Dr. Lester K. Spence

Forty years ago this summer, Detroit burned, leaving 43 dead, 467 injured, and 2000 buildings burned to the ground. Although some argue that this ended up being the impetus for white flight, the fact of the matter is that even as whites had the opportunity to leave in droves (and many did), it took a hard fought electoral victory by Coleman Young to seal the deal. Whites, fearing what a black run city would look like, in effect took their marbles and fled.

What should we be focused on forty years later, when it appears as if the dreams of black power died where Jos Campau met the Chrysler Freeway? While the discussion rages as to whether we should follow Garvey, Washington, or Dubois, I think that Grace Boggs has the best handle on it. Thinking about the rebellion, she notes the following:

As we look at our communities, looking more and more each day like wastelands and fortresses, as we look at our younger brothers and sisters scrambling and nodding on the streets of our communities, as we think of the children whom we will be bringing into this world–we cannot just grab on to any ideas of liberation just because they are being pushed by old friends of ours or because they give us an emotional shot in the arm.

We can start by categorically rejecting astrology, drugs, religion, black capitalism, separatism and also all those messianic complexes that someone else or we ourselves are going to become “the leader” whom the black masses are waiting for, to lead them out of the wilderness of their oppression. In other words, we can start by turning our backs on all the various escape routes by which many people are still traveling, in the vain hope that somehow they can evade grappling with the real contradictions of this country, this society.

Read the entire essay here. While there is a lot we can gain from studying the ideas of those that came before us, invariably the context we are dealing with now is unique to us, and our task is to develop a response appropriate to it.

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Me at the brooklyn bridge

Originally uploaded by Unbowed.
I’m still trying to get a handle on work, and on my NYC trip. It is likely I won’t be able to get it all down.

Suffice it to say that the network that I’ve worked to build for the last 20 years is a powerful one that deserves replication and study. Formed primarily of black Michigan graduates (YBP 1.0), I rarely have to worry about much as far as the niceties of life. Need a place to stay? Chill in the lower east side with one of my boys….then stay in his brother’s spot in Manhattan. Need a connect to do some work in the schools? Holler at my boy who has an in.

This is real. We can talk all we want about “black people” but the reality for me is that there are not black people as much as there are black men, black women, black concierges, black taxi cab drivers, black day laborers. And there are some black men and women who are making more than a life for themselves. They are not only providing a living for themselves, in some important ways they are building new opportunities for their families, and indirectly for younger brothers and sisters who never imagined it possible to build a life off of the love of sneakers (for example).

But there’s also the other side.

Which I think I’ll keep for the next post.

Suffice it to say that NYC is the closest thing to a police-state city I’ve ever been in.

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Originally uploaded by Unbowed.

I’m in NYC now on business. I’ll be holed up until Monday morning I think. If you’re around and want to holler…give me a ring. 410-948-2709. Life is good.

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I got this from Both Teams Played Hard (the name of the website taken from an infamous Rasheed Wallace quote). They compiled the best 50 NBA Commercials available on YouTube. A couple of things stand out about this commercial. Three actually.

It holds up pretty well over time. I got the same chills watching it this time around as I did the first time I saw it. And I even remember thinking that homeboy in the red doesn’t really belong in the piece at all. What does he really do other than dance? I could do that!

The second is that this definitely needs to be higher on the list than what it was. I think it cracked the top ten but I’m thinking top 3, easy.

The third is that I can’t think of a better way to represent hip-hop without showing a single MC, DJ, or tagger.

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This year’s top 25 censored stories of 2007 includes this interesting tidbit:

Special Counsel Scott Bloch, appointed by President Bush in 2004, is overseeing the virtual elimination of federal whistleblower rights in the U.S. government.

The U.S. Office of Special Counsel (OSC), the agency that is supposed to protect federal employees who blow the whistle on waste, fraud, and abuse is dismissing hundreds of cases while advancing almost none. According to the Annual Report for 2004 (which was not released until the end of first quarter fiscal year 2006) less than 1.5 percent of whistleblower claims were referred for investigation while more than 1000 reports were closed before they were even opened. Only eight claims were found to be substantiated, and one of those included the theft of a desk, while another included attendance violations. Favorable outcomes have declined 24 percent overall, and this is all in the first year that the new special counsel, Scott Bloch, has been in office.

And out of 25 censored stories, that’s just number 6. Yep. This snitching sh*t has got to stop!

(edited to add: Check out blackprof.com for a richer take on this.)

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I remember when we were younger and in college. If you wanted to have an event that was guaranteed a crowd but without a DJ? You had a “male-female relationship” forum. We’ve got something very similar going on now in black blogs. Over at Jack and Jill and in at least one other place I frequent folks are bringing up what is a contemporary challenge in black communities–the diminishing number of available black men. One response from black women is to expand their dating pool to nonblack men in general–a response that garners extreme criticism from some quarters. Another response–much smaller–is to explore relationships with other women. And a third response is to pursue relationships with black men, sometimes sharing black men with other women.

As the parent of two daughters, I’m concerned about this reality, and I don’t think it’s going to get better soon. In fact I think it’ll soon get worse, not just for black (and Latina) women, but for women in general. At the very least at the higher tiers–I’ve taught around 60 kids this year, and fewer than 20 of them were men.  What this means for me is simple–to the extent I can control it, I socialize my daughters to be willing to date men who are not black. The numbers just don’t work unless we consider polygamy a serious option because at any given point because of structural factors there are always many more powerful women than there are men. One of the commenters at Jack and Jill noted that we’re in a civil war and we need to get our own house in order before we even consider dating outside of the race.

This point of view is understandable, but backwards. One of the reasons why we are at war with one another is because of extreme competition over scarce resources–men. By having a restricted dating pool, heterosexual women end up at war with other women…and inevitably end up at war with black men.

For an interesting look at this perspective, take a listen to this story. Farai doesn’t dig into the politics her that much but this is still worth a listen. What concerns me is that while we try to mobilize around long term solutions, we aren’t paying adequate attention to what we need to do NOW to keep people safe and sane.

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Thanks to my man Jimi, I got put down with Michele Martin’s new show. I’ve done the political roundtable thing before, to what I thought were horrible results. I can play the political analyst, but what I really do when I’m on the mic…is talk sh*t.

So what Jimi and Michele did was put on a bit where that’s basically all we do. The result is controlled chaos.

Check it out here.  Let me know what you think!!

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My kids asked me the other day to eat dinner with them. I begged off.

“No thanks.” I said.

It isn’t like I don’t love my kids. I do.

But what I’m looking for come dinner time, is decompression. And it’s difficult to get decompression when you’ve got an orchestra playing in the background.

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Originally uploaded by Unbowed.

For respite, clarity, and vision, I take pictures.

Last week I was out, planning to take a trip to the cemetery to get some shots in during the golden period–that moment during the day where the sun produces beautiful golden rays. On the way to the cemetery I drove by Druid Hill Park–for the old heads, the park that Dru Hill took its name from.

It was packed. Cadillacs, El Dorados, Escalades, Yukons, Superhawks, Ninjas, tricked out with dvd players, bass heavy stereos, and Sprewell rims. Moving at a snails pace as drivers profiled. On both sides of the strip of road running through the park a sea of black men and women hung out, checking out the rides, and each other. Some brought pit bulls, some brought babies. Some brought their A games, testing their mettle against Baltimore’s best pickup basketball players.

Meanwhile, men with motorbikes, scooters, and four-wheelers popped wheelies around the lake. They are notorious for doing tricks in traffic, sometimes through traffic. No helmets. No leather jackets. No traffic lights. Speed, danger, and freedom.

When I found out that the cemetery was closed I tried to get back to the park with the quickness, parking on the outskirts because I knew that it’d take hours to get out of traffic if I did otherwise. I got off about a hundred or so shots, easily.

A group of sisters came up to me while I was taking pictures. “Take one of me and my girls,” they said. I shot a few.

Then one of the sisters wanted me to shoot her with one of the bikers. I did, with the brother pictured here. I didn’t know what their relationship was, and didn’t say more than a few words to the brother.

Last night I got an email from the sister.

“I’m sorry to bother you, but I was wondering whether you had any other pictures of me and the boy with the bike? He was killed yesterday.”

Speed, danger, freedom.

(edited to add: i just received a response back. he was shot, walking to his car.)

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I’m working on a project involving black attitudes about people with HIV/AIDS, and was doing some more citation digging. Came across this nugget that I don’t think I’ve seen before–or at least not recently, it is taken from my personal files:

A study was conducted to determine whether the level of black socioeconomic status is related to the level of black residential segregation in the city and suburbs of Detroit. Data were drawn from the U.S. Bureau of Census, 1990 Summary Tape Files 4-A, and the indexes of dissimilarity D and isolation P were used to measure segregation and isolation between blacks and whites at the same level of occupation, income, or education. Findings reveal that residential segregation between blacks and whites remained high in both city and the suburbs in spite of comparable socioeconomic status. It is noted that at every socioeconomic level, blacks in the suburbs were more isolated than blacks in the city.

This piece was written by Joe T. Darden and Sameh M. Kamel and is entitled Black Residential Segregation in the City and Suburbs of Detroit: Does Socio-economic Status Matter? Now there are some serious questions about generalizability, because the Detroit area is one of the most segregated areas of the country. But particularly given my previous post about the New Poor, it’d be interesting to see how blacks in the suburbs–who as the article notes are even more isolated than blacks in the city– are faring. In fact, depending on how the wind blows–if whites become less rather than more progressive in light of their plight–we may end up seeing suburban blacks return to the city in droves for matters of safety and comfort more than anything else.

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