Justin Erik Halldór Smith

Clinton and Obama in Anthropological Perspective

Why Race and Gender Are Separate Issues

Justin E. H. Smith

Will there be no end to this tiresome "national conversation" as to whether a black man trumps a white woman, or vice versa, on our nation's list of the wronged? One possible end might arrive, of course, when another white man is elected in November and American politics returns to business as usual. In the meantime, I would like to join the conversation, if only in order to bring to light the inanity of the relevant comparison, based as it is on a presumption of analogy between two social groups that are distinguished, conceptually and in reality, from the dominant group for entirely different reasons: in the one case, the distinction is based on a relatively short, 500-year history of economic subordination; in the other, it is a consequence of an evidently universal structural feature of human societies.

Judith Warner Is in My Head

Justin E. H. Smith

Judith Warner is in my head, and she won't leave. She's been in there for three weeks. Now I don't mean I've been thinking intensely about Judith Warner for three weeks. I mean she is actually in there, perceiving the world through my eyes, seeing everything I see, peeing standing up when I pee standing up. Seeing it all.

Let me explain. This is not like Being John Malkovich, where the parasitic consciousness takes over control of the host body. I need to make this clear: Judith Warner has no control whatsoever over my sensorimotor system. She has to sense whatever I sense, and do whatever I do, whether she wants to or not. She doesn't like Ravioli-O's? Tough.

How did this come to pass?  Those who know me will know that I suffer from obsessive-compulsive symptoms, including the irrepressible desire to swallow whenever I see the letter 'A' and to feign a sort of half-spitting, half-vomiting motion whenever I spot an 'F'.  I'm out of my gourd, but we knew that already. The question now is: How did Judith Warner get into my gourd?