![Sample our Social Sciences journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/110822/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Social-Sciences.jpg"})
Abstract
We often imagine black respectability politics as a suffocating hegemon, opposed only by small, usually youthful, groups of artists, intellectuals, and activists. But for more than the last two decades, the most popular syndicated black American radio show, The Tom Joyner Morning Show, has openly dissented from respectability politics—while simultaneously “flying under the radar” of both black and mainstream public sphere attention. This invisibility may be due to the show’s commercial status and mixed format—but most importantly, because of its low-status medium, radio, combined with the “unsexy” nature of its huge audience: middle aged and definitely working class.
Notes
Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 14–15.
Ibid., 186.
Ibid., 187.
Ibid., 199.
Ibid., 202.
Quoted in Michael Eric Dyson, Is Bill Cosby Right? Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind? (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2005), xi–xii.
Fredrick C. Harris, “The Rise of Respectability Politics,” Dissent 61, no. 1, Winter 2014: 1–8, esp. p. 2.
See an accounting of the histories of culture of poverty and underclass ideology in Micaela di Leonardo, Exotics at Home: Anthropologies, Others, American Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 112–27; and on neoliberal consciousness, see Micaela di Leonardo, “The Neoliberalization of Minds, Space and Bodies: Rising Global Inequality and the Shifting American Public Sphere,” in New Landscapes of Global Inequality: Neoliberalism and the Erosion of American Democracy, edited by Jane Collins, Micaela di Leonardo, and Brett Williams (Santa Fe: School of Advanced Research Press, 2008), 191–208.
Adolph Reed, Jr, “Romancing Jim Crow,” originally appeared in The Village Voice, April 6, 1996. It was reprinted in his Class Notes: Posing as Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene (New York: The New Press, 2000), 14–24.
“Romancing Jim Crow,” 14–15.
Ibid., 19–20.
E. Frances White, Dark Continent of Our Bodies: Black Feminism and the Politics of Respectability (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001).
Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (New York: Vintage, 1997), 10.
Darlene Clark Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West: Preliminary Thoughts on the Culture of Dissemblance,” in The Gender/Sexuality Reader, edited by Roger Lancaster and Micaela di Leonardo (New York: Routledge, 1997), 434–39.
Evelynn M. Hammonds, “Toward a Genealogy of Black Female Sexuality: The Problematic of Silence,” in Feminist Theory and the Body, edited by Janet Price and Margrit Shildrick (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 93–104.
Robert J. Patterson, “‘Do You Want to Be Well?’ The Gospel Play, Womanist Theology, and Tyler Perry’s Artistic Project,” in Womanist and Black Feminist Responses to Tyler Perry’s Productions, edited by LaRhonda S. Manigualt-Bryant, Tamura A. Lomax, and Carol B. Duncan (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 217–33, esp. p. 224.
Brittney Cooper, “Talking Back and Taking My ‘Amens’ with Me: Tyler Perry and the Narrative Colonization of Black Women’s Stories,” esp. p. 237 in Womanist and Black Feminist Responses to Tyler Perry’s Productions, 237–49.
Brittney Cooper, “Talking Back,” 237.
Ibid., 248.
The show broadcasts for four drive-time hours each weekday morning. As a “media ethnographer,” I listen to 10–20 hours each week, simultaneously transcribing relevant material. [See Kelly Askew and Richard Wilk, eds., The Anthropology of Media: A Reader (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002); Faye Ginsburg, Lila Abu-Lughod, and Brian Larkin, eds., Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).] Ellipses indicate missing material. At the beginning of my research, it was “transcribe or die,” as there was no alternative access to show material. Later, I was able to replay some limited archived material on blackamerica.com, and also to re-listen to the day’s show directly after its end, using the TJMS app once they adopted it in 2014. But they disbanded the replay feature May 2, 2016. I periodically check the “where to listen” map on the TJMS website to gauge listenership over time: the number of stations carrying the show has risen and fallen over the decades, but remains ca. 100. I have also read widely in black radio, black media, and American media history to contextualize the show, and have interviewed large numbers of African American listeners and non-listeners about their opinions of and uses of the show and its associated events. See Micaela di Leonardo, “Neoliberalism, Nostalgia, Race Politics, and the American Public Sphere: The Case Study of the Tom Joyner Morning Show,” Cultural Studies 22, no. 1, 2007, 1–34; “The Neoliberalization of Minds, Space and Bodies: Rising Global Inequality and the Shifting American Public Sphere,” in New Landscapes of Global Inequality: Neoliberalism and the Erosion of American Democracy, edited by Jane Collins, Micaela di Leonardo, and Brett Williams (Santa Fe: School of Advanced Research Press, 2008), 191–208; “Whose Homeland? The New Imperialism, Neoliberalism, and the American Public Sphere,” in Rethinking America: The Imperial Homeland in the 21st Century, edited by Jeff Maskovsky and Ida Susser (Herndon, VA: Paradigm Press, 2009), 105–21; “Grown Folks Radio: US Election Politics and a ‘Hidden’ Black Counterpublic,” American Ethnologist 39, no. 4, 2012: 661–72; “‘Paint the White House Black’: Black Media in the Obama Era,” Institute for Policy Research Working Paper, 2010, http://www.northwestern.edu/ipr/publications/workingpapers/wpabstracts10/wp1008.htl.
See Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books), 118–19.
With one exception: They do ban, as they say, “cussin” on-air, and have created a plethora of ridiculously funny substitutes, such as “shiggedy” for shit. But this avoidance of profanity has loosened over the decades as it has in American culture at large.
I did not begin formal transcription of TJMS shows until 2004, so I cannot specifically date the interaction.
See documentation of TJMS’s response to Katrina and their philanthropy in “Neoliberalism, Nostalgia, Race Politics.”.
See Micaela di Leonardo, “Neoliberalism, Nostalgia” for documentation of TJMS’s desperate organizing for John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election; and Micaela di Leonardo, “Grown Folks Radio” for an accounting of TJMS’s central role in ensuring the 2008 Obama victory.
For a history of WCDI, see Louis Cantor, Wheelin’ on Beale: How WDIA-Memphis Became the Nation’s First All-black Radio Station and Created the Sound that Changed America (New York: Pharos Books, 1992). For invaluable black radio history, see William Barlow, Voice Over: The Making of Black Radio (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999). On the origins of “The Quiet Storm,” see also Cathy Hughes in episode 7, “The Woman’s Touch,” “Black Radio” series, National Public Radio/The Smithsonian Institution, 1995, including a larger discussion of the growth of Quiet Storm programming.
For the “new quietist black bourgeoisie” interpretation of Quiet Storm, see Mark Anthony Neal, What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 1999), 125–29.
See William Barlow, “Commercial and Noncommercial Radio,” in Split Image: African Americans in the Mass Media,” edited by Jannette L. Dates and William Barlow (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1990), 189–264, esp. p. 245. On the black American working-class majority, see Michael Zweig, The Working-Class Majority: America’s Best-Kept Secret (New York: ILR Press, 2000), 32–33.
I have done repeated searches to document this extraordinary lack (or merely en passant mention) of media and scholarly attention to the TJMS powerhouse. See Micaela di Leonardo, “Nostalgia, Neoliberalism,” p. 4 and p. 31, fn 7. The only substantive New York Times piece is Felicia R. Lee, “Building a Conversation, One Radio Show at a Time,” New York Times February 13, 2007. See Mark Anthony Neal, Songs in the Key of Black Life: A Rhythm and Blues Nation (New York: Routledge, 2003), 140; Melissa Harris-Lacewell, Barbershops, Bibles, and BET: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 237–49, esp. p. 237. (To give Harris-Perry her due, she put her book to bed in 2003, possibly before TJMS politics became quite as clear as they were by 2004, when I began actively transcribing and analyzing.) There is also a short positive article on the show from the defunct magazine Emerge: Sandra Gregg, “Tom Joyner,” [1998] in The Best of Emerge Magazine, edited by George Curry (New York: Ballantine, 2003), 114–20. See also Catherine Squires’s short treatment of TJMS in her African Americans and the Media (New York: Polity, 2009), 194–96.
Robert M. Entman and Andrew Rojecki, The Black Image in the White Mind: Media and Race in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
Harris, “Rise,” 1–2.
This black-music meme, “Throw your hands in the air like you just don’t care!” has been in broad use since at least the hip hop 1980s. It shows up in lyrics by The Sugar Hill Gang, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, The Pharcyde, and Outkast, among many others.
See, for example, Signithia Fordham, Blacked Out: Dilemmas of Race, Identity, and Success at Capital High (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
The phrase “communities of the air” comes from Susan Merrill Squier’s edited Communities of the Air: Radio Century, Radio Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).
See James Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (New York: Random House, 2010).
The girl who stole the watch was 17, but the other girl involved may have been as young as 12. See David Streitfeld, “R. Kelly Is Acquitted in Child Pornography Case,” New York Times, June 14, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/14/arts/music/14kell.html (accessed August 17, 2015).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Micaela di Leonardo
Micaela di Leonardo is a cultural anthropologist at Northwestern University whose work focuses on social and economic inequalities by race, gender/sexuality, and class in the urban United States. She has written The Varieties of Ethnic Experience (1984) and Exotics at Home: Anthropologies, Others, American Modernity (1998) and edited or coedited Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge: Feminist Anthropology in the Postmodern Era (1991), The Gender/Sexuality Reader (1997), and New Landscapes of Inequality: Neoliberalism and the Erosion of American Democracy (2008).