Dr. Lester K. Spence

This was the take home message of my latest NPR Commentary. The caption focuses largely on black America’s debt. And our debt is growing. But what folks really need to get with is the fact that this is an American condition. Black people are always talking about how we spend money on frivolous stuff like Cadillacs and Air Jordans instead of stocks and bonds (preferably black stocks and bonds). Well…check that. Black people don’t talk about it, black pundits (like Tavis) do. That’s not the reality though.

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I am in Houston at the 4th Annual Summer Workshop on Health Disparities. A number of the countries best and brightest are here to talk about health disparities from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Right now I’m listening to Bill Jenkins and he’s talking about the disparity in death rates and HIV/AIDS between blacks and whites. When video of the conference is available I’ll link to it here. Tidbits:

• There was an arcane law in New Orleans that allowed drug users to get clean needles from the state. This law was prominently featured in a newspaper critique…and legislators promptly changed the law.
• There isn’t one HIV/AIDS epidemic…there are two parallel epidemics in America, one largely black, one largely white. They’ve got different roots (HIV/AIDS is transmitted in black communities NOT by down-low brothers but by hetero drug addicts, HIV/AIDS is transmitted in white communities by white gay men). They’ve got different solutions.
• The disparity between high income black and white women in infant mortality rates far outstrips the disparity between low income black and white women. Why? Stress…but I’m thinking there’s more going on.

What we’ve got to get to–and why I became a Kellog Scholar in Health Disparities in the first place–are the politics behind these dynamics. One of my colleagues talked about the role of “cultural insensitivity”. I suggested that it isn’t “insensitivity”…what we’re talking about are the politics of care.

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I participated in an NPR discussion on politics a couple of days ago. I get asked a lot about the Presidential race. “Do you think Hilary can pull it out?” “What about Kerry?”

This ain’t Miami vs. Dallas. I give less than a damn about what X has to do to take advantage of Y event. Just tell me what we have to do to get a decent working wage? What do we have to do to get the hell out of Iraq? Don’t give me personalities, give me policies.

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I read Octavia Butler’s last book, Fledgling. I’ve talked about what Butler meant to me as an Afrofuturist. On one level Fledgling is a very simple book, attempting to answer a series of very simple questions. Reading it I can see the gears turning in Butler’s head.

• What if the first black vampire was a modern creation?
• What if vampires could be explained scientifically?
• What type of social structure would vampires need to survive?

The protagonist of Fledgling is a 53 year old vampire named Shori. Bred to create a group of vampires who could traverse the Earth during the day, Shori has the body and the appearance of a ten year old girl. Further, because of an attack on her extended family (vampire and human) that leaves her alone, she has amnesia. It isn’t that difficult to imagine a narrative using the same central character that focuses on how weak she is, how powerless. But Butler doesn’t roll like that. Shori’s strength comes because of, not in spite of her status. Because of her amnesia she’s not grief stricken by the death of her family. Because of her size, she’s able to slip in and out of spaces without too much attention. And because of her blackness, she is a Daywalker.

There are a whole host of black writers who either consciously or unconsciously ignore the power of black people. To quote Albert Murray they’ve effectively bought into the fakelore of white supremacy–believing there’s something “broke” about black people. As long as the work of Octavia Butler lasts, we’ll have at least one model of how to get out of that trick bag.

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One of the interests that ties the various threads of my work together is in intra-racial gender politics. Basically the politics of gender within black communities. How is the anxiety caused by the “down-low” narrative heightened because of the gender gap in professional black spaces? What type of organizing can black students do on black and non-black campuses when women outnumber the men 6 to 1? How can we be truly healthy given the marriage disparity?
Black women have been historically forced to choose between their gender and their race. While it is very possible to be discriminated against because you are a black women, it is literally impossible to sue for race AND gender discrimination. How does the race vs. gender choice influence their attitudes?

I’ve been working on a paper that answers that question. I haven’t really shared my academic work here…but I expect a rough draft to be ready soon. It’ll be a bit technical, but I think it’ll be worth reading for folks who are looking for something more than NPR commentaries and black voice essays.

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Over the weekend I had a chance to read Hip Hop Matters by S. Craig Watkins. Probably the best book of its kind in the field. It was a little formulaic in places–in order to flesh out the narrative Watkins presents brief bios of important figures in rap, and after a few chapters you can pretty much predict when those bios occur and the form they take. Some of the thoughts I have after reading it:

• Watkins refers to “corporate rap” in a few places. What’s the difference if any between corporate rap and non-corporate rap–beyond the obvious I mean. He alludes to thematic differences, as do many in the field. But if I recall correctly Straight Outta Compton was a non-corporate release, while I’m pretty sure Common’s Be is about as corporate as you can get. By using the “corporate/non-corporate” dichotomy, Watkins is to a certain extent able to create a dichotomy between “real” rap and “sold out” rap. But this dichotomy is only politically useful. Unless there is some important qualitative difference between the two I don’t think it is actually useful analytically. I wonder where he got this term from? Is there any literature (besides the alcohol piece I already cited) that uses or defends this dichotomy using some combination of theory and empirics?

• There are many places where he refers to the “hip-hop movement”. Again, this term is politically useful–and when I say this I mean useful because it is a signal to his main audience (hip-hop scholars, activists, heads, and fellow travellers) about his own political line, a signal that they don’t necessarily have to read Watkins’ work with a grain of salt. He doesn’t have to defend it, say what makes it a “movement” or even what a “movement” is…not just because the book is a non-academic book…but because people “know” it’s a movement already. I actually agree that it is, but it is a cultural movement….one that has a form of micro-politics embedded in it. That distinction is important.

(more…)

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I’ve written elsewhere about the problem with the whole idea of “the down low.” I presented the tentative results of an experiment I conducted looking at black attitudes towards HIV/Aids and towards black men (straight, gay, and bisexual). I found that black women exposed to stories about an HIV/AIDS victim who claimed to be heterosexual but in actuality was not (the typical down-low portrait) was much more likely to feel cold towards black men in general, and towards black bisexual and gay men in particular. As much as we talk about Why Americans Hate Welfare, what we really need to deal with are the problems keeping black people from organizing with other black people. There’s a real interesting book project here that deserves tackling. (more…)

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I took the post below and snatched it from my old haunts.

I remember the first time I heard “Song for My Father” by Horace Silver. I couldn’t have been more than five years old. My grandfather played it, and other old school classics, religiously. We never got a chance to talk about its meaning to him. Could’ve just been another song. But today reminds me how important fathers are. Not in crass Singltetonian sociological sense. I know plenty of men who grew to be fine men and fine fathers without having fathers around themselves. But in the sense of…well, again, pictures say it best. Dad, Mr. Mason, Bill, Chris, Steve, Mark, Marlin, Doom, Joseph, Sam, Darius, Stan, Jeff, Ernie, Chuck, Delbert, Dan, Orrin, Louis, Robert, Ben, Kurmell, LaRoi, Rob G., Caurn, Will, Reg, Frank, RayShawn, Curt, Bird, Mike O., Todd, Tyron, Sel, Rudy, Rico, J Marks, Big Nasty, Fly, Perk, Drew, Dokes, Brett Dancer, Larry, Mark Douglas, Harwood, Mike Minta, Ralph, Bowen, Craig, Ed, M.A.N., Ern, and those I missed, Happy belated Father’s Day.

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Around Mother’s Day a group publishes a report on the State of the World’s Moms. The United States didn’t fare too well. My latest commentary on NPR looks at how these numbers jibe with the supposed “culture of life” that Bush supports. This came out a few weeks ago, but given the day I thought it was appropriate to talk about it here. Can’t very well have fathers without mothers can we?

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I changed my CMS from Geeklog to Wordpress after much deliberation. I wanted a cleaner look, and I also wanted to be able to use tags to organize my blog entries. Wordpress offers both, plus literally hundreds of plugins and themes. My wife’s blog was probably the thing that put me over the top though.

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