‘Keeping It Real’
Photo credit: Candace diCarlo
When Penn President Amy Gutmann introduced anthropologist, author and filmmaker John L. Jackson, Jr. as the University’s first Penn Integrates Knowledge (PIK) professor in April of 2006, she raved that Jackson’s work would bring “new perspectives to bear on our understanding of race, class and visual communication.”
Provost Ronald Daniels added that Jackson embodied “the spirit of the PIK program,” with his “multidisciplinary approach to his study of the experience of black America.”
So Penn was clearly excited to have Jackson.
But Jackson was just as excited to come to Penn.
A summa cum laude graduate of Howard University with a Ph.D. (with distinction) from Columbia University, Jackson, who previously served as associate professor of anthropology at Duke University, says he was attracted to Penn’s big-city atmosphere—as well as Gutmann’s commitment to interdisciplinary study.
“Very few institutions of this caliber can boast the kind of resources, city-wide resources, that cities like Philadelphia can offer,” he says. “I felt like my [future] colleagues at Annenberg and in the Department of Anthropology were talking about issues that intersected well with some of my own interests, so it kind of just felt like the right time to make a move back up to the Northeast to a real city and to continue doing the work I do as an urban anthropologist in a new space.”
Jackson has focused his work on the experience of African Americans and race, authoring such books as, “Harlemworld: Doing Race and Class in Contemporary Black America,” “Real Black: Adventures in Racial Sincerity,” and “Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness.”
At Penn, Jackson serves as the Richard Perry University Associate Professor of Communications and Anthropology, holding joint appointments in the Annenberg School for Communication and School of Arts and Sciences. He is also affiliated with the Center for Africana Studies and blogs for the Chronicle of Higher Education.
The Current recently spoke to Jackson about his background, how he developed his unique expertise, and what his work and research have taught him about the black American experience.
Q. You obtained your bachelor’s degree from Howard University, a historically black university often called the ‘Black Harvard.’ Has there ever been a moment when you felt that degree would not be given its proper respect?
A. Usually the way people frame that question is, ‘Does going to a place like Howard or Hampton [University] actually put you at a disadvantage when it comes to dealing with white America?’ So that’s a kind of different iteration of the same kind of question: ‘Do people not respect it? Do you not get the tools you need to even negotiate these new spaces?’ And I have to tell you, I haven’t felt that way at all. If anything, I would say the exact opposite. I think a lot of scholars of education would probably be able to give you some nice data to support the claim that, really, what Howard allowed me to do is it allowed me to say, ‘Well, let me forget about all of the sort of angst around ‘acting white’ and being considered somehow inferior intellectually. Let me just get the work, let me just learn, let me just understand things,’ which I did. The other thing I realized was at Howard, I got a full scholarship, which I didn’t get at Penn State, which I didn’t get at Hofstra. I’m sure they would have cobbled something together but Howard said, ‘If you come here, we’ll pay for everything.’ And I didn’t want to lose that because I didn’t want to have to go back to Brooklyn. So the first year, I worked as hard as I’ve ever worked at anything in my life. It got to the point where when we were ready for finals, I would just give people my books if they hadn’t purchased them because I already had everything in my notes and I had it down because I didn’t want to fail. That first year I really applied myself more than I ever had at [Brooklyn Technical High School] and once I saw what kind of grades I could get as a function of that, I kind of just kept doing it. And so by the time I left, I had an incredibly good [grade point average]. I think part of what people are seeing is that I went to a [Historically Black College or University], but not just that, I went to a HBCU and really excelled. And I feel like I excelled in the classroom and then did a lot of things outside the classroom, like joining the forensics society and speaking all over the country, that really made me feel confident that I’d be able to interface with all kinds of interlockers in the real world. I feel like, if anything, it shored up my feeling of, not just credentialized authority, but real sort of educational authority because I feel like the stuff I went through at Howard had to stand me up along with the folks who graduate well at any of the top colleges. To this point, no one’s ever tried to make the claim that somehow if I am not up to snuff, it’s because of Howard.
I think that what I saw more than anything when I got to Howard, was the relative advantage that came with going to a school like Brooklyn Tech for high school, and going to what were basically predominately white elementary schools and junior high schools in Brooklyn. I was always in places where the schools were predominately white and the teachers were incredibly well-trained and committed, not just inside of class, but outside of class.
I didn’t meet anyone at Howard who wasn’t incredibly bright, but [some] didn’t have the same kind of training, so they had to kind of retool and figure out how to approach certain kinds of educational and curricular issues that we had already begun to address when I was in high school. It’s not because they weren’t smart enough to do it, but I think it’s because a lot of these schools are so overtaxed and underfunded that they’re not able to provide the full compliment of resources to students that are necessary.
Q. You were a communications major at Howard. So what led you to anthropology at Columbia?
A. I always tease people and say I was brainwashed. But I ended up doing what was the graduate preparation summer program, which was a link between Howard and American University. So that summer they gave us tons of resources, they put us up at American University, they brought in scholars from all around the country to talk to us about what they did throughout the social sciences and the humanities and the natural sciences. And basically they tried to make a pitch, which was, ‘We need more people of color getting Ph.D.s and in the academy.’ I was someone who always enjoyed reading and writing. I was at Howard to be a filmmaker. I grew up in Brooklyn during the moment of Spike Lee. I mean, Brooklyn Tech was around the corner from [Lee’s production company, 40 Acres & A Mule Filmworks]. I wanted to be a filmmaker. I knew that, but I also knew that as someone whose world almost began and ended in the streets of Brooklyn, I needed to know more about the planet to be a good storyteller, to be a good filmmaker, and so I thought, ‘If I am going to get a Ph.D., I might as well get it in a discipline like anthropology,’ because it had the tradition of scholarly commitments to filmmaking and film theory, ethnographic and fictional, actually. And two, because I felt like anthropology was a big enough tent—epistemologically, methodologically—that once I figured out what I wanted to do, what question it was I wanted to ask, I could find a way to call it anthropology. And that’s why I chose that field and that’s why I even chose the academy, because I thought, ‘I need to accumulate more stories. I need to know more about the planet to be able to be an effective filmmaker.’ To have something to say, I thought, besides what I knew from the couple of neighborhoods in Brooklyn where I lived for most of my life.
Q. In your book, ‘Real Black: Adventures in Racial Sincerity,’ you tackle the contemporary insistence on ‘keeping it real,’ and shed light on your own ‘crisis of identity as an anthropologist afraid of field work.’ What was it about anthropology that gave you concern about conducting field work?
A. I think in some ways part of what the current anthropological moment demands is a sort of self-consciousness about the potential pitfalls of ethnographic research, and so I think my concern shouldn’t be reduced to an individual or psychological preoccupation. This is a broader, discipline-wide discussion about what forms of ethnographic practice have to be reconfigured to do justice to the present moment. There’s a figure I create [in ‘Real Black’], a kind of alter ego called Anthroman, and Anthroman was an attempt to talk about, both in decidedly individualized ways and in larger, macro-structural ways, the kind of difficulties one encountered as one tried to do ethnographic research. Now these are usually difficulties that I would argue don’t get thematized enough in methodology classes as a grad student, but that are still important and that have to be negotiated and, to a certain extent, ‘resolved.’ It doesn’t mean resolving them such that they are no longer an issue, it means finding your own idiosyncratic way to keep some of these issues and productive tension enough to allow you to go out and get your data and allow you to think about the world in comprehensive ways. My point really is to simply say anytime you do this research, you’re trucking in all these different sort of trajectories of potentially problematic relationships, sort of conflicts, ideological debates. And what I tried to show was that that’s the stuff ethnography is made of, that’s the stuff that needs to be described and discussed and not simply bracketed out into a seamlessly sanitized ethnographic monograph, which is usually how anthropologists were taught to think about this stuff. So the world is messy, but the final book has to be really neat, tied up with a nice little bow. Part of what I wanted to say was there’s a messiness to the field that actually is what makes it so interesting as a place to think through and with, and that messiness might be usefully translated to the documents or the films that one produces to talk about the cultural worlds that you want to analyze.
Q. What would be some examples of the difficulties or the ‘messiness’ in the field?
A. Even though I tell people I’m an ethnographer and I’m there doing ethnographic research and this is what my agenda [is], people might hear that, but they don’t always remember it, or, think about their own best interests as they divulge some of their deepest, darkest secrets to you, and so one of your jobs is to be an incredibly good self-policer when it comes to ethical concerns, and making sure you’re not just trying to get the data by any means necessary, but you’re also looking out for them, for their safety, for their confidentiality, for their anonymity. You’re trying to take care of your subjects in an ethically, legitimate way. That was one thing that I really tried to make explicit in the text—that these are folks who have given me access in ways that I often found really troubling. No one should know the stuff that you know as an ethnographer. When you look at documentary films, a really good documentary film should make you say, ‘How in the heck did they allow the filmmaker to get this?’ And I think it works because as individuals, we want people to know our stories and we want to trust people with those stories. And anthropology, for better or worse, feeds on that almost existential need. Part of what I try to talk about in the book is the way in which I’m constantly trying to both get the story and do justice to it, but also be protective of these people and their lives. And even though they might today think this is fine for me to say and this is exactly the way I want to talk about it, a year from now they might be mortified at not only what they said, but what then you took it upon yourself to publish and publicize. So that’s one of the issues that I think can be very thorny ethically for an ethnographer.
Q. Have you ever been given a satisfactory definition for what ‘keeping it real’ means from one of your interview subjects?
A. There are a lot of good definitions about what ‘keeping it real’ means. I always bring up the funny Dave Chappelle skit ‘When Keeping It Real Goes Wrong,’ because I do think there’s something about ‘keeping it real’ that is about almost flirting with disaster in a certain kind of way. It’s about a sort of boldness and a fearlessness that says, ‘I’m gonna,’ in a sense, ‘do me.’ In [‘Racial Paranoia’], I try to talk about how hip-hop’s notion of realness is about saying, ‘I’m not gonna let anyone else judge me.’ That realness is about saying, ‘I can judge me and God can judge me.’ That’s sort of Tupac Shakur’s famous credo, ‘Only God Can Judge Me.’ I think that sensibility is in some ways part of what ‘keeping it real’ is. It says, ‘No one else is going to be able to predetermine who and what I am.’ It’s maybe a too hopeful form of agency but I think it demands at its adherence a very specific commitment to self-reliance and to autonomy. I think ‘keeping it real’ is about saying, ‘I’m gonna do what I need to do regardless of how the chips might fall.’ I think the irony, of course, is often ‘keeping it real’ becomes reduced to little more than reproducing the most clichéd stereotypes of blackness, so you’re demanding a sense of individualized autonomy, but you’re performing it in these very stereotypical ways, in ways that are supposed to mesh with these prefabricated categories of black possibility. And I think that’s an interesting tension. But I think the impulse, the sort of ethos at the heart of it is something that says, ‘I’m gonna be bold about who and what I am and I don’t care what anybody thinks.’ And it can go wrong.
Q. ‘Real Black’ also discusses the idea of ‘acting white.’ How did this idea of increased education become such a negative in the black community?
A. We shouldn’t reduce ‘acting white’ to how well someone does in their biology class or in their history class or what their final grades are on their report card. ‘Acting white’ usually gets glossed as that, so if you do well in school, you’re dismissed, you’re delegitimized as trying to ‘act white.’ And what I argue is that a notion of ‘acting white’ in a school context is about so much more than how you do on a test paper, it’s about all the big and small ways we imagine race to be a performative identity. For me, the argument is, it’s only the links that are made between what you’re doing on exams, how you’re behaving in classrooms, how you’re walking in the halls, how you’re behaving on the school grounds. There are all these ways in which every single thing you do in a school context can be racialized, and is racialized as either white or black. And I talk about all this rhetoric around certain things that seem to have no racial inflection at all, intrinsically, being considered white or black, and so there are white and black ways to do everything, to run, to walk, to talk. To make sense of ‘acting white’ is to put the under or overachievement question into that larger context. One thing I try to argue is people are able to negotiate this claim about whiteness being reducible to high test performance in school, but performing in a way, versions of blackness in other parts of their academic or school lives. One thing I show in the book, especially in the first book, ‘Harlemworld,’ is that people are cognizant of the fact that if they do well in school, people are going to be looking to see if they see other signs of white identification or ‘white behavior,’ and can be very subconscious about, in these other venues, performing against the grain of some of those expectations, maybe even, in the worst case scenario, in stereotypical ways. But even still, they can actually have their cake, in some ways, and eat it too. They can do well in school as long as that doesn’t translate into other forms of interpersonal behavior and interaction that also fall in line with stereotypical renditions of what it means to be white. My point is just that we need to flesh out what ‘acting white’ is and recognize it’s not simply about getting an ‘A’ in an exam, it’s about all the different ways in which your everyday behavior gets mined for its potential racialized inflection.
Q. In ‘Racial Paranoia,’ you argue that while the Civil War outlawed slavery, the civil rights movement put an end to legalized segregation, and Americans today are more sensitive than ever when it comes to the words they use to talk about other races and ethnic groups, the country remains as racially divided as ever. So if wars can’t solve America’s race problem, and the courts can’t, how can it ever be solved?
A. What I try to argue in the book is that we need to look at all of the ways we’re able to effortlessly reproduce what’s, in effect, racial segregation in our most intimate social networks. So I think the reason why, even after we’ve outlawed racism and beaten back the most destructive displays of racial hatred from the public sphere, we still have this race-based skepticism is because we recognize two things: One, that in a politically-corrected world, racists who want to be taken seriously know they can’t be racists the ways old school racists were. There was a moment when politicians ran on explicitly racist platforms: ‘Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.’ Even the hint of that kind of adamant racial commitment and racist commitment will get you tarred, feathered and run out of Washington, D.C. in the present moment. There’s something about that that clearly, I think, most of us would say is a good thing and a sign of progress when it comes to racial issues. I think the flip side of that, though, is we still create these sort of racially-homogenous spaces, our most intimate social spaces, in our living rooms among our closest friends and family members, that are the almost Archie Bunker-style race segregated social contexts. And the fear, I think, is even if there are no racists out there parading on the public sphere, there are enough spaces where they can go back to their home and vent and produce the same sorts of rhetoric we were used to hearing out in the public sphere, but now it’s just in the privacy of their most intimate social contexts that allows people to recognize that what you see when it comes to race in the present isn’t necessarily what you get in terms of the kinds of ways in which we might all, in big and small ways, be committed to reproducing forms of racial discrimination and differentiation. So I think the key would be to say, first of all, let’s look at our social network, let’s look at the ways in which we find it easy to reproduce what’s basically racial segregation in our own context.
Q. Do have any examples that might illustrate your point?
A. There’s always this idea that one of America’s most segregated hours is the religious hour, during church. I think in some ways that’s exactly why the Jeremiah Wright phenomenon is so important for us. He was saying things that almost no matter what kind of community one inhabits as an African American, almost no matter what kind of background you have, you’ve been in spaces—maybe they weren’t in the church and coming from the pulpit, but maybe they were in a barbershop, maybe they were in some other sort of race-specific context—where you heard versions of the kind of harsh, serious critique that a figure like Jeremiah Wright offers up from the pulpit in Chicago. Clearly, part of this was just being mobilized by political campaigns because it was good fodder, but I do feel like there was a legitimate segment of white America that was mortified and had never heard this before. I think the reason why we could have these worlds where people are speaking completely different languages and understanding the notion of critique in very different ways is because we are able to maintain what is in effect forms of social and racial segregation in our most intimate social networks even if we don’t have it codified in law anymore. And I think that’s one of the places where we can begin to work, by looking at how we reproduce racial difference, how we reproduce race-based segregation as a function of just doing the things we do everyday to live our lives.
Q. ‘Racial Paranoia’ also mentions the ‘unintended consequences of political correctness.’ Do you think political correctness has been a bad thing?
A. Political correctness didn’t create our racial problem. There’s a lot about political correctness that is undeniably good for the country, good for the level of public discourse we’re able to engage in, that there’s an advance in the public sphere if we move from a place where certain people feel like they will get demeaned by others, they will get denigrated, they will get offended and no one cares to a moment where everyone is being very self-conscious about the fact that if they are going to be attacked, if they are going to be demeaned, they have recourse, that the other person is the one who stepped out of line and that the rest of the public sphere, the rest of the public dialogue and community will probably rally in their defense. I think there’s a lot about that that’s good. The point, really, is simply to say that that’s a starting point, that’s not the endgame for how to think about racial policy. There [are] some people who think [that] once you sanitize public discourse, once you take out all the more egregious and racist forms of public rhetoric, then we’ve done all we can do and we’ve created an equal society and now we can all be Americans. I think that’s a wrong-headed way to think about what political correctness does and if that is your endgame, then it makes a bad situation worse because what it does is it allows people to recognize the unmistakable reality that there’s a disconnect often between what people say and what they do or believe. If it’s all simply about political correctness, then I think what happens is we have these bad faith conversations where people are saying all the right things, but we’re still skeptical, we’re still cynical, we’re still trying to read between the lines and determine whether or not we can trust what we’re hearing.
Q. Has the presidential campaign taught you anything about race relations in America?
A. I think one thing [Barack Obama has] been very effective at is a discourse of inclusion and integration. He wants to be the person who brings people together. Originally, this was discussed as a kind of post-racial figure. I think they’ve backed off from that rhetoric more; now he’s just someone who really wants to be a quintessentially American political figure, someone who brings everyone to the table, delegates responsibilities to every single citizen, and makes us all work together regardless of our own superficial differences towards the same common goal.
I think one thing we’ve found is that there are a lot of ways in which there can be push-back against that kind of rhetoric. And they’re going to be large chunks of this country that are going to be angry, hurt and horrified at the outcome. This has been the case in the last two elections as well but I think everything’s amped up and ratcheted up so much more this time around because of both Barack Obama’s racial identity and how that’s been deployed and because of the extent to which the McCain campaign did these really interesting jobs of playing kind of along the edges of more adamant forms of race-based politicking.
The thing that becomes interesting is if even a portion of my argument is right in ‘Racial Paranoia’ and that these euphemisms become all the more suspicious in a politically correct environment, when people can’t really come out and say the ‘n-word’ but they can find other ways to flag what might be similar sorts of communities, then I think we have a scenario where we’re all going to be looking for these ‘gotcha’ moments, whether they’re Don Imus talking about the Rutgers women’s basketball team in derogatory ways or they’re Michael Richards having a meltdown that linked in his head to lynching and historical racial demonization and murder. I think we’re constantly going to be going out for these kind of ‘gotcha’ moments.
Clearly, old school forms of racism are still out there. It’s not like we’ve moved beyond that. But I think the day-to-day machinations of race are so much more subtle and nuanced than that, that we should be careful not to force ourselves into a corner where either it’s explicit and self-evident and obvious, or it must not be real at all.
I think what we’ve been forced to do this election season, and I think it will continue, is to interrogate some of this middle ground between the obvious and the plausibly deniable. And I think it’s there in that space where a lot of the race work—for good and for ill—is being performed in the present moment. I do imagine that we’ve begun a conversation about race and difference in the country that will have to continue.
And so I think we’re in for a long first term of the next President. It’s going to be a term where discussions about race and difference are going to have to be front and center because people are going to demand it.
Originally published Nov. 13, 2008
