Melissa Harris-Perry of MSNBC gives new face to cable news

“And GO! And GO! And GO!”

It’s about five minutes to showtime, and Melissa Harris-Perry, clad in a nautical-inspired dress, navy blue cardigan and matching pumps, is jumping up and down on the highly polished floor of MSNBC’s Studio 3A.

Anna Holmes

Anna Holmes is a contributing columnist for the Style section. She is the founder of Jezebel.com.

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The 38-year-old college professor and former cheerleader (Thomas Dale High School in Chester, Va., late ’ 80s) grabs the hand of her husband, fair-housing activist James H. Perry, before bounding — half stomping, half dancing — toward the set of her eponymous new cable news show, which, in just a few short minutes, will make its series debut.

There is some concern that Harris-Perry, a professor of political science at Tulane University, is going to begin her day by twisting an ankle or doing a face-plant on the studio’s plexiglass floor. (If memory serves, she also engages in some fist-pumping along the way.)

But then she’s seated and flipping through a stack of papers as producers, technicians and assistants fuss over earpieces, lights and the show’s first guest, Edward F. Cox, chairman of the New York Republican State Committee.

“One minute!” the floor manager hollers.

Harris-Perry looks straight ahead at one of the unmanned cameras positioned in her direction.

She’s got this.

The program was signature Harris-Perry, from the counter­intuitive opening — in which she made the case for why America needs a strong and competent Republican Party — to the two-minute rant about young women who went online during the Grammy Awards to defend Chris Brown’s assault on his ex-girlfriend, Rihanna. “This has real consequences, especially in African American communities,” she said Saturday. “AIDS is now the leading cause of death for African American women ages 25 to 34, and most infections come from unprotected sex.” Some young women, she continued, have so internalized the message that they need a man that they will do anything — forgo safe sex, invite violence into their lives — in order to keep one.

Though Harris-Perry is at ease synthesizing the complexities at the intersections of race, gender and politics, she’s not quite comfortable training that academic gaze on herself. In fact, the woman who may just help revolutionize mainstream news analysis — last week, writing for Alternet, media critic Jennifer Pozner described her as the “first black progressive woman to ever solo-host her own news and politics show on a major corporate TV news outlet” — seems downright reluctant to provide a Big Picture Analysis of her own success, or her effect on the wider cable news landscape, which tends to be white, male and middle-aged.

“Yes, this is something new, but I don’t want to divorce it from a trajectory,” says Harris-Perry, quick to acknowledge the contributions that such longtime, more classically trained broadcast journalists as CNN’s Soledad O’Brien and PBS’s Gwen Ifill have made to the changing shades of national news. “You know, I think about Oprah, who was obviously doing a very different kind of show, a cultural daytime talk show, but that show was very much about her voice and her opinions and how she read and saw the world.”