DEAN ARRINDELL

Worked in TV news. Now, a stay-at-home dad writing about American manhood, politics, and race.. and a bit of Britain, too.

Race has also played a role in [Justin] Timberlake’s rise. It’s fair to attribute some of his success to the same dynamic that propelled Elvis Presley to the top of the pop charts: white boy plays black music, makes it “safe” for mainstream America, and outsells the originators in the process. But Timberlake’s relationship to race reflects our world more than Presley’s. Elvis was a rebellious figure: a white Southerner tapping into black culture at a time when black culture was taboo. For that reason, among others, he’ll always be a much more revolutionary artist than Timberlake. (So will [Michael] Jackson, who melded black and white music and united two previously segregated audiences.) But in 2013, African-American culture is no longer forbidden. It’s mainstream. It’s cool. Timberlake takes this for granted—he’s never known otherwise—and so do his fans. As a teenager, Timberlake wanted to be black, basically. He learned to sing from Brian McKnight, Al Green, and Donny Hathaway; early profiles describe his “homeboy delivery” and “hip-hop flavoring.” As Pharrell Williams once put it, “Justin could’ve been raised in the black church.” And so, unlike Elvis, Timberlake isn’t challenging the status quo by singing R&B. Instead, he is embodying our deeper, postracial aspiration—a desire that didn’t exist in Elvis’s day—to be at ease in black and white culture simultaneously. If he can pull it off, perhaps we can, too.

—

I appreciate the hope, but a couple of things bother me in this passage from Andrew Romano’s piece on JT:

-Yes, Timberlake does play that Elvis role, but even in 2013 African-American culture is still forbidden in some places. It’s not universally understood, respected or appreciated.

-And Timberlake “wanted to be black”? Really?? That’s quite a statement. There needs to be more proof than just listening to soul records.

Read more in Newsweek/The Daily Beast.

Not only did Hollywood ignore black cowboys, it plundered their real stories as material for some of its films.

The Lone Ranger, for example, is believed to have been inspired by Bass Reeves, a black lawman who used disguises, had a Native American sidekick and went through his whole career without being shot.

—More on Hollywood’s omission of black cowboys in the Old West and interviews with black cowboys in their 80’s.. from Sarfraz Manzoor in BBC News.

Was Sergey Brin talking about losing manhood or losing humanity? (From The Atlantic Wire)

What makes an ideal man? Page through the advertisements placed in a standard American men’s magazine, and you’ll find one idea: He is a stomping, yelling, shooting, drinking, fucking, tough guy. He has big muscles and a limited emotional range—stoic, angry, horny. He exists in dark alleyways, war zones, and fast cars. He holds his beer bottle over his crotch to approximate a boner.

If advertising is meant to be aspirational, these ads are presenting a pretty sad version of what American men can aspire to be.

—By Amanda Hess in Slate. 

It’s about America and who goes to see movies. Women are interested in men and women, and men aren’t interested in the woman’s story. They just aren’t. There are exceptions, but by and large … I mean I do think that it’s feminizing for a guy to go see a movie with a female lead unless it’s Angelina Jolie shooting people or Zero Dark Thirty or something that feels like it’s in the male sphere. The devaluation of the traditional female roles or the traditional female approach, it starts to feel like this is what’s wrong with our country.

—The creator of HBO’s “Enlightened,” Mike White, on why men don’t watch shows or movies with female leads. Read more of his interview in Vulture and more on men watching female leads in Slate.

Boys learn that academic disengagement is a sign of their masculinity. If we want to re-engage boys in education, no amount of classroom tinkering and recess and science fiction reading is going to address that. We will need to enable boys to decouple the cultural definition of masculinity from academic disengagement.

—Michael Kimmel in “Do Boys Face More Sexism Than Girls” in the Huffington Post

I share concern for the emasculation of black men in our country today. But I don’t see it happening in instances of creative men stepping outside of the box and expressing themselves through fashion—to me, those are defiant acts of freedom. Instead, I see emasculation through the outlandish prison rates of black men in America or oppressive policies like stop-and-frisk that target young black men and turn them into statistics. From “Black Man in a Dress” by Wilbert Cooper in VICE.

I share concern for the emasculation of black men in our country today. But I don’t see it happening in instances of creative men stepping outside of the box and expressing themselves through fashion—to me, those are defiant acts of freedom. Instead, I see emasculation through the outlandish prison rates of black men in America or oppressive policies like stop-and-frisk that target young black men and turn them into statistics.

From “Black Man in a Dress” by Wilbert Cooper in VICE.

..the life prospects of an American are more dependent on the income and education of his parents than in almost any other advanced country for which there is data.

—“Equal Opportunity, Our National Myth” by Joseph Stiglitz  in NYTimes.com

‘Mainstream American history, from the point of view of the white majority in the Northeast, Midwest and West Coast, is a story of military successes…’

thesmithian:

The British are defeated, ensuring national independence. The Confederates are defeated, ensuring national unity. And in the 20th century the Axis and Soviet empires are defeated, ensuring (it is hoped) a free world. The white Southern narrative—at least in the dominant Southern conservative version—is one of defeat after defeat. First the attempt of white Southerners to create a new nation in which they can be the majority was defeated by the U.S. Army during the Civil War. Doomed to be a perpetual minority in a continental American nation-state, white Southerners managed for a century to create their own state-within-a-state, in which they could collectively lord it over the other major group in the region, African-Americans. But Southern apartheid was shattered by the second defeat, the Civil Rights revolution, which like the Civil War and Reconstruction was symbolized by the dispatching of federal troops to the South. The American patriotism of the white Southerner is therefore deeply problematic.

more.

This was a great piece!

theatlantic: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Gun Violence in America How often are guns used in self-defense? There are no comprehensive records kept of incidents where guns are used in self-defense, so the only way to know is to ask people. Data from the National Crime Victimization Survey suggest that a gun is used in self-defense about 60,000 to 120,000 times each year. Several other surveys confirm this estimate. By comparison, each year about a million violent crimes involve guns. This means guns are used to commit a crime about 10 times as often as they are used for self-defense. A few surveys in the early 1990s suggested that there are millions gun self-defense incidents each year, but there are very good reasons to believe that these estimates were improperly calculated and these numbers are way off, more than 10 times too high. If the numbers really were this high, this would imply that pretty much every gunshot wound in America is the result of somebody protecting him or herself. Even among the more accurate surveys, according to a panel of criminal court judges who reviewed survey respondents’ stories, about half the time the gun use was “probably illegal,” even assuming the gun itself had been purchased legally. Read more. [Image: Reuters]

theatlantic:

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Gun Violence in America

How often are guns used in self-defense?

There are no comprehensive records kept of incidents where guns are used in self-defense, so the only way to know is to ask people. Data from the National Crime Victimization Survey suggest that a gun is used in self-defense about 60,000 to 120,000 times each year. Several other surveys confirm this estimate. By comparison, each year about a million violent crimes involve guns. This means guns are used to commit a crime about 10 times as often as they are used for self-defense.

A few surveys in the early 1990s suggested that there are millions gun self-defense incidents each year, but there are very good reasons to believe that these estimates were improperly calculated and these numbers are way off, more than 10 times too high. If the numbers really were this high, this would imply that pretty much every gunshot wound in America is the result of somebody protecting him or herself.

Even among the more accurate surveys, according to a panel of criminal court judges who reviewed survey respondents’ stories, about half the time the gun use was “probably illegal,” even assuming the gun itself had been purchased legally.

Read more. [Image: Reuters]