Melissa Harris-Perry bears the distinction of being the only tenured professor with her own cable news talk show. Harris-Perry, 40, is in a great place in her life — she’s been on the air with her eponymously titled MSNBC show over two years now, is about to transition from Tulane University to a teaching job at her alma mater, Wake Forest University in North Carolina, and is the proud mother of a new baby girl born in February. Coming to St. Petersburg Sun. May 18 to give the commencement at Eckerd College, she spoke to CL earlier this week.
CL: You have this very powerful platform — four hours of cable real estate — to give analysis in a way that’s not always accessible on regular cable. For instance, this past Saturday we saw you deliver a “letter” to the kidnapped Nigerian girls [taken by the Al Qaeda-linked Boko Haram group]. It was quite powerful, and then the story started getting more mainstream coverage, such as a column by Nicholas Kristof in Sunday’s New York Times. Does having the power to illuminate such a subject make it worth it all to you?
MHP: We try to do a letter every Saturday, and part of our goal in the letter is we try to talk about something a little different than what’s in the mainstream news. So for us the case of the kidnapped Nigerian girls absolutely fit in that category. It had begun to get coverage towards the end of the week, primarily as the result of the work of activists, and it’s certainly not as though I had gone out and done investigative journalism myself. I am not a journalist and we don’t have investigative reporters for the most part, but we do try to keep our eye on a variety of different sources, and sometimes we use the show platform as a megaphone to amplify those voices. Certainly we’ve seen how TV, despite the fact that it’s a weekend cable news program and therefore probably the cheapest piece of real estate in the land of television, is still a very powerful medium.
You wrote about the condemnation of [Wisconsin Republican Congressman] Paul Ryan for his comments back in March blaming a culture of laziness for inner-city poverty. In The Nation you wrote that it was understandable that he was taken aback by the criticism, because it’s something that Democrats and liberals have said for decades.
Part of the point wasn’t to either write an apologia either for Mr. Ryan or for former President Clinton or for current President Obama, but rather to point out talking about a culture of laziness or a general culture of pathology is almost normative, it’s almost like the air that we breathe in American politics. So whether a public figure is a person of color or is white, is a Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative, it’s [easiest] to blame or to scapegoat people who are economically disadvantaged, because they’re often exactly the folks who have the least kind of available public platform to speak back to that power. And so I certainly saw Mr. Ryan’s comments as being part of a much broader context of at least 20-30 years of explaining poverty through culture rather than structure. And of course it’s been about 50 years since LBJ declared a war on poverty, and if you go back and listen to President Johnson talk about poverty, he hardly ever talked about issues of hard work or out-of-wedlock marriages. LBJ talked almost exclusively about the policies and structures that could be changed. And so you really do see an amazing shift in the past couple of decades.
You talk often about race on your show. You touched on the big kerfuffle with L.A. Clippers owner Don Sterling this past Sunday, as did the other major Sunday morning public affairs programs. But you had on a set of guests that we don’t usually see.
Well, I hope so. I don’t want to make too many claims for myself, but I certainly see my primary role is as a college professor, and my favorite part is always teaching. And what students in part have taught me over the years is that if you take a topic that they think they know, like the American revolution, or slavery, or so-called racism in America, and especially if they already know your ideological perspective, and mine is pretty clear to my students — if you spin it a little bit, if you turn it on its head, they just tend to be much more engaged. So when I start a class on American slavery, I say the least important thing about slavery is whether or not slave owners were racist. Who cares whether a slave owner is racist? That’s not what’s important here. What’s important here are these questions of property and of the trading of human beings as commodities and our understanding of what economics is, and what we’re allowed to make a profit from, but it wouldn’t really matter whether slavery was race-based or religious-based or gender-based. It’s not really about racism; it’s about the thing that is slavery. Almost always I can get students to wake up, much more to a discussion about that than if I start a conversation on slavery by saying, “Oh, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were racists because they had slaves.” Like, who cares? I mean, maybe they were, maybe they weren’t, there’s interpretive evidence that Jefferson had some really negative racial views and some really positive ones. But the point was his economic behavior, so I try to do the same thing on the show. That’s a long way of saying we try to take an issue that a lot of people are talking about and turn it on its head a little bit. Sometimes we succeed and sometimes we fail at doing that.
I do have to ask you about the incident on the program in January regarding Mitt Romney’s black grandson. [Harris-Perry came under fire after she and a panel joked about a Romney family photo on a segment called “Look Back in Laughter,” singing a Sesame Street song “One of These Things Is Not Like The Others.”] After that incident occurred, you gave a very intensely sincere apology on the air, and Mitt Romney was very gracious in accepting it — despite the prodding of Fox News Sunday’s Chris Wallace. What did you learn from all of that?
I certainly learned a lot of personal lessons from it. The most personal and I guess least politically important lesson is just the amount of gratitude I have towards Mr. Romney for the way in which he so graciously accepted that apology. I wasn’t in any way surprised by his graciousness. I think, for example people who have seen the Mitt documentary — you know, even if you deeply disagree with Mr. Romney politically as I do, I don’t think anyone has made the argument that this guy is not a gracious, honest, kind person.
There was a kind of personal backstory going on at the time that no one in the public was aware of, and that is that my husband and I were expecting our own child. I guess she was born six weeks later. So we were in the final trimester and no one knew of our pregnancy surrogacy at that time. It wasn’t something that we made public beyond our close circle of friends and family and co-workers, but I think maybe some folks were wondering when I was crying on air if that was sincere. And what I was thinking of at that moment was the extent to which I had made so many families feel uncomfortable. That we had worked really hard on our program to be a place where we said, “If you’re a same-sex couple who makes your family through adoption, if you are a white family who makes your family through transracial adoption, this is a safe program for you to watch because we’re not going to mock people who make their families in non-traditional ways.' And right at that moment I was right in the middle of making my own family in a non-traditional way. And so the idea that we had violated that fundamental precept, I was genuinely pissed and hurt with myself, and with the choices that we had made that allowed that to happen. But I think the other thing that it was a reminder about… the president just made a variety of very interesting sort of race jokes at the White House Correspondents Dinner. He referred to race in a joking manner. And it was so interesting to kind of watch it go over — it was okay, but it was okay because he was making the race jokes about himself, right? So he was a person in power who was being self-deprecating about the question of race, relative to him. And where we screwed up, where we did something wrong was, we made a race joke at the expense of an innocent, right? In this case, Mr. Romney’s grandson. And no matter what was the intention, and it wasn’t of ill intent, but it was a reminder that race is always about power. So you can make a so-called race joke, but if you are an empowered person making a joke about yourself, then it works, it’s okay, it’s actually funny, and nobody is harmed. But if you’re an empowered person and in this case, having a cable show makes me empowered, and you’re making a race joke about someone who is disempowered – in this case an infant – then you have crossed a line. It’s really important I think to keep remembering that racism and our racial angst isn’t so much about the N-word as it is about that question about how those who have power wield it against people who don’t.
You are giving the commencement speech a week from this Sunday at Eckerd College. What are the words of wisdom that you want to impart to the graduates?
I’m so excited to be giving this commencement address because my own niece, the second oldest niece in the family and the second to graduate from Eckerd, will be graduating on that day. I am actually going to talk about the biggest lesson that I learned as an undergraduate at Wake Forest. I’m going to talk about a book by a Presbyterian minister named Frederick Buechner, and I’m going to talk about a story that he writes about finding out that God exists. 100 percent. You’re completely clear, the whole world knows ...and then one night a little boy says, “Well, so what?” And that’s the question. We end up fighting over, is Don Sterling a racist? Is the ACA a good policy? But actually, that’s not the question. The question is: So what? If Don Sterling is a racist, so what? What does that mean for us, what should we be doing? How does that inform our politics? If the ACA is a bad policy, so what? What does that mean, what should we do next? One thing I want to encourage is to look less for the answers, and look more for what the answers may mean. So you’re not really on a quest to find out what kind of job should I have, but rather what kind of difference should I make?