Dr. Lester K. Spence

I’m combining two posts that are related.

Rachel is talking about the recent election of Deval Patrick in Massachusetts. Someone asked a group of Asians, Latinos, Whites, and African Americans to name their biggest concerns. Education, crime, jobs, and healthcare (or some combination) was on everyone’s list. But for whites, taxes were also listed. As Rachel notes, when folks say taxes what they really mean is “we’re paying too much and want our taxes cut.”

Which brings me to my girl Tayari, who is touting a Netflix like book service. You pay them loot, tell them what books you want…they drop the books off, and then you send them back when you’re done. Great right?

Only….aren’t libraries one of the things we PAY TAXES FOR?!? I check out whatever books I want…get to keep them for a few weeks, and if they’re late i pay what? Maybe .50c per day in late fees?

What’s happened over the course of some 27 or so years–going back in the modern era to Proposition 13–is that the anti-tax movement has become the norm. We no longer believe that government can or even should provide valuable services–like libraries, good roads, and the like. The end result of this logic is something like Katrina….where people are saying with a straight face that it isn’t the role of government to protect us when catastrophic events occur. One of the reasons we’re homeschooling now is because no one believes enough in the public schools to put the money in them that they should have to do their job.

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Picked this citation up browsing:

Abstract: This article analyzes the high and sustained levels of popular support for President Bush’s policies during the Gulf War using a composite model of public opinion formation drawing on the rally around the flag effect noted by political scientists, the spiral of silence hypothesis drawn from communications studies, and the concepts of priming and framing drawn from political psychology. By linking the aggregate effects noted in the rally and spiral of silence hypotheses with models of individual cognitive processes, the composite model explains, better than either the rally or the spiral hypothesis alone, the sudden shift toward supporting the use of force on January 16, 1991 and the high levels of support that persisted through July.

The Media and the Gulf War: Framing, Priming, and the Spiral of Silence

Barbara Allen; Paula O’Loughlin; Amy Jasperson; John L. Sullivan

Polity, Vol. 27, No. 2. (Winter, 1994), pp. 255-284.

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Kawaida is the philosophical foundation for what many of us now celebrate as Kwanzaa.  Maulana Karenga developed the philosophy of Kawaida as a way to develop an alternative set of cultural values that were themselves based on the best of black diasporal life through time.  The seven principles of Kawaida (Ujima, Umoja, Ujamaa, Nia, Imani, Kujichagulia, and Kuumba) were supposed to be both pre- and post- Ten Commandments, according to Amiri Baraka (once practitioner–Baraka was given his name by Karenga).

So i was looking for a richer conception of Kawaida that I could use for my book, and I don’t have Karenga’s writings handy (they are at home in Baltimore and I’m in Detroit) so I went to Wikipedia.  Couldn’t find it.  Thought I might have spelled it differently.  Nope.  I stopped trying to add my own twists there after a fight with someone over Afrocentrism.  If someone, anyone, has the time to come up with a nice entry for Kawaida, I probably won’t need it by then …but it’ll be appreciated.

Until that is, someone tries to rip it to shreds.

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I don’t know if they’d call it a manifesto, but what the folks at Democracy and Hip-hop have laid down certainly reads like one. Let me say at the outset that this is the type of critical work that we need to be creating and fighting about. This is the only way we’re going to be able to make sense of the reality we find ourselves in without resorting to the language and ideas of times past.

With that said though I have a number of questions. In fact this will probably be split up into a number of posts.
How are we to judge the following statement:

“we conclude that hip-hop, as a form of culture with literally millions of participants here and across the globe, is the best indicator; the best gauge of the consciousness of the masses of people throughout the world and it expresses not only all that is ugly about them, but all that is beautiful and all that yearns to be free. It gives the best approximation of where they are and where they are going, of the present stage in their historical movement to institute a free and democratic society.”

Is this just a numbers thing? That is, can we make this claim about hip-hop because more people listen to it/practice it than other forms of popular culture? I could easily make such a claim about house music–I could definitely make more of a claim about its rootedness (because it is largely faceless and because it wasn’t started in nyc, American music executives were loathe to try to make headway into the genre).  I could make similar claims for electro, for techno…and a lesser claim for bass music.

Further, it’s a stretch to say that hip-hop is the “best” arbiter of what the masses of people are doing.  If by “best” you mean “most representative” then perhaps you can make a case.  People who are performing and consuming hip-hop do so in a wide variety of mind states, and express those states in a variety of different ways.  But in America and elsewhere those ways are skewed by market forces.  Those market forces may actually skew how humanity behaves in a way that makes it LESS representative.  Even the underground responds to the market–acts putting out mixtapes just to get a record deal, which in turn skews the artistic decisions they make as far as what to include/not include in a track.  Breakdancing has already moved out of the clubs and into spaces formerly reserved for house because the clubs want to maximize bodies per square foot.

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Ok.  I was checking out an interview with Minister Faust.  Faust, wrote one of the most original pieces of science fiction that I’d read in the past few years in The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad, and given that he’s got a new book coming out I wanted to see what he was up to.  As an aside we really need more folks like Faust in the game.But anyway that’s a tangent.Did you know that somebody owns the moon?  AND the other eight planets?So…turns out that when countries began moon exploration, the UN passed a law preventing governments from owning celestial bodies.  But that law didn’t cover individuals or corporations.  About 26 years ago….someone took advantage of this loophole.  And the result is The Lunar Embassy.  This is not a joke.Can you imagine what type of lunacy was required to actually conceive of and follow through on this idea?

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Craigslist was sued for violating the 1968 Civil Rights Act because of several dozen racist housing ads that were posted on the Chicago site.  The judge threw the case out because Craigslist is basically a third party publisher.  I agree with the ruling, but with qualifications.  Check it out here.

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(Updated 12.15.06)

Check out this video: (I removed the Youtube video because Firefox 2.0 users and Safari users had trouble.)

This one may be more representative. Check it out as well.
The relationship between police and citizens in urban spaces with large non-white populations can be at the very least compared to the relationship between a colonial army, and colonized subjects. They are obviously not equivalents, but particularly after the sixties, what we began to see is the growing usage of military equipment, strategies, and tactics, to deal with men, women, and children, who are citizens. In fact the way police and millitary units actually share tactics, strategies, and resources across space (within a country, or between countries) is woefully understudied.

For the uninitiated the surge drill is used by the NYPD solely as a way to instill fear into citizens by displaying a public surge of force. What is particularly interesting here is that there is no perpetrator. That is to say, the police aren’t actually RESPONDING to anything here. I’m assuming that New Yorkers have taken this type of thing for granted.

They shouldn’t.

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I did a piece for NPR about the Sean Bell killing, tying it into the research on implicit attitudes and race.  You can find it here.

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Over at Afronerd they’re discussing the Queen brutality case. Their ideological line is very far from mine, but I am not interested in that as much as I am interested in what flows from that. How does a moderate conservative ideological perspective alter their conception of this incident?

They note the following:

1) Policing is a stressful, difficult and dangerous job that no sane person wants to do.

2) Police officers (some who are also persons of color) have been killed in the line of duty leaving families (like the victim’s in this case) orphaned and widowed. The key difference is that Sharpton, to my knowledge has not shown up for cases like these.

3) And of course, you do have reprehensible cases of police misconduct and corruption.

And black/Latino communities have to keep in mind the following (some context deleted for space reasons):

1) The police have to discern who has criminal intent in an atmosphere that idolizes rebel behavior thanks to commercial hip hop imagery. Gone are the days when the heroes and villians wore opposing color schemes. Now there are legions of Black and Brown youth, whose fashion sense and mannerisms mimic those comprised of the thug element. Many are not criminals but (a la 50 cent) how is one to tell the difference between a gangsta and a wanksta.

2) Not only do you have a street culture that has risen to mythic proportions but also street ethics that manifest in “stop snitchin’” policies-the ghetto version of the Italian omerta.

3) And lastly, we have a youth culture that unfortunately fulfill the stereotypes that have been ascribed to them. In the Bell case, all three parties had numerous arrests for drug and weapon charges in the past.

Questions:

• When the writers say “of course there are some reprehensible cases of police misconduct” what do they mean? Are they saying that this is a part of the job? That we should except misconduct as routine? How is this misconduct distributed? Are Manhattan socialites as likely to be the victim of misconduct as Puerto Rican working class men? If not, why not?
• If no sane person would take the job of the police, then are we to believe that the police are in fact, insane?
• The three aspects of black/Latino life they focus on are modern in nature. Is police brutality against communities of color a modern phenomenon?
• Did the police know about Bell’s record before he was shot and killed? Is this why they sought to stop him?

If we don’t take into account the stated purpose of the police, as well as the historical trajectory of their development vis a vis black communities, then it is very easy to take Afronerd’s point of view. But if we take into account the fact that police are paid by our taxes to protect us, then the first viewpoint we should think about are those of the citizens they are supposed to protect. Further if we understand that police misconduct is not a “natural” part of the job, in as much as it is targeted towards certain populations, and that this misconduct is not a modern response to hip-hop, then rather than taking some brutality for granted (and blaming it on hip-hop), we’d likely take a more sensible approach to crime fighting and to police behavior.

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