Melissa Harris-Perry: Public Intellectual

• • journalism

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I’m more than a little heartbroken at the news today about Melissa Harris-Perry’s departure from MSNBC. Her show is set to record on my DVR each weekend. Mostly on weekends, I’m running errands or sometimes at church or just somewhere else when her show airs but I always – always – watch it later (skipping the commercials, thank you DVR). Harris-Perry’s has become for me a kind of touchstone for Where We Are Now in the nation in terms of race, gender and a range of social justice issues. Melissa Harris-Perry is also a the North Star for what it means to  a scholar-activist-journalist in the digital era.

“Probably my biggest angst about being an academic is that question of whether or not it makes a difference beyond just your students in the classroom,” Harris-Perry said during a 2012 interview.

Melissa Harris-Perry is, in many ways, a 21st century scholar-activist. She is a respected scholar, a professor of politics and international affairs at Wake Forest University, an activist, and until this weekend, her eponymous talk show on the MSNBC news network gave her a wide reach beyond the traditional classroom.

Calling Harris-Perry the “foremost public intellectual today,” Ta-Nehisi Coates described her show this way:

“[it] brings a broad audience into a classroom without using dead academic language and tortured abstractions”.

Her weekend morning show routinely featured two hours of scholars, activists, journalists, and documentary filmmakers from diverse range of backgrounds discussing the social issues of the day. To augment the conversation further, the show’s producers also curated a conversation on the Twitter hashtag #nerdland, evoking her – and her audience’s – identification as ‘nerds.’

Twenty years ago, leading academic thinker Ernest Boyer, in his famous remarks on the ‘scholarship of engagement’, conjured a show very much Harris-Perry’s when he sought to reimagine the weekend news show of that day, Washington Week in Review, when he wrote:

I find it fascinating, for example, that the provocative Public Broadcasting Service program Washington Week in Review invites us to consider current events from the perspective of four or five distinguished journalists who, during the rest of the week, tend to talk only to themselves. I’ve wondered occasionally what Washington Week in Review would sound like if a historian, an astronomer, an economist, an artist, a theologian, and perhaps a physician, for example, were asked to comment (Boyer, 1996, p. 25).

What Boyer instinctively knew, and what Melissa Harris-Perry has demonstrated, is that there are productive, vibrant and interesting conversations to be had across traditional lines of journalism or academia and that at least some segment of the public is interested in listening to these. Harris-Perry extended this a step further by regularly inviting grassroots activists on to her show for conversation with journalists, scholars of all kinds, artists and filmmakers.

The fact that many of her guests were people of color, including many African American women, meant that Harris-Perry created a unique and much-needed space within the mostly white and male set of guests on mainstream and cable news shows. Each of her carefully curated and produced shows made liars out of those who only schedule white men (and some white women) as guests, experts and pundits because they “can’t find” people of color to book.

It may have been her critical stance on race and gender that MSNBC executives objected to. There are some reports suggesting that it was a proposed segment on the recent Beyoncé video that prompted MSNBC executives to cancel her show. Of course, Melissa Harris-Perry has not been with out her missteps on the race, such as the cringe-worthy interview with Rachel Dolezal.

Still, Melissa Harris-Perry’s critical and mostly spot-on takes about racism for four years at MSNBC have marked an important shift in the culture. For the four years her show was on the air, an African American woman and a public intellectual led a conversation that elevated the public sphere by bringing in new voices to the conversation that most cable news viewers rarely get to hear. Her show also did the kind of thing that Ernest Boyer imagined twenty years ago, by bringing together people from a range of backgrounds, scholars, activist, journalists and filmmakers.

The decision by MSNBC to effectively disappear Melissa Harris-Perry and her show is a loss for us all and diminishes the public sphere. It also serves as a reminder that being a public intellectual on a corporate-controlled platform is always a Faustian bargain.

 

Engaging with Black Feminist Thought

• • women of color

One of the reasons for the persistent misreading of contemporary digital feminist activism, such as this unfortunate piece on the supposedly “toxic” atmosphere on Twitter for some feminists, is a lack of reading, understanding and deep intellectual engagement with black feminist thought by the vast majority of white women and most white feminists. By ‘deep intellectual engagement,’ I mean going beyond pulling a selective Audre Lorde quote out every once in awhile, like ‘caring for myself is not self-indulgence…it is an act of political warfare ‘ to justify a spa day. (Afrofeminist Nigerian journalist SpectraSpeaks has a wonderful piece of writing here about the distinction between self-care as revolutionary or individualistic.)

And, to perhaps state the obvious, the (mostly) white-male-tech elite which is ascendant in building and theorizing the web has very little interest in engaging with feminist perspectives on technology, and black feminist perspectives are nonexistent in this realm. So, as something of a corrective, I offer these resources.

Back in November, 2013 PoliticoMagazine featured a cover story by Michelle Cottle, titled “Leaning Out: How Michelle Obama Became a Feminist Nightmare.”  In response to this piece, Melissa Harris-Perry, the public intellectual tour de force,  responded with a smackdown to Cottle in her regular ‘open letter’ segment and offered a ‘syllabus’ of suggested reading in black feminist thought for Cottle and the other white feminists she represents. Yesha Callahan at Clutch Magazine was good enough to pull all those books out, list the author, full title and links for easy, scrolling and clicking access to Professor Harris-Perry’s syllabus:

And, if you’d like a video supplement to your learning experience, I remind you of this wonderfully engaging dialogue between Melissa Harris-Perry and bell hooks, which took place at The New School, November 8, 2013 (1:36):

What do you think? How has black feminist thought shaped your work, your activism, your scholarship? Are you new to these ideas? Intimidated about jumping in?

Pat Buchanan Out, Melissa Harris-Perry In at MSNBC

• • African Americans, media, news

There are some big changes happening at MSNBC. Melissa Harris-Perry will host her own weekend show on the network, starting in February.  Harris-Perry is a professor of political science at Tulane University, where she is founding director of the Anna Julia Cooper Project on Gender, Race, and Politics in the South. She’s also the author of Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America. Harris-Perry has been a frequent guest on other MSNBC shows where she is offers a consistently strong analysis on progressive issues and a cogent critic of the racism in mainstream politics.

This is the first time that an African American woman has had her own show on MSNBC.  Harris-Perry follows in the footsteps of other African American firsts, including Carol Jenkins whose career included 23 years as co-anchor of the 6 p.m. newscast and her own local show.

During the same week, MSNBC announced that Pat Buchanan is “out indefinitely” at the network. We’ve written quite a lot about Buchanan’s racism here (and here and here and here) before, so of course, it’s not a surprise to us or regular readers here that Buchanan has some pretty deplorable views. He’s also been the focus of an ongoing campaign by progressive organizations CREDO and ColorofChange to have MSNBC to remove him from airing those views on a major cable news outlet.

What is surprising, and indeed refreshing, is that over the weekend, MSNBC President Phil Griffin announced that Buchanan would not be allowed on the air indefinitely after the release of his latest book, Suicide of a Superpower, and has not decided whether to allow the commentator to return.  Deadline‘s Ray Richmond first reported that Griffin was unhappy with Buchanan’s book, and had not made a final decision on whether he would be back on MSNBC:

Griffin told me after the panel, “I don’t think the ideas that [Buchanan] put forth [in the book] are appropriate for national dialogue on MSNBC. He won’t be coming back during the book tour.” Will Buchanan be back at all? “I have not made my decision,” replied Griffin, who did say he will be tinkering with the network’s format as the year goes on. Pat’s a good guy. He didn’t like [being removed from the air], but he understood.”

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) was the most recent civil rights group to join the effort to drop Buchanan. The ADL noted that Buchanan’s book includes racist and anti-Semitic remarks, among them claims that America is being damaged “ethnically, culturally, morally, politically” by the rise in minority populations and the lament that the “European and Christian core of our country is shrinking.” MSNBC President Griffin described the ideas Buchanan expressed in his book as not being “really appropriate for national dialogue, much less the dialogue on MSNBC.”

I couldn’t agree more with Griffin on this point. This is part of the argument that we’ve been making about Buchanan for a long time here.  It’s not a free speech issue to take away Buchanan’s platform. He doesn’t have a constitutional right to a spot as a commentator on a cable news show. By allowing him to air his views, the network effectively skews the terms of the debate to the far-right for viewers of that show.  While it’s quite possibly (likely even) that Buchanan will find a welcome audience for his views over at FoxNews, I still think it’s the right decision (if belated) for MSNBC to suspend him.  Griffin should look seriously into Buchanan’s views over the long term and make the next right decision, which is to fire him.

The combination of these shifts at MSNBC – Buchanan out, Harris-Perry in – signal a shift in the direction of a major news outlet.  Only time will tell if this contributes to a shift in the conversation about race at the network and in the broader arena of mainstream political discourse.