5 Questions For: MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry, On Political Diversity And Being “Better Off” [#DNC2012]
By Arturo R. García; cross-posted from Raw Story
This year’s political convention season, says MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry, got complicated. Although she is in Charlotte for the Democratic National Convention this week, she missed going to Tampa, FL, last week for its Republican counterpart because real life got in the way. Hurricane Isaac’s path, which initially threatened the convention before tearing through New Orleans, meant the Tulane University professor and her family had to evacuate their home, which they subsequently lost.
“In a certain way, the personal drama, set against the backdrop of the convention, helps to remind us that the personal is political,” she told Raw Story Wednesday. “On the one hand, we were having our own personal issues about wind and rain and a hurricane, but the fact is, levees are political, and disasters–whether or not aid is going to come to your community–has to do with who is making those choices from a political position. And so, certainly it’s been hard, but it’s helped to crystallize why elections really do matter.”
Raw Story: Speaking of the personal being political, talk about your journey over the past four years.
Harris-Perry: When I attended the DNC in Denver, I was writing for The Root at that point, was mostly just a blogger, every once in a while showing up on MSNBC as a voice but not even a contributor. And the idea that four years later I would end up with my own show is…certainly it’s not something I was even thinking about four years ago. But more than anything, I guess, it’s been an opportunity for me to take all the things I care about as an academic and watch them occurring. What I studied, what I spent 15 years doing, is race and politics in the American context. And now we’re seeing all these issues play out on the national stage, and it’s pretty extraordinary to be able to have a voice in that as it’s happening.
Raw Story: From your position, you are well acquainted with the resonance any minute, any sentence, any moment can have in the social media space. And I want to take you back to this past Saturday. I know you apologized, but at the same time, that resonated. What you were talking about struck a chord with people. How well do you find that phenomenon translating, among your colleagues, both as a media presence and an academic?
Harris-Perry: Let me start by saying that when I apologized, my apology was not for what I said. It was not even for the passion with which I said it. But it was for yelling at a guest. I’ve been a guest on many shows, shows where I agree with the host, where I don’t agree with the host. And I do feel like, as a host, the thing that I want to be is not someone who, even if I fundamentally disagree with my guests, makes my guests feel like I’m yelling at them. To me, it makes me feel like a bully. Because I’m sitting there in the host’s chair. So my apology was for yelling at a guest. No matter how much we may have disagreed.
And no one asked me to do that apology: it was just my initial reaction. I in no way apologized for the sentiment, because I am angry. Like, not just disappointed, and not just finding that it lacks facts: I’m angry at the portrayal of poor, working-class people in this country and the idea that, somehow, poor people, working-class people, have it easier, or that they’re lazy, or that they don’t want, or that they don’t deserve help. You can’t actually have lived in a poor neighborhood, seen how hard it is to live in our neighborhoods, and managed everything from public transportation to schools to crime to finding decent groceries. That stuff is actually hard. And so I don’t, in any way, apologize for the sentiment. My worry–at least at that moment–was that the sentiment would be lost behind the yelling. I studied black women’s self-expression, and I worried that all they would see is a yelling black woman. So I just want to be clear that the sentiment is still there.
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