Soft Skull News

A rather surreal development, in which Tim Wise's White Like Me has an unusual cameo

DELAND -- Some women on the Stetson University softball team donned basketball jerseys, painted themselves black, wore cornrows and fake gold teeth and flashed "gangsta" poses for pictures that ended up on the Internet, all in the name of Halloween.

They say they didn't know they were tapping into an ugly chapter of American history, that of 19th century actors performing in blackface.

"I find it offensive, objectionable and sad," said Leonard Nance, dean of first-year students and chairman of the Diversity Committee. "This is not behavior that we condone. It goes against every principle we believe in."

Members of the men's basketball team loaned the softball players their practice jerseys. Softball players wore the costumes Oct. 29 to a contest at a DeLand bar, where they met up with some of the basketball players, the softball team said in a statement published Thursday in The Recorder, the Stetson student newspaper.

Three softball players dressed as black basketball players; four dressed as white basketball players.

Softball players said they were dressing as individual basketball players, not as black caricatures.

"We had (the basketball players') permission and help," the statement reads. ". . . They thought the costumes were great."

Wylie Tucker, an assistant men's basketball coach, said his players were surprised to learn of the controversy.

"The players felt that the (softball players') intentions were not offensive," he said. "Rather, they were elated that people thought enough of them to try to be like them."

None of the softball team's 16 players pictured on the school's Web site are black. Eight of the 14 men's basketball players are black. About 4 percent of the school's enrollment is black.

The school is requiring both squads to meet with the Diversity Committee, watch a documentary that addresses blackface and read the book "White Like Me," by Tim Wise, an anti-racism activist who recently spoke on campus.

Posted by Richard Eoin Nash at 06:08 PM | Permalink

From the Australian newspaper the Herald Sun on the subject of This Day in History (it's already November 2nd in Australia...)

2003 – The Rev Canon V Gene Robinson is consecrated as the first openly gay bishop of the US Episcopal Church, a move that threatened to tear apart the worldwide Anglican community.

2004 – A filmmaker who was the great-grandnephew of Vincent van Gogh is slain in a daylight attack, and police arrest a Dutch-Moroccan man after wounding him in a shootout. Theo van Gogh made a movie criticizing the treatment of Muslim women.

I came to this information via the poor man's clipping service Google News Alerts, because of the reference to Gene Robinson, and I'm keeping up-to-date with him because we're publishing a book about him next June, entitled Going to Heaven written by Elizabeth Adams, herself possessed of a lovely blog.

I then notice, as did you, immediately beneath, that November 2nd is also the day (the following year) on which Theo van Gogh was assassinated in the Netherlands. And we're in discussions about doing a book about that also (a translation of a Dutch book, publishing today...). Shoudl we end up doing it, I'll devote a post to it, as it touches on several things of concern to Soft Skull and publishing (and the Frankfurt Book Fair).

So this coincidence—Gene Robinson and Theo van Gogh—compells me to note, earlier than I might otherwise have planned to, that Soft Skull is embarking on a plan to start publishing a good deal about religion and how it plays into politics and society. And it's not all anti-clerical, either, though I can assure you that it is also not going to involve books about how the Dems can win in 2008 by being more religious. What it is about is recognizing that the U.S. is by far the most religious country in the West, and if we're to tussle with understanding this country, we have to engage with religion, and we're going to have to get our hands dirty with it. And, notwithstanding the relative secularity of the rest of the West, and notwithstanding my massive antipathy towards utterly ahistorical Huntingtonesque theories about clashes of civilizations, to also seek to understand the role religion (theological religion, let's say) plays when cultures (Algeria and the Netherland, Somalia and Italy, Morocco and Spain, etc etc...) interpenetrate.

Interestingly enough, almost everyone writing for us on this subject is in blog land. Michael Standaert is writing on Tim LaHaye and the Left Behind series in Skipping Toward Armageddon: The Politics and Propaganda of the Left Behind Novels and the LaHaye Empire; Laurel Snyder is editing Half/Life a collection of original essays on growing up half Jewish; and David Griffith has written what is probably the finest title for a book we'll publish this year: A Good War Is Hard to Find which we're describing as a Catholic Regarding the Pain of Others or as Joan Didion meets Flannery O'Connor...the first chapter of the book is online here.

So we're hitching a couple more horses to the Soft Skull non-fiction chariot: intellectual property as readers of my Google post will have noted, and religion, as I'm saying here. Making ever stranger bedfellows with queer studies, music, foreign policy, electoral politics, and so on...

Do we know what we're doing, putting all this together? No. But we're doing it so we can find out why we're doing it.

Posted by Richard Eoin Nash at 09:16 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)