Dr. Lester K. Spence

If you’re connected to me via facebook you know I was updating furiously during the Obama speech. And I agreed with much of it. What he’s doing is nothing less than revolutionary–at least within the context of the last 10 plus years of American politics. The Great Society, the New Deal, Obama isn’t using a nice neat phrase to refer to his attempt to change the social contract, but this is what he’s doing. The GOP will attempt to maintain party discipline and serve as the party of obstruction–something the DNC should have done during the previous eight years–but i am not sure they’ll be able to hold up. States are coming close to the fiscal edge as we speak, and the numbers don’t even begin to tell the story.

Yet and still there was one element of Obama’s speech that I find troubling. He’s still holding on to the line about what parents need to do to ensure their kids educational success.

We’ve moved away from neoliberal policies. I’m expecting us to nationalize banks any day now. And whereas ten years ago we were gushing over CEO heroes, no one is looking to business or to MBA management practices to solve pressing social problems.

Neoliberalism is dead.

But yet and still we’re employing various rhetorical and institutional devices to frame issues in such a way that personal discipline and hustle remain central. We can have a kid write the President a letter telling him her school is basically crumbling around her….yet still emphasize “parental responsibility”, even as the kid sits next to the First Lady. This is neoliberal governmentality in a nutshell, creating a discourse in which people feel compelled to govern themselves, embedding neoliberal ideas about human capital deep within their souls.

I’ve never felt more connected to the country than I have this year. Seeing Obama handle the toughest crisis we’ve faced in the modern era with aplomb was powerful to see, particularly given his predecessor. But that’s part of the problem for me.

Neoliberalism is dead. Long live neoliberalism.

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After the passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (your neoliberal government at work), some thought that one of the (intended) benefits was that racial politics and welfare would be decoupled. Or at the very least, the Democratic Party would no longer be saddled with the welfare burden. The public opinion data suggested otherwise, but the problem was that the public opinion data that we used was collected BEFORE the passage of the Act.

I just stumbled on an interesting article from Public Opinion Quarterly. The abstract for “The End of Welfare as We Know It?” (Joshua Dyck and Laura Hussey, vol 72, No. 4, pp. 589-618):

Since passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA), welfare has lost its place among America’s most controversial issues. While there are many critics of the reform, many more declare it a success, and these elites are both Republican and Democrat. Opinion polls indicate that a majority of the public is favorably inclined toward the passed reforms. In this paper, we provide systematic evidence that the information environment surrounding welfare policy has changed. Given this, we pose the following research question: do negative attitudes about blacks continue to color people’s willingness to spend money on welfare programs? We address this question by examining the predictors of opposition to welfare spending in the 1992, 1996, 2000, and 2004 American National Election Studies. The evidence suggests that despitethe changing information environment, welfare attitudes are as strongly racialized in 2004, as they were a decade earlier.

Dyck and Hussey knocked this out of the park. (And yes their last names are funny as hell considering the subject.)

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With Obama’s election, there was hope that the black media corps would have a much tighter relationship with him. And to an extent they have so far–remember we’re barely a month into his Presidency. Feels a lot longer because Bush pretty much abdicated after the election, but still…

So Essence, BET, and Ebony I think have all had a crack at him. But still we hear “whining.”

From Roland Martin. From the black press corps in general. We need more blacks not only asking questions, but on the team figuring out who is even ALLOWED to ask questions.

Now I’ve already talked about this at the Barbershop. But a conversation at TNC’s spot has changed my mind. During the last administration, which was fairly diverse phenotypically, I argued that I could do without Bush’s diversity. If having someone black meant having someone like Clarence Thomas or someone like Rice in a position of power? Save that.

I don’t think that any longer.

There are at least two reasons why affirmative action, or programs that increase diversity “for diversity’s sake” are beneficial even when there are no substantive differences in the outlook between the various “diverse groups.”

The first is psychological. I don’t think I’ll ever forget my middle son’s response when I asked him why he was going to vote for Obama in the mock election:

Because white people need to know black people can do it too.

He understands at 8 what it takes years for some to understand–this isn’t about black self-esteem, at all. Whites need to routinely be exposed to non-whites (and women) in positions of power, regardless of attitudes, so their conception of power, their conception of (in this case) what it means to be American can change and grow. And we need to see this too, so our own conception of what our country is capable of can change. Note this has nothing to do with US. We routinely accomplish without the need for “role models.” 

But the second thing is material. In order to stave off societal death as long as possible, we need to have our cultural and human capital distributed as widely as possible. Having non-whites in positions of power and authority does that–regardless of the attitudes and policy stances those non-whites take. We cannot solve our current crisis if we continue to rely on a subset of our population for answers to our problems, just as we cannot hope to win any modern war if even 10% of the eligible population is sitting on the sidelines. 

Again, my own mind has changed here. I still have a strong preference for diversity that leads to a richer set of policy options/ideas. But I now have a preference for what some might call “surface diversity.”

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I’m prepping for class tomorrow. This semester I’m teaching Black Politics at the undergrad level and American Racial Politics at the graduate level.

Tomorrow’s ARP lecture is about the role of race and racial ideology in the generation of knowledge. I’m going to start by discussing why it took so long for political scientists to study racial politics, and then move to some of the problems associated with the modes they used to study racial politics when they began to study it.

But in re-reading the articles I came across the following passage that reminds me of a problematic exchange that I’ve seen regarding police brutality in black neighborhoods. In “Inequalities That Endure? Racial Ideology, American Politics, and The Peculiar Role of the Social Sciences” Lawrence Bobo begins with two post-9/11 focus groups, one predominantly white, the other black. Asking them each what is the most pressing problems they face in their community, the black focus group says “crime and drugs”. One of the participants goes on:

The first two robberies that I had, the elderly couple that lived next door to me, they called the police. I was at work when the first two robberies occurred. They called the police two or three times. The police never even showed up. When I came in from work, I had to go…file a police report. My neighbors went with me, and they had called the police several times and they never came. Now on that Sunday when I returned from church and caught him in my house, and teh guy that I caught in my house lives around the corer, he has a case history, he has been in trouble since doomsday. When I told [the police] I had knocked him unconscious, oh yeah, they were there in a hurry. Guns drawn. And I didn’t have a weapon except for the baseball bat, [and] I wound up face down on my living room floor, and they placed handcuffs on me.” (p. 15)

According to the article, the situation was so shaky that she thought she’d have been shot by the police had it not been for the presence of one black police officer. After this encounter she ended up being arrested, while the perp was taken to the hospital. 

One of my commenters, and others I’ve read elsewhere, mentioned the shibboleth of “black on black crime” when talking about Oscar Grant and other incidences of police brutality. I asked my commenter why exactly we should place violence between two civilians on the same conceptual level as that between individuals and the state? 

Got no answer. Don’t really expect one.

For the agnostic of my readers, re-read that passage above if you could. Crime is a problem in black communities because they tend to be poorer. But crime is also a problem in black communities because the individuals charged with protecting them are either slacking on the job, or unable to discern between criminals and non-criminals, or both. 

Which is the more pressing problem?

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