Slouching in White: Joan Didion and the Legacy of the Late Sixties

“One last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out,” Joan Didion concluded with an air of unassuming menace in her 1968 essay collection Slouching Toward Bethlehem. As the party ended, the 1960s closed with the Tet Offensive, the assassinations of MLK and JFK, the rise of angrier more militant Chicano, Feminist, and Black Power Movements, and the reactionary moves of Nixon’s “southern strategy." More than a few historians, Rick Perlstein among them, have noted the splintering of American culture. None of these examples even includes the carnage of the civil rights movement from Emmet Till (1955), whose memory Little Wayne recently besmirched, to the slain …

London Calling: Paul Gilroy, Dick Hebdige, and British Multiculturalism

Black man gotta lot a problems But they don't mind throwing a brick White people go to school Where they teach you how to be thick White riot - I wanna riot White riot - a riot of my own White riot - I wanna riot White riot - a riot of my own - “White Riot” by the Clash The winds of imperialism blow two ways. While we often focus on the impact of the colonizer on the colonized, in recent years, more and more writers have begun to also consider what colonialism has meant for imperialists on the domestic front.   Few places provide a window into this reciprocity than 1970s London.  Postwar immigration from former colonies to Britain resulted in an increasingly diverse …

We’re All the Same Except that We’re Not: A Primer on Multiculturalism

“We are extremely skeptical about ‘multicultural’ education in settings with few or no blacks,” Charles Moskos and John Butler wrote in 1996. “Indeed, without a substantial black presence, such education can detract from blacks’ opportunity by becoming a vehicle for other ‘oppressed’ groups – women, Hispanics, Asian Americans, gays and lesbians, and so on.”[1]  For the two sociologists, blacks endured the longest and most pernicious forms of discrimination, both de jure and de facto, which immigrant groups largely avoided. Moskos and Butler even blamed the rise of multiculturalism for undermining affirmative action programs for African Americans, arguing that once …

The Suburb and the Sword: Wartime Housing, Integration, and Suburbanization in Alexandria, VA, 1942-1968

For much of the post-WWII period, the tendency to describe housing as the provision of the private sector and as an inherent example of the value of free, unregulated markets  has proven pervasive. Writers like David Freund have compellingly deconstructed such arguments noting that in reality state and federal governments intervened into housing regularly.  “Postwar development politics helped convince a generation of whites that homeownership and neighborhood control rose above issues of class or party affiliation or even personal preference,” reflects Freund. Indeed in an era of “metropolitan fragmentation, restrictive zoning, and federal credit policy” that resegregated …

An MLS Moment: What the Chivas USA Controversy Tells Us About the State of US Soccer

In a recent podcast for Grantland, Roger Bennett and Roger Davies reflected on Major League Soccer’s (MLS) current fortunes. After nearly two decades, they argued, the league had made it through the leanest years intact, financially healthy, and ready to expand its market share. Indeed, soccer remains one of the nation’s most popular youth sports and perhaps more importantly, among 17 – 24 year olds, as was widely reported last year, soccer ranks second just behind American football in popularity. Undoubtedly, as evidenced by their recent success in the English Premiership (EPL), American players, most of them former or current MLS standouts, have become increasingly common. From …

No Oscars but Plenty of Action: Subverting Traditional Masculinity in Die Hard and Point Break

In a recent podcast of Slate’s Culture Gabfest, moderator Stephen Metcalf, movie critic Dana Stevens, and Deputy Editor Julia Turner discussed the inaugural issue of Kindling Quarterly, a new print publication aimed ostensibly, despite the protestation of the publication’s founders, at “hipster dads.” Whatever one thinks of the quarterly’s premise, all agreed that ideas about masculinity were in flux. Metcalf described the current state of American masculinity as “troubled” or “ambivalent.”  The rise of creative types with flexible schedules who promise to be more present parental figures than their own fathers, Metcalf argued, was in many ways a new phenomenon, if not in …

Between Adolescence and Adulthood: How Girls and Toro y Moi Capture Our Awkward 20s

“We were kids acting way too old Hidden somewhere in the back room Now we got it and it's just us Now I, wanna, keep it, forever” - “Day One” from Toro y Moi’s Anything in Return Aaaahhhhhhh the twenties. Looking back, the corresponding victories of your first taste of adulthood can be the sweetest but the failures can also be the most disappointing. Dropping the ball while fumbling through the process of “finding oneself” stings that much more because, well, you haven’t figured it out; to paraphrase Fugazi, you spend your time hoping that every slip’s not a slide. This tension makes Lena Dunham’s Girls exciting. “There’s something thrilling and familiar about …

Double Victory: From WWII to the AVF, African Americans and the U.S. Military

In a recent exchange between right wing town crier Bill O’Reilly and former Secretary of State and Head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell, Powell appeared irritated at O’Reilly’s insinuation that the former Secretary voted for Obama for racial reasons. “So you basically said to yourself I’m still going to support the guy even though his economic policies haven’t worked for African Americans and pretty much anyone else,” the host argued.   Though some have described Powell’s response as hostile or angry, to this viewer he seemed the same eternally calm presence he’s appeared to be since embedding himself in the national conscience in the early 1990s. “Why do you …

Angry and Privileged?: The 1980s, Class, and Southern California Hardcore

The final installment in ToM's 1980s hardcore punk retrospective.   In our earlier pieces, ToM discussed San Pedro's The Minutemen, D.C.'s Ian Svenonius, and in late 2012, we examined the "politics" of hardcore and thrash metal in the era of Paul Ryan and the Tea Party. ''My friend Mike used to say it wasn't a good show unless he got kicked in the teeth, because he had braces,'' said Win Vitkowsky in an attempt to convey the intensity of the 2001 Connecticut hardcore scene to the New York Times. “Despite its reputation as a boring but happy place of white-glove politics and private beaches,” Times journalist Paul Zielbauer wrote, “Connecticut has long been fertile ground for an …

Inauthentic Authenticity: Ian Svenonius and the Challenge of Indie Rock Satire in an MP3 World

Saturday night, Washington D.C., a stone’s throw from one of D.C. hardcore’s central nodes and the playground of Nation of Ulysses (NOU) front man Ian Svenonius: the Embassy in Mt. Pleasant.  In the late 1980s and 1990s, Svenonius, NOU, and other D.C. punks used to gather at the Embassy to discuss music, politics, and agit prop, even serving as an ally to the Riot Grrrl movement when Kathleen Hanna and others left Washington for a sojourn to the capital in what for many, became a transformative experience.   Tonight, though, sitting in independent book store Politics and Prose and waiting for Svenonius to appear from on high to assault us with his latest philosophical tract, the shop …