Ego Trip's Race-o-Rama

Got off the phone with DMSB earlier this evening. Among other things, we talked about some possible topics to put up here, such as the passing of James Weinstein. I learned of him through the NYT obit. What caught my eye at first was that he had founded In These Times. But I was surprised to read that he'd also founded one of our neighborhood institutions, Modern Times. Google turned up this more extensive obit.

After DB had to sign off (Terra alert), I cracked open the laptop with the plan to do some work. But I also turned on the TV for some background noise, and found an episode of Ego Trip's Race-o-Rama playing on VH-1...and felt compelled to do a post on it. (Which brings to mind a phrase I caught in another Daniel Drezner post: "Maybe the Internet is not the nirvana of Habermasian discourse, but the academic version of crack." That's chimes in on two recent posts--in addition to linking to Drezner last week, I slipped in a reference to the idea of the web as a Habermasian public sphere here.)

But back to the topic at hand. Have you guys seen this Ego Trip show? I read something about it when it premiered--it may have been this Ta-Nehisi Coates piece from the Voice--but hadn't caught one until now. Seems to be worth seeking out--where else are you going to find folks talking about race in this manner on TV, now that Chappelle appears to be on extended hiatus. (In fact, I thought of characterizing the Ego Trip show as an extended and expanded version of Paul Mooney's Ask a Black Dude/Negrodamus segments on Chappelle.)

That VH-1 put something like this on shows they're not completely culturally bankrupt, as Johnee seemed to imply in his last post. Though it's an odd coincidence that the Ego Trip crew was previously best known (to me, at least) for their book of lists (thanks to DB for hooking me up with that one a few years ago). But they showed there that the list format needn't be intellectually bankrupt.