Social Text

"Will I Die Before They Get To Know Me?"

2010-07-29T14:30:33Z

"Will I Die Before They Get To Know Me?" From J. Cole to Oscar Grant III

"Will I live or will I die before they get to know me? If I go, I know the ones that's pourin' liquor for me ... "

-J. Cole, "Can I Live?" The Warm Up

While rappers from Kanye West to Jay Z have celebrated Obama's ascent to the US Presidency as a victory for black people and for the prospect of democracy in the US, more broadly, J. Cole remains unconvinced that we have entered the age of Hope, as he makes clear on "I Get Up," the sixth track from his standout mixtape, The Warm Up:

We raisin' babies in Hades, where it ain't no Hope...Politicians hollerin' 'bout problems,
but I ain't gon' vote. Keep talkin' 'bout Change, we floatin' in the same ol' boat.

Like the Notorious B.I.G. and Nas before him, J. Cole's lyricism centers on the unlikely prospect of individual success in a gothic underworld defined by corrupt social institutions ("like a corpse six feet, shit's deep," "Grown Simba"; "My mind's elsewhere: my mom's health care. To get out this hell, here," "I Get Up"). J. Cole specializes in elaborating an unruly cityscape where death is familiar, making fantasies of bling desirable (where social reproduction lies in the slim possibility that some of the "seeds" he and members of his cohort manage to help produce might survive to see a brighter tomorrow; where he and his peers might live on in legends told by the women they too often reduce to accessories and vehicles for sexual satisfaction, despite the longing they routinely express for a partner who could appreciate the social and psychological suffering that defines their plight). Precisely because J. Cole doesn't consider himself to be much interested in electoral competition or protest politics, I was struck by a single line from, "Can I Live," that echoes ominously in the aftermath of Oscar Grant III's tragic death: "He didn't even get a chance to run before the bullet hit his lung."

In the first few hours of 2009, Johannes Mehserle stood over, shot and killed, Grant, as the twenty-two year-old father lay face down on Oakland's Bay Area Transit platform, while another officer kneeled on the young man's neck. The bullet passed through Grant's torso and hit the ground before bouncing back into his lung, ending his life some hours later. In courtroom testimony, Mehserle maintained that he meant to reach for his taser but mistakenly drew his semi-automatic handgun, although he was wearing his taser on the left side and his .40 caliber on the right side of his body, and despite the fact that the former weighs about half as much as the latter.

On July 8, 2010, Mehserle was convicted of involuntary manslaughter, marking the first time in the history of the state of California that a police officer has been convicted for shooting and killing an unarmed African American man, although it happens at an alarming rate. What some onlookers view as a just conviction was met with widespread disappointment and diverse methods of protest. Supporters of Grant, legal experts, and grassroots activists hoped the jury would return a verdict of second-degree murder or, perhaps, voluntary manslaughter. But then, Mehserle's defense team had insisted in pretrial correspondence, apparently with far-reaching effects, that the presiding judge should instruct the jury to limit its deliberations to either second-degree murder or acquittal. Even more unsettling, Michael Rains, counsel for the defense, managed to have each potential African American juror removed from consideration for the trial based on the dubious rationale that Oakland's black residents cannot be expected to deliver an unbiased verdict in a criminal trial involving a police officer suspected of violent conduct. The kind of shooting J. Cole writes about (involving miscellaneous "niggas" and rival drug crews) would seem wholly different from police violence wielded by a state employee, except that we are too often discussing "accidental shootings," in either case.

Particularly in the 1990s, when hip hop began to enjoy unprecedented commercial success, rap lyrics became increasingly preoccupied with the violence that derived from urban narcotics firms that used high-powered assault weaponry to eliminate competition from prized blocks and alleyways. While this violence is structural in scope, an offshoot of the dramatic increase in potential profits associated with crack cocaine (which required little investment compared to its promised dividends) was that innocent people sometimes got caught in the crossfire when rival drug crews went at it. Recall: the innocent honor student cut down in a hail of stray bullets became a familiar media archetype during this period.

But, while people easily become irate when faced with the fatal consequences of drug violence, they are not always as outraged by police violence. This tension is especially acute in cases like the one involving Oscar Grant, where suspicion too often falls on the young people who fit a particular profile and not the police officers who exhibit questionable behavior. If lazy law enforcement officials see fit to harass, detain, and abuse young African Americans who are statistically more likely to commit certain kinds of crimes, it's worth asking how we might view and assess Johannes Mehserle's behavior on January 1, 2009 given his own documented history of violence. Here's a Freakonomics question worth pondering: what is the statistical probability that a police officer alleged to have beaten one African American man, Kenneth Carrethers, in an unprovoked attack so severely that he required hospitalization would kill another African American man some weeks later under troubling circumstances?

Since so many scholars remain convinced that apathy defines the political ethos of the hip-hop generation, it's worth asking if J. Cole's lyricism might help enrich discussion about the implications the Oscar Grant case will have for people in his demographic category. What does it mean for members of an entire demographic to worry about being murdered in cold blood by the police? What is your perception of politics when you feel like there is little difference in being killed by a stray bullet, a drug dealer, and a law enforcement official? Elsewhere in "Can I Live," J. Cole promises to keep "rhyming until his heartbeat drop[s]" like the "phone" that falls from the hand of his street protagonist's mother "when she heard the news," as he favors lyrics that are riddled with elegies for fallen comrades ("More blacks singin' more blues. More niggas pourin' more brews. Pour dude, he was young, like, twenty-one. Straight up out that city that I'm from"). His swagger is defined by tales of masculine conquest, sexually and lyrically; still, in the aftermath of a fatal gunshot, the characters in his scenes convey an anguish that is even more acute than their audacity:

"Breathe, nigga," his nigga screaming, "Don't you fuckin' leave, nigga!"

He took off his shirt, tryin' to stop the bleedin', nigga

One wonders what went through the mind of Grant's friends who watched him plead with Mehserle not to fire, as the Oakland police officer's partner derided him as a "bitch-ass nigga." Here hip-hop meets a different genre of masculine violence, leading us to wonder whether Grant shared J. Cole's critique of Obama. Did Grant help to elect the President who claimed victory two months before he was tragically killed, and who was inaugurated several weeks after his untimely demise? I can't help but wonder whether Oscar Grant shared J. Cole's skepticism, whether he was more hopeful.

And whether it matters anymore.

Michael Ralph teaches in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. His scholarship on crime, economics, political transformation and urban youth culture has been published in Public Culture, Social Text, Souls, Transforming Anthropology, Afrique et Développement and South Atlantic Quarterly.

Read more about the shooting of Oscar Grant and watch the press conference held by Oscar Grant's family here.

Photo by Thomas Hawk.

The Decision

2010-07-29T14:28:42Z

As a scholar who is deeply intrigued by both the ingredients and political consequences of public opinion, I often gauge public sentiment by simply reading the status messages and posts of my friends on Facebook and Twitter. These social media tools are excellent indicators of what people are angry about, intrigued by, and concerned with. While most of the country came to a halt waiting to hear Lebron James publicly announce which city would become the new home to his basketball greatness, I chatted with a small group of fellow scholar activists who work on the politics of punishment waiting to hear about a different kind of decision. Our discussions often focus on how the nexus of race, crime, and the law structures the political experiences of people of color in the United States and increasingly, across the world. Yet on this day we waited to hear the verdict in the case of former Oakland BART police officer Johannes Mehserle who was charged with killing an unarmed African American man named Oscar Grant III. Much like prominent media outlets CNN, ESPN, Fox News, and MSNBC, most of the Facebook status messages barely mentioned the Mehserle verdict. Most debated what it would mean to Lebron James's legacy if he left his hometown of Cleveland, how it would boost the party scene in the host city, and how much money a "vintage" Lebron jersey could bring on ebay.

An all-white jury deliberated for less than six hours before finding Mehserle guilty of involuntary manslaughter, a conviction that can carry an enhanced sentence of two to fourteen years. Two years for a tragic murder that was captured by multiple cellphones and transmitted across the world via YouTube. Two years for shooting a twenty-two year old man who lay facedown. As the verdict came down my husband reminded me that a year earlier former NFL wide receiver Plaxico Burress received a two year sentence for accidentally shooting himself at a New York nightclub. Two years.

This video shows the shooting of Oscar Grant as recorded by witnesses.

As Oakland residents took to the streets decrying what they viewed as another incident in a long history of police brutality, national media outlets focused on the outrage of Cleveland residents who burned jerseys, shouted obscenities, and questioned Lebron James's integrity.

Even the Reverend Jesse Jackson, who has built a career championing the rights of disenfranchised people, chose not to address the verdict. Jackson and others remained silent, missing a chance to comment on the alarming number of unarmed civilians who die at the hands of police officers each year. Instead, Reverend Jackson spoke out against Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert for treating Lebron as a runaway slave who had escaped the control of his master. On the surface it appeared that America's thirst for entertainment exceeded its appetite for justice.

Perhaps we have become so immune to this state-sanctioned violence that it no longer captures our interest. Perhaps we are so overwhelmed by the stories of Tyrone Brown, Sean Bell, Robbie Tolan, Amadou Diallo, Rodney King, and now Oscar Grant that seeing a successful young African American man like Lebron James take control of his future and excel on his own terms provides an opportunity to exhale and enjoy the comfort of possibility. But the juxtaposition of these two announcements is too great to ignore. It is a signal that even in this mythical "post-racial" era racialized acts of violence and injustice are deeply entrenched in the American experience. The reality is that race has and will continue to shape interactions between citizens and police officers. The task now comes in determining how it will matter and what measures must be enforced in order to protect members of our communities from the overwhelming fear that seems to structure interactions between the two.

It is a fear that prevents community members from respecting law enforcement and silences suffering under the admonition to "stop snitching." It is a fear that leads police officers in post-Katrina New Orleans to murder unarmed civilians whose only crime was attempting to cross a bridge to escape death, only to meet it at the hands of the very people sworn to protect and serve them. It is a fear that leads state legislators to devote more resources to controlling criminals than educating children. The murder of Oscar Grant III reminds us that we must commit ourselves to doing the work in the present that will ensure a fairer, more equitable and violence free future for our children where they won't grow up fearing police officers who see Black and think criminal.

Part of that work involves renewed dedication on the part of the Department of Justice and its Civil Rights Division to aggressively enforce the Civil Rights Act of 1871 that punishes state representatives who deprive Americans of their rights. Chief among those rights must be freedom from injury and death at the hands of judicial officers who abuse their use of force powers. As the US continues to grapple with economic downturns, rising anti-immigrant sentiment, and increased concerns over domestic terrorism, we can expect a steady increase in interactions between police officers and communities of color. What we should not expect and cannot tolerate is a justice system that continues to stratify the life chances of young people based on race.

Khalilah L. Brown-Dean teaches in the Departments of Political Science and African American Studies at Yale University. Brown-Dean has been featured as a political analyst, advisor, and commentator for CNN, PBS, NPR, The Wall Street Journal, Crisis Magazine, Democracy Works, and The Sentencing Project.

Old Wounds and New Pain

2010-07-29T14:26:43Z

The past can be like an old wound that never heals, especially when the scab keeps being picked. In the wake of Oakland transit cop Johannes Mesherle's recent involuntary manslaughter conviction for the on-duty shooting death of unarmed, 22 year-old Oscar Grant, the injury of his death and so many black men before him is as raw and bloody now as it was the day they were killed.

The pain runs deep not just because another mother lost her son to a quick-triggered cop, or because no black jurors were yet again allowed to stand in judgment of a white man, or because some observers claim that Grant's prior trouble with the law made him a willing partner to his own summary execution. The hurt runs deep because at the root of the outcry over the failure to get a murder conviction for another willing executioner of a black man is the painful reminder, and concurrent denial, of the cheapness of black life in America.

Just remembering the horrors of slavery or the tragedy of Scottsboro in this context is enough to make many want to scream, holler, burn, and pillage. And yet such hot memories are too often soothed by the cool comfort of our post Civil Rights, post Jim Crow triumphalism. However, by the measure of police brutality outside of the South, not much has changed.

In a 1929 Illinois Crime Survey, researchers found that African Americans made up 30 percent of the recorded police killings but only 5 percent of the population. In one case, for example, a manhunt for a sixteen-year-old Chicagoan accused of breaking a restaurant window, ended with police entering his home without a warrant, guns blazing. Alfred Lingle died in a hail of thirty-five bullets.

North of the Mason-Dixon Line unlawful police violence has produced long suffering in silence. In response to a 1930 federal report of police brutality, Lawlessness in Law Enforcement, which highlighted conditions in the Jim Crow South, members of the Philadelphia black press cried foul. They told officials that the report prominently covered brutality in the "uncivilized wilds of Mississippi," but had ignored several alarming cases in the urban North: the local beating of a sick elderly black woman; the torture of a man "choked, hung upside down, his joints twisted and told that Negroes should be treated like dogs; and the "drag net" arrests and beatings of blacks on the "steps of their own homes."

There is a thin blue line separating the past from the present, as evident by the arrest of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. on the steps of his own Cambridge home last summer; the perjury and obstruction of justice conviction last month of Jon Burge, former Chicago Police Commander, accused along with dozens of other officials in the abuse or torture of nearly 200 African Americans arrested between the 1970s and 1990s; and the recent federal indictment of six New Orleans officers charged in connection with the execution-style shootings of six unarmed Katrina victims, two of whom died.

Society's enduring denial of police repression in black communities inflicts the most harm, ripping off the scab of racial injustice every time an officer's humanity is affirmed by the presumption of innocence and little to no punishment. In Mesherle's case as was true for the officers acquitted in the killings of Amadou Diallo and Sean Bell, it is the innocence of fear of black men that decriminalizes murder in police killings, rendering them tragic "accidents."

Fear affirms the shared humanity of all who presume the guilt of black men. The burden of blackness is to prove one's innocence, to justify one's humanity; the privilege of whiteness is to take both for granted.

Recall New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's smear that the slain Patrick Dorismond was "No altar boy" after he was goaded into a fight with undercover narcotics agents (later acquitted) while innocently and soberly minding his own business.

"Again? Again? Again?" were the anguished cries of Dorismond's mother as she mourned, side by side, with Kadiatou Diallo at Sean Bell's funeral in 2006.

Wanda Johnson, the mother of Oscar Grant, now feels the sharp sting of the scab pulling from an old and festering wound. We hear her cries of pain, "my son was murdered," linking her to a troubling past and present.

As for the future, in order for wounds to heal scabs must not be allowed to form. Wounds must be thoroughly cleaned, properly treated, and vigilantly monitored for healthy tissue to grow.

Khalil Gibran Muhammad teaches in the Department of History at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is the author of The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America (Harvard).

Photo by Ayesha Walker and Youth Radio.

Justice for Oscar Grant

2010-07-29T14:24:50Z

"Justice for Oscar Grant!" As I sit in front of these keys I know that I could have written this essay 100 times before and will likely need to write it 100 more times before I die, simply because I knew there would be no justice for Oscar Grant. Justice for most would have been a conviction of Officer Mesherle on a second degree murder charge, but that still would not equal justice -- that would simply be a small step on the path towards justice. Justice is larger than the Oscar Grant case, the Sean Bell case, or any of the host of assassinations of unarmed Black men by the police. Justice is about their totality and the space that lies between popular unshakable belief in state innocence and Black male criminality. Justice is knowing and doing something about, as Mos Def said, "the length of Black life [being] treated with short worth." When Oscar grant was killed nearly 2 years ago at the age of 22, he would exit this planet knowing that this society had done him no justice and his family was reminded of that when the jury deliberated for 8 hours, about the misery they will have to cope with the rest of their lives. So many will wonder, is the judicial system even the place to look for justice?

When I found out a verdict was reached quickly, I knew that the charges they found would not be the maximum and prayed that they would find some guilt, but that was a weak prayer. I wanted partial justice, but there is no such thing as partial justice. While we casually throw around the term justice, few of us take time to grapple with its meaning at its core. I've come to my own conclusions on justice that draws sources ranging from John Rawles to George Jackson. At its core, I think justice is the equal distribution of tragedy and triumph. Reading some people's thoughts on Oscar Grant and others reminds me that loss and pain exist, but Black people, particularly poor Black people, get an extra helping of it. What would be more justice than all sharing in suffering? More pressing than that, are we willing to accept what at just society would look like? We will have justice when a child born in Detroit is as likely to go to Harvard as a child born in Greenwich. We will have justice when a twenty-two year old Asian woman is as likely to be executed at point blank range as a twenty-two year-old African American man. It may sound extreme, but the stifling and loss of human life is extreme.

When it comes to daily criminal activity, the judicial system is more concerned with retribution than with rehabilitation. When we look at the justice system as it comes to their own agents, police officers, suddenly the scales are tipped towards reform and away from reality. The increased video monitoring of police abuses seems to matter little in courts where criminality is silently embodied by poor Black men. So where does this leave us? How do I teach my Black brothers and our community that justice is available in this country? We must continue to teach our community so they know their rights when engaged by police so that they can remain safe and strong. We must continue to pressure local municipalities to develop civilian oversight programs. Even as we do this, we have to realize that these are all small scaled and collective action across race, class and gender lines is mandatory. Collective dissatisfaction must be so loud that the mainstream media can no longer ignore the Oscar Grant case or any of the many cases that paint the innocence of the state and the guilt of victims.

I want justice in the courts. I want justice in the community. We will know that we are closer to justice when my unborn children's life paths are determined by their own volitions, not the discretion of police with guns and tasers.

R. L'Heureux Lewis teaches in the Department of Sociology at City College in New York City. His scholarship on race and education has been featured in media outlets such as US World News Report, Diversity in Higher Education, National Public Radio, theRoot.com and the Detroit Free Press.

Photo by Youth Radio.

New from a Social Text Author: The Citizen Machine

2010-07-29T00:51:22Z

The Citizen Machine:

Governing by Television in 1950s America

by Anna McCarthy

Formed in the shadow of the early Cold War, amid the first stirrings of the civil rights movement, the idea of television as a form of unofficial government inspired corporate executives, foundation officers, and other members of the governing classes to imagine TV sponsorship as a powerful new form of influence on American democracy in the postwar years. The Citizen Machine tells the story of their efforts to shape U.S. political culture, uncovering a dense web of fantasies and rationalizations about race, class, and economic power that have profoundly shaped not only television, but our understanding of American citizenship itself.
Published by The New Press and available here.

Communist Objects and the Values of Printed Matter

2010-07-28T18:38:19Z

Following recent research in historical and cultural studies of "the book" and the practitioner field of book arts, the book is now approached no longer only as a vehicle for content but as a rich and mutable material entity. But in this materialist framework, is it possible to discern a politics of the book? This article addresses that question from two angles. First, it sets out a figure for the analysis of political material culture: the "communist object." This figure is developed through Russian Constructivist concern with the "intensive expressiveness" of matter, Walter Benjamin's analysis of the "collector" and his critique of use value, and the confounding capacities of the "fetish." Drawing on the perceptual field of book arts, the article then employs the concept of the communist object to investigate the dynamics of political printed matter, with a focus on the small-press pamphlet. The article concentrates on three contemporary small-press projects of nondoctrinal communist persuasion: Unpopular Books, 56a Archive, and Infopool. Against the anemic image of political media as "counterinformation," the article seeks to develop an expanded understanding of the material culture of political media, an understanding that foregrounds a communism of organic and inorganic process.

MediaShift . Your Guide to Next Generation 'Content Farms' | PBS

2010-07-27T19:24:42Z

The future of online publishing? Content farms.

The Citizen Machine: Governing by Television in 1950s America

2010-07-27T00:48:44Z

The Citizen Machine:
Governing by Television in 1950s America

by Anna McCarthy

Formed in the shadow of the early Cold War, amid the first stirrings of the civil rights movement, the idea of television as a form of unofficial government inspired corporate executives, foundation officers, and other members of the governing classes to imagine TV sponsorship as a powerful new form of influence on American democracy in the postwar years. The Citizen Machine tells the story of their efforts to shape U.S. political culture, uncovering a dense web of fantasies and rationalizations about race, class, and economic power that have profoundly shaped not only television, but our understanding of American citizenship itself.
Published by The New Press.

Kabul War Diary

2010-07-26T13:37:02Z

WikiLeaks has released over 75,000 secret US military reports covering the war in Afghanistan.

Yes Men Release their World Fixing Movie to the World

2010-07-25T02:11:49Z

I don't believe in One Licensing Model for creative works but I do think that the documentary, especially the political documentary, is meant to circulate as far and wide as possible, otherwise what is the point?

It might make sense not to throw it into the wind right away. It might make sense to hold it under copyright while it makes it way through the the festival circuit, hopefully garnering attention but once it is done traveling through the circuit, then it makes sense to open the cage and let the documentary go. So I am really happy to see that the Yes Mean have followed this model. They have not only Fixed the World but Released it to the (Internet accessible) World. I hope this inspires other documentary film makers to follow in their footsteps.

Anna McCarthy: Mad Men, Big Business

2010-07-22T22:33:58Z

Do you like Mad Men? Social Text Co-Editor Anna McCarthy blogs about the show on Huffpo.

Penitenciarul de Femei Tirgsor | punctum.ro

2010-07-22T00:10:01Z

Inmates in a Romanian women's prison photograph their lives.

World Cup 2010

2010-07-21T00:52:44Z

In this dossier, a series of football enthusiasts (who also happen to be social and cultural critics), offer their reflections upon the meaning and significance of the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. Much commentary and controversy has already been generated by this global event, the first World Cup, and indeed the first global sporting event of any significance to be held in "Africa". The specific importance of South Africa as a relatively privileged outpost, what some would describe as an "exceptional" civil and political space on the African continent--lends additional weight and distinctiveness to these reflections. World history from the vantage point of South Africa has been represented as a triumph over the legacies of modern white supremacy and settler colonialism. South Africa's World Cup in turn has been touted by its many boosters as a benchmark in post-apartheid nation-building, and as a showcase for African national competence and good governance that will both advertise and provide a leading indicator for a bright new era of continental development.

The facts on ground, of course, have proven to be messier and more conflicted, even as the conventional narratives and imagery that saturate the event often conform to and reanimate older colonial scripts. Pre-World Cup advertisements on Australian television, for example, depicted the national team, "the Socceroos," training with wild animals of the African bush. Laundered by post-apartheid common-sense, the racist bestiary thus regains its old salience for the 'invention of Africa'. What might be called the sounding of the event as several writers discuss, has been an arena of fundamental contestation, as "Waka-Waka" and the vuvuzela offer competing soundtracks and register a contested history of cultural production and material appropriation that has long been central to both scholarly and popular representations of African realities. A stunning commercial and financial success from the standpoint of FIFA (football's world governing body), and its biggest corporate sponsors (McDonalds, Budweiser, Coca Cola, etc...), for South Africans saddled with 'white elephant' stadia, unpaid public wage bills, and masses of underemployed and workless poor who could not afford the price of the ticket, the 'trickle-down benefits' of the event are far from certain.

Africa's first World Cup in this sense at once signifies and promotes the ascendancy of multicultural neo-liberalism in our own time, bundling together its glittering promise of inclusion for all along with its vicious indifference to a host of new enclosures. Yet, for many who write here who have been engaged in the event these past weeks, football's World Cup cannot be grasped in its complexity if it is cast only as a confirmation of dominance (or merely as a guilty pleasure). For the ardent partisans of national teams, the passionate neutrals, as well as those who get drawn in, in different ways, to the public narratives that cohere around the event, the World Cup indexes something more than the unremitting triumph of corporate capitalism in the train of its colonial past and present. Not only is football, (soccer in the US parlance), arguably the only truly global game, its World Cup, a spectacle consumed by billions of people, takes on an interpretive significance for the entire planet, as its serialized, agonistic form engages in both precise and distorted ways the pressing social questions of our time: the allure and failure of nationalism as a cosmopolitan ideal, the risk and promise of innovation weighed down by a stagnant order of things, the limits of formal equality and the inadequacy of the rule of law to demands for justice, the threat that ever widening circles of human affiliation across borders will beat a xenophobic retreat to virulent realities of marginalization and defeat.

Football in this sense encompasses a geopolitics of affiliation, one with an irreducibly modern historical dimension. Viewed in this light, the presiding trope of "Africa's World Cup," retains a decided ambivalence. The tournament has unfolded in such a way that for the first time in 72 years two European teams will meet in back to back finals; the winner will be the first European nation to win a World Cup played outside of that continent. Michel Platini, the head of UEFA, the European soccer federation, explains these developments in a classically Eurocentric idiom: "we are witnessing a triumph for technical education programs, sound management and good governance... Nothing could be more pleasing than this state of affairs." As columnist Richard Williams pointed out in the Guardian and as Peter Alegi documents in his book African Soccerscapes, Platini characteristically ignores how Europe's soccer federations have prospered in recent decades through the ravenous recruitment of African talent at all levels of the game, with very little return given back for local infrastructural development at the source.

One suspects that the collective feeling, cost accounting and narrative framing in South Africa and elsewhere on the African continent is rather different. For despite the failure of most of the African teams, including South Africa (the first host nation to fail) to advance out of the qualifying rounds, one team, the Black Stars from Ghana (notably the first independent, post-colonial African state), did so, eventually reaching the quarter finals. South Africans across colors and communities quickly transferred their allegiances to the Black Stars in ways that seemed unprecedented to many -- a demonstration of horizontal solidarity and pan-African affiliation that appeared to cut against the grain of both South African exceptionalism and the enduring divisions of the apartheid past. At Soccer City stadium outside Soweto, a crowd of 85,000 (excepting approximately 2000 Uruguay supporters) watched in horror as Ghana were cruelly knocked out by Uruguay, as a result of a Uruguayan field player, Luis Suárez saving a ball off the goal-line with his hand, an egregious breech of the rules of the game, but one that despite being punished with a red card and an award of a penalty kick, delivered the match to Uruguay as a consequence of the Ghanaian players subsequent failure to convert the penalty, and a succession of spot kicks in the penalty shoot out. This event, much like Zinedine Zidane's notorious head butt in 2006, or Diego Maradona's 'hand of god' goal in 1986 arguably constituted the central talking point for the event as a whole. For Suarez's handball highlighted an injustice, indeed a form of cheating, for which the laws of the game provided no definitive remedy. In turn, Ghana was prevented from becoming the first African side to reach a World Cup semi-final, (after which who knows what might have happened?). Instead, with the defeat of (the now locally unloved underdog) Uruguay in the semi-final we were left with the novelty of two of Europe's oldest colonial powers Spain and Holland, neither of whom has ever won the World Cup before, contesting for the ultimate prize on African soil.

One South African blogger of note (who also happens to be my brother) thoughtfully considers this outcome, drawing upon the insights of the celebrated Uruguayan leftist writer and soccer enthusiast Eduardo Galeano. "In football," Galeano writes, "rarities occur. In a world organized around the daily confirmation of the power of the powerful, nothing is rarer than the coronation of the humiliated and the humiliation of the crowned. But in football, at times, this rarest of events does happen." Alas, "rare" remains the operative word. More often the games leave fans hard done by and not only because our teams don't win, or because we must return to our mundane existence. Rather we are dogged by a sense of the unfairness of it all. This is not only because we have spent days, weeks (and eventually years) mesmerized by a highly scripted, corporate-dominated, commodity spectacle. For unlike other serialized forms of mass culture whose generic prescriptions frequently offer comforting confirmation and imaginary resolution, football is fatalistic; its results rarely please. And yet this may also help to explain the peculiar unity that an event like this actually engenders among supporters of all sorts. For apposite the nationalist pageantry of flag waving and face-painting, the beautiful game, particularly when played on the global stage, engenders neither partisanship nor triumphalism among the great majority, but the intimate fellowship and humility of the mutually wronged.

The essays here can hardly begin to chart the still proliferating meanings of this global event, particularly as its narrative threads disperse with returning players and fans across four continents. Inside South Africa, the post-mortems on World Cup 2010 have scarcely begun. Charges of corruption, murky money trails, on-going and impending strikes, rumors of resurgent crime and xenophobia are weighed against a justifiable sense of national achievement and near universal praise for South Africa's astonishing ecumenism and hospitality. With its' coffers lined, FIFA ( an organization that seems a bizarre cross between the Vatican and the IMF) has already charted a relatively short path across the Southern hemisphere to 2014 and Brazil, a country still brimming with recrimination for falling short of a wholly unique expectation to win every World Cup it plays. Outside hapless England, whose golden generation finally withered on the vine, Europe looks on with anticipation and complacency. Elsewhere, Catalunya pauses to give two cheers for Spain. While Asia and Africa still await their champion.

Nikhil Singh is Associate Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at

NYU. He is the author of Black is a Country: Race and the Unfinished

Struggle for Democracy (Harvard, 2004), and editor of Climun' Jacob's

Ladder: The Black Freedom Movement Writings of Jack O'Dell

(California, 2010).

Photo by Karam Singh.

The World Cup in Pictures

2010-07-20T00:35:02Z

Soweto, South Africa - Fans on a train in Soccer City.

Korogwe, Tanzania - Watching the Game.

Maputo, Mozambique - City Streets.

Lusaka, Zambia - Street Dancer.

Johannesburg, South Africa - Standton City Mall Marionettes

Quissico, Mozambique - Footballers and Fans.

Critiquing What We Love

2010-07-20T00:22:20Z

In the run-up to the World Cup, countless advertisements from around the globe began to build the hype for the 2010 tournament in South Africa. The vast majority of these ads - including some mentioned elsewhere in this dossier - displayed a striking consistency in their reliance on tired stereotypes and discourses barely modified from the colonial roots from which they sprang in their portrayal of "Africa's World Cup." One ad, however, deserves a second look for the way it both surfaced and dismissed the broader social and cultural issues underlying the World Cup: titled "United," it features U2's song "Magnificent" with a voice-over by Bono promoting ESPN's coverage of the event.

"It's not about politics," Bono tells us, "or religion, or the economy. It's not about borders, history, trade, oil, water, gas, mineral rights, human rights, or animal rights." By deploying Bono - at once recognizable as both mega-star and outspoken advocate for a neoliberal orientation to solving global social issues - ESPN made his initial assertions both compelling and counterintuitive. He continues to describe, for nearly the full minute length of the ad, what the World Cup is not about: social issues of great importance. Not until the final 12 seconds does the song itself crescendo along with Bono's voice: "This is about the one month, every four years, when we all agree on one thing," Bono concludes. "32 nations. One world watching. 2010 FIFA World Cup." The ad thus declares at once universality for the sport it celebrates and a symbolic space outside of the global and local struggles faced by supposedly unified human beings in everyday life and politics.

"United" thereby manages to surface an ambivalence that has followed the World Cup, and football more generally, for decades. This ambivalence vacillates between seeing football on the one hand as an indicator of broad social trends and of geopolitical intrigue, and on the other as just another form of entertainment, whether played on neighborhood sandlots or in corporate-controlled stadiums. As the province of good family fun or thuggish hooligans; as a source of innocent joy or criminal and financial manipulation. In recent years, a spate of popular and academic books analyzing the game and its importance - from Franklin Foer's How Soccer Explains the World (2004) to Simon Kuper's and Stefan Szymanski 's Soccernomics (2009) to Peter Alegi's African Soccerscapes (2010) - have further contributed to this ambivalence. Is football an escape from the more challenging elements of daily life, a proxy for those struggles, or both?

Nikhil Singh's description of the authors in this dossier as "football enthusiasts (who also happen to be social and cultural critics)" also exposes these tensions. Do those of us who exist within both of these two social categories - football enthusiasts and social/cultural critics - inhabit that space as a contradiction or as a concurrence, particularly during the hype of the World Cup? For fans of the game, this month represents the most intense fluctuations of our addiction, emotionally and even physically, as we re-arrange lives to accommodate as many as four matches per day, often at odd hours if we live in time zones other than where matches are being played. Yet it also represents the moment when our addiction reaches the height of its commoditization, attracting the greatest number of fellow-travelers into the incessant rehashing of matches, their nuances, and their social and political implications, while we often frame our support for one team or another based on some broader claim of postcolonial, moral or aesthetic politics. This is not to say, of course, that football is not political or big business during the intermittent four years, but rather that the commercialization and politicization of football builds to a crescendo, like Bono's voice, during the tournament.

For those of us with deep ties and personal and political commitments to South Africa, these contradictions and concurrences became especially acute during this particular World Cup. The opportunity to witness the tournament here - whether our affiliation with South Africa is by birth or choice - was an opportunity not to be missed. Yet the impact of the Cup on the politics and economy of the host nation, and particularly on the coffers of a government already struggling to provide basic social infrastructure for its people, from health care to a social wage to economic opportunities, remains undeniable. Likewise, the oft-spoken of "vibe" here in South Africa has been equally undeniable, with excitement surrounding the Cup spreading far beyond the hardcore fan base of the sport or the tourist enclaves, most notably toward women in huge numbers across the social spectrum who are often marginalized by men's focus on football. So while accolades pour in for South Africa's successful hosting of the tournament - by FIFA's and the government's particular standards, which appear to concern primarily commercial and security interests - the ambivalence remains around the long-term social and cultural impact. And this ambivalence is felt deeply, rather than as a passing acknowledgment of the abstract complications of our world.

The dilemma is not that these ambivalences exist; the World Cup can be a simultaneously transcendent and prosaic experience, as well as both inclusive and exclusive, in multiple contexts. Rather, the problem arises when the two sides of this ambivalence are imagined as clearly demarcated spaces of physical being or intellectual labor rather than mutually constitutive. The thrill we feel, along with countless others, watching the World Cup is part of what allows the crazy twists of political economy surrounding the tournament; yet, the joy people feel in experiencing the sport and its flagship event cannot be reduced solely to that political economy, or the social dilemmas it both generates and reflects. In other words, the ambivalence must remain alive, in multiple registers, and open to both critique and pleasure.

More than 20 years before the "United" ad, during the states of emergency in South Africa, U2 released their live album Rattle and Hum. In the middle of a track written for Artists United Against Apartheid, Bono pauses to call for sanctions against the apartheid regime. "Am I bugging you?" Bono sardonically asks his audience at the end of his diatribe. "I don't mean to bug you." Now, in 2010, the sarcasm in his question seems to disappear, giving his (new) audience permission to ignore the deeper implications of the Cup and a way out of the ambivalence. Yet for those of us who care about both football and South Africa, this route - while tempting - is far too easy.

Ron Krabill is Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences at the University of Washington Bothell and on the graduate faculty of the Department of Communication at the University of Washington Seattle. He is the author of the Starring Mandela & Cosby: Media and the End(s) of Apartheid, due out from the University of Chicago Press in August. Ron is currently in South Africa leading the UW undergraduates in a course titles, "Critical Perspectives on the 2010 Football World Cup," which includes a community media partnership between Cape Town Community Television, 911 Seattle Media Arts Center, Seattle Sounders FC, and the Simpson Center for the Humanities at UW, wherein small teams of students and young South African media workers are filming short videos on the local impacts of hosting the World Cup.

Photo by Kwame Nyong'o.