote, “The beautifully contoured symmetry of Sims’s face and the lithe suppleness of her body presented on the once-exclusionary pages of high-fashion journals were evidence of the wider societal movement of Black Pride and the full expression of ‘Black is Beautiful.’ ”...

In 1972, the producers of the movie “Cleopatra Jones” sought to cast Ms. Sims in the title role, but she turned it down because, she said, she was offended by its racist portrayal of black people....

In 1973, Ms. Sims decided to start her own business. As a model, she often did her own hair and makeup, since many studio assistants were unfamiliar with working with darker skin. And she noticed that most commercially available wigs were designed for Caucasian hair, so she began experimenting with her own designs, baking synthetic hairs in her oven at home to create the right texture to look like straightened black hair. Within five years, her designs, produced by the Metropa Company, had annual sales of $5 million.

"I have a little confession: I don't like ['A Change is Gonna Come']."

Kim Cosmopolitan confesses (in the Throwing Things recap of last night's "American Idol" finale):

I'm sure that flags me as a social reactionary or something, but I don't like the song...

Ha ha. Yeah. I do like that song so I don't have that problem, but I certainly would be careful about expressing dislike of it. (Lyrics. Here's Sam Cooke singing it. And here's Adam Lambert singing it in last night's finale.)

It's like: Don't you care about civil rights? Really: Don't you hate when there's some work of art — e.g., "Schindler's List" — that you don't even want to risk looking at with a neutrally critical eye? Don't you hate when a work of art comes to you encrusted with moral/political importance that denies you the freedom to say it's bad? Well, say it's bad then! Fight back. It's a matter of moral and political importance.

Anyway, back at Throwing Things, Adam responds to Kim:

I'm just going to assume that the people who don't like Adam will find his "A Change Is Gonna Come" indulgent. I guess I was hoping for that little wink that acknowledged the gravity of the change Sam Cooke was singing about and which Lambert presumably was connecting with in his own interpretation. But he cut both the "too hard living but I'm afraid to die" and "go downtown"/"don't hang around" verses, the latter of which especially would have brought that home, and so what we were left with was a song sung well but without the depth that could have made it transcendent. What change, Adam?

Transform a song about black people into a song about gay people? Gay people aren't born by the river in a little tent. Would you buy a glammed up gay guy asking for sympathy for his troubles in words written about poverty and race discrimination? I guess it's possible to do that, but also probably in bad taste to horn in on the unique suffering memorialized in "A Change Is Gonna Come."

"I heard a couple new-sounding tunes on the tubes and they blasted me sky-high..."

I was thinking about that lyric from the Lovin' Spoonful song "Nashville Cats" this morning as we were talking about the old days when you might stay up late at night to pick up the signal of a distant radio station that played music that you couldn't hear during the day.

In that song, John Sebastian sings of a radio station that captivated him when he was 13:

And the record man said every one is a yellow Sun
Record from Nashville
And up north there ain't nobody buys them
And I said, but I will

And so the boy from the north fell in love with country music. Me, back in the mid-1960s, I liked some college radio station that came in from Fort Wayne, Indiana. I heard songs they didn't play on WABC in New York City. Indiana seemed like a cooler place than NYC. (Oddly, I still think that sometimes.)

I used to write down the names of the artists they played that I'd never heard before. I remember, listening that way, late at night, hearing "I Got You Babe" for the first time and wrote down "Sonny and Cher."

That was my little experience. Did you have anything like that?

Consider this:

Dewey Phillips was on the air in Memphis around 1950. He was an anomaly at the time: a white DJ spinning regional rhythm and blues hits for black audiences. Rick Wright says Phillips and his African American contemporaries up the dial on Memphis' WDIA helped elevate disc jockeying to an art form.

People like Nat Turner, a young B.B. King, and, one of Wright's favorites, Rufus Thomas. "Now, Rufus comes in, 'Hey baby, this is Rufus Thomas, WDIA Memphis, Tennessee, where you can cop a smile about a quarter mile provided you've got time and don't mind this drive time line we're gonna try.'

Wright says that one Nashville station, WLAC Nashville was owned by the Life and Casualty Insurance Company - L-A-C. He says that that station would take this music and this DJ style to places it had never been. He says the course of American cultural history was changed one Saturday.

"And they were playing, basically, records by Guy Lombardo or whatever and it was that era of a 50,000-watter trying to find itself with no audience," says Wright. "And there were some African American students from Fiske University who had gotten past the security and got up to the station and brought a bunch of 78s with them."

And they walked into the studio and started talking to the DJ. "Mr. Nobles, can you play some of our folks' records on your radio show?"

And Nobles said sure, hand them over. Records of Fats Domino and Little Richard, Chuck Berry and Etta James, Laverne Baker.

And he played them.

"All of sudden," says Wright, "the phone started to ring, and the letters and cards were coming from all over the place. And they established that night, one of the real, first, mainstream R&B formats on a major powerhouse radio station. WLAC 1510 Blues Radio Nashville, Tennessee. The only full time R&Ber at night with 50,000 watts."

At night, 50,000 watts get you very far. Bob Dylan has said he owes much of his musical inspiration to listening to WLAC as young teenager all the way up in Minnesota.

***

It was the "Moonstruck" clip that I blogged last night that set me off thinking about Cher and the first time I ever heard her sing. It was observed that I love Cher, and I confessed to my longstanding affection for the durable diva. I loved Cher since the first time I heard 'I Got You Babe' on a radio station from Fort Wayne, Indiana, I said.

I remembered answering some questionnaire at the time about what famous person I would like to be. It was 1965, so I was 14. I said Cher. And it wasn't just that I wanted to be a female pop star. I was entranced by the strong affection that Sonny and Cher showed each other when I saw them on TV.

I searched YouTube for an early appearance — perhaps their first national TV appearance — when the two were singing IGYB while sitting at a little table. They were petting and kissing — a real public display of affection. There are, of course, a lot of clips of them doing that song, but I couldn't find that one or any other where they were transgressively pawing at each other, the PDA I'd seen when I was just 14.

So let me go in a completely different direction and show you this instead:

I GOT YOU BABE

"It was supposed to be a homage to the American lifestyle and the new U.S. President."

We noticed that American products and the American way of eating are trendy at the moment. Americans are more relaxed. Not like us stiff Germans, like [Chancellor Angela] Merkel."

Re Obama-Fingers, the German fried chicken product.

Oh, yes, we are relaxed... until we're not.

And, by the way, not only are your chicken fingers racist, calling your Chancellor "stiff" is sexist. And if you think I'm stiff for saying that bitching about a woman's stiffness is sexist, that is doubly sexist.

Speaking of Robin...

"'Rockin' Robin,' even with the little dances [Megan Corkrey] does, I hate to death. She looks like she's having an emotional fear breakdown in the middle of things, I think she forgets some words, the little dances stop looking funny and weird and just look stupid, and her voice goes from weird and intriguing to shrieky and horrible and desperate. That sucks, I was really looking forward to her doing something cool and then she did the dumbest fucking thing she could think of. Oh my goodness it sounds terrible, man. And then at the end she goes, 'Caw! Caw!' like just to let you know she meant it to sound horrible. It's gloriously WTF and almost earns back my respect. What on earth is she thinking? Kara's like, 'Well, I guess that is your personality, which is nice.'"

And yet it was Jasmine that America sent home this week. Jasmine and Jorge, the persons of color, will be dismissed first this year, and Megan — per Paula — "is pretty enough to be safe this week." Anoop too must be dismissed, and soon will have just li'l Lil and all those white people.

Sorry, to play the race card on "American Idol." (Argue with me and I will dig in and stand my ground.)

But Jasmine did suck and so did Jorge and Anoop. Worse than Megan, really, because Megan — beautiful white girl though she is — has found an original and bizarre way to be bad and that's entertaining. (Watch it here.) How astounding that a girl that pretty thinks she needs to find a new way to amuse us. Kudos to Megan!

So: The race problem this season is not caused by America's failure to vote for the nonwhite contestants. It is caused by the judges' fear of an excessively white final 12 and their consequent padding of the final group — expanded to 13 — with persons of color who just plain didn't deserve it.