Dr. Lester K. Spence

Twenty years and one day ago I joined Omega Psi Phi Fraternity. There were four of us (Samuel Kirkland, myself, Darius McKinney, Glenn B Eden). I’d tutored Sam and Darius the summer before, and considered Darius a friend. The first time I’d met Glenn was at the first interest meeting (called “the smoker”). We were all middle/working class kids living in and around post-industrial cities (Detroit and Flint). A second year student, I was the oldest. At that smoker there were 17 of us I believe.

By the end of the process only four remained.

Now looking back on it, I knew I’d join a fraternity sometime next the end of my first year. My father–an Omega–talked to me about fraternities. I vividly recall him saying to me that given the racism at Michigan’s campus I needed to have a group of people that I could count on, a group of people that I could trust no matter what. I didn’t have to join Omega Psi Phi, he said, because Omega wasn’t for everybody. But I should consider joining one of them–Michigan also had chapters of Alpha Phi Alpha, Kappa Alpha Psi, and Phi Beta Sigma on campus.

(I say “vividly” in part because my father’s memory of this discussion was very very different. He explicitly remembers telling me that if I didn’t become a “Que”, I couldn’t come home. He remembers this as clearly as I remember what I am telling you. It is possible our stories are somehow both correct, but I’m pretty hardheaded, and if I heard my father tell me what he thought he told me I’d have joined another fraternity.)

My first year I had a chance to see friends of mine pledge two other fraternities (Kappa Alpha Psi, Alpha Phi Alpha). Each with histories going back almost 100 years (Michigan’s chapter of Alpha Phi Alpha just celebrated their 100 year anniversary last week) over time each had garnered its own niche among black men. Over the years I was there as an undergrad Kappa Alpha Psi garnered a reputation as entertainers and event promoters. Phi Beta Sigma during my first few years was known as giving the best step shows. Perhaps because they were the oldest chapter–no, the oldest black organization–on the yard I think that Alpha Phi Alpha probably was the organization that probably best represented the average middle to upper class black man on campus.

There were only two undergraduate Omegas on the yard at that time. They may have held a party during my first year, but I don’t recall it. I do remember thinking that they were aloof. I didn’t see them at any of the other fraternity parties I went to. And they didn’t speak much when I saw them around.

My first year on campus coincided with Spike Lee’s movie School Daze. Now School Daze was about the black college experience…but for me Lee nailed the black experience at Michigan. What I knew about pledging I knew from School Daze. I knew it was hard. I knew it was brutal. I knew it was physical. I didn’t think he got the politics of fraternities right necessarily, but I knew that pledging wasn’t a cakewalk.

But that was the point. I didn’t want something that would be easy. I wanted something that would be difficult. Something that would test me. Something that would take me outside of myself.

So I spent those first two semesters getting the lay of the land. A few of my friends pledged Alpha, one of my closest friends pledged Kappa. For several weeks they dressed the same (the Alphas “Sphinxmen” wore black jackets, black jeans, and black boots, the Kappas “Scrollers” wore blue jeans, blue coats, black sunglasses, and either blue or red berets). Whenever there was more than one of them they walked/ran/marched in single line formation. They didn’t speak to anyone outside of their Big Brothers. When they spoke to each other, they whispered, passing messages up and down the line. Every day at noon they would perform skits for the Big Brothers and for the rest of the campus. Although they had study hours, most of us thought they’d used their study time for sleep…they looked so gaunt and exhausted we figured they didn’t really have much time to sleep.

My close friend who’d become a Scroller? He looked a bit like JR Reid from the North Carolina Tarheels only shorter. About 6′5 or so. Maybe around 250 lbs. I’m guessing he lost about 50-75 lbs while pledging. Each group of pledges has to come up with a line name….a name that describes the group. My friend’s line name was originally “The Octagon” because there were eight of them. After two quit (“dropped line”) their line name became “Six the Hard Way”.

I’d started running with a group of other freshman. My first campus girlfriend used to jokingly call us “The Magnificent Five.” To that extent we’d already had a line name. Already had a bond. It was just about figuring out which group we’d join, together. The Sigmas were tossed out because they weren’t popular enough. The Omegas were tossed out because they were brash and brutal. The first time we saw the Omegas was at the end of the year stepshow. Gold military boots, freshly painted. Royal purple diapers. And nothing else. They looked like something out of a science fiction movie. They scared the shit out of everyone who saw them. They called themselves dogs. And I saw why. They looked and behaved as if they’d rip someone’s throat out in a fight rather than throw a punch. And vulgar as hell. If the Kappas were the Navy, and the Alphas the Army, the Omegas were the Marines. The shock troops. Michael Bowen–an Alpha with around ten more years in the game than I–said the Omegas were “sheer, blunt force trauma.”

Yes sir.

Seeing the Omegas at that moment probably sealed the deal me for my friends. We talked about it later that summer. The ques were wayyy too hard, too scary. The Sigmas didn’t have a high enough profile. The Kappas weren’t scary but one of the most challenging aspects of the pledge life is figuring out how to make a process as hard as possible without compromising academic excellence. From the outside looking in we didn’t think the Kappas on campus had that figured out, at least not in the late eighties. My friend for instance had to spend a few extra semesters in school because the semester he pledged his grades fell off the face of the earth. The Alphas were good men. They pledged hard enough. They had good character. They had a prestigious history.

It was all rational. Made a great deal of sense.

Later that summer my friends and I had a falling out. Pretty severe as far as those things go at least from my perspective. The details aren’t important here, but what I can say is that none of us were all that developed in the art of friendship.

This falling out pretty much removed the Alphas from my calculus.

So that summer I’d made the decision to pledge Omega. One of the first parties on campus made the difference between the Omegas and the other fraternities crystal clear. Another fraternity had a party, and had a step show. During the show they made fun of the others. In making fun of the Omegas–who had a party the following week–they noted that there were too few of them to joke about.

The two Omegas on the campus (plus one) were there. When they heard what the performers said about them, they walked into the center of the party, disrupted the show, and began handing out fliers advertising their party.

Of course a fight broke out.

There were literally two to three dozen members of the other fraternity, and only three Omegas. The Omegas didn’t run or leave each other. And the following, while important was not crucial. They didn’t lose.

That was the type of friendship the type of bond I wanted. The brashness I wanted. I wanted to be with a group of men who would literally go to the ends of the earth for one another, and were willing to disrupt anything and everything in the effort to be.

I was still scared shitless–I weighed barely 145 with clothes on–and didn’t think I had it in me. But it was at that moment I knew I’d made the right decision. The Ques continued to frighten, to intimidate. The first seven weeks of pledging I thought I would quit every single minute of every single day, in fear of what they would do that night, in fear of what they’d do the next day. But I moved through my fear, with my fear. And when i didn’t think I could go on, my line brothers picked me up, urging me not to give up, not to quit. I did the same for them.

I want to say we changed the campus irrevocably when we crossed. Of course that isn’t totally true. But what we provided in my time as an undergrad was a space for black men who wanted to be in a fraternity, but didn’t want to be Greek. Because our numbers were still low we were not really known for what WE did as Omegas. Rather we became known for what we did in the Black Student Union. What we did in the Office of Minority Affairs. What we did when students were maced by police on campus.

More than any single experience I have ever had, pledging Omega Psi Phi prepared me for life. Prepared me for those moments I didn’t think I’d finish my PhD. Prepared me for fatherhood, for how to raise, care for, and discipline children. And most importantly it prepared me for now–when it seems as if the bills don’t stop coming, the challenges of raising a family of seven in a Depression never cease, when every day a new hurdle appears, a new obstacle looms large.

Twenty years and one day later I wonder where I would be without the Ques. And I turn to the poem “Invictus” by Ernest Henley, a poem I learned while pledging. The second stanza:

In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud

Under the bludgeoning of Chance

My head is bloodied but Unbowed

Twenty years and one day later, my head is bloodied.

I remain unbowed.

Deadly Sirius 4/18/89

1. Samuel D. Kirkland

2. Lester K. Spence

3. Darius V. McKinney

4. Glenn B. Eden

DP Selvan Manthiram

ADP Lee Rudolph

Long live the Sons of Blood and Thunder. Long live Omega Psi Phi Fraternity.

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Zoltan Hajnal at the University of California, San Diego, has just published an article in the American Political Science Review that looks at the issue of political representation. Democracy at its best is supposed to distribute victories and losses fairly evenly among the population. I may win on this given issue, my candidate may win in this particular election, but the next time I may lose. But because I know that I at least have the potential to win, I come back and fight another day.

For African Americans? Not so much. The abstract:

Critics have long feared that America’s winner-take-all electoral system would undermine the interests of minorities. Unfortunately, few available tests broadly assess how well minorities fare in a democracy. To gauge winners and losers in the American case, I introduce a new measure of representation. For any election, I count up how many voters from each demographic group vote for a candidate that loses. After comparing this new measure to its alternatives, I use data from the entire series of Voter News Service exit polls and a sample of mayoral elections to determine which kinds of voters end up losers. I find that across the range of American elections, African Americans are consistently more likely than other groups to end up losers, raising questions about equity in American democracy. The one exception to the pattern of black failure—congressional House elections—suggests ways to better incorporate minority interests.

This finding has all sorts of implications for elections, and for public policy. Cobb (Michael Bowen, not Dr. Jelani) argues that rights never generated wealth. This isn’t right at all. Coming with the right to choose winners and losers, among other things, is the indirect right to award contracts and to garner services. If that doesn’t lead to wealth, and health I don’t know what does. In the wake of news that political scientists don’t really bring much to the table in the way of policy prescriptions, it’s good to see research like this.

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I’ve already mentioned this on facebook, but my book Stare in the Darkness: Rap, Hip-hop, and Black Politics has been accepted for publication by the University of Minnesota Press. I plan to rewrite portions of it, to turn it in by August, for August 2010 release.

Along similar lines I believe I’ve mentioned this on facebook, but my article “Episodic Marginalization, HIV/AIDS, and African American Public Opinion” was recently published in Political Research Quarterly. HIV/AIDS has been and remains a scourge in black communities, hitting black women particularly hard. Many blame the rise of HIV/AIDS among black women on black men who claim to be straight but engage in sex with other men. What I do in my article is test the effects of this particular story about hiv/aids transmission, on black attitudes. How does reading a story about a black man infected with hiv/aids through sex with another man influence black attitudes about black men, about hiv/aids, about solutions to it?

I’ve got a proposal in the works that will similarly test the effect of Obama on black public opinion. Well, not Obama per sé but black leaders including Obama. If blacks are exposed to a statement by Obama putting the blame for black problems on black men are they more or less likely to support it? Are they more or less likely to support the types of policy solutions that come along with this?

And my next book project is on neoliberalism in black politics. The goal is to get three solid chapters of this project done by this time next year…in fact sooner than that. We’ll see.

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The Urban League recently released a report on the state of black America.

With unemployment at 22% in Black America alone, do you really need to know what that report said?

For historian Jelani Cobb, this calls for a treatment of the old Booker T. Washington vs. W.E.B. Dubois argument. Whereas Dubois was calling for civil rights and the political enfranchisement of African Americans, it was Washington calling for economic empowerment. Cobb:

If we take a look at the State of the Black Union report on lagging wealth, home-ownership and income within the black portion of America it would seem as if that dispute remains unsettled; that one side has piled up the points only to see the game head into overtime. We (wisely) recognize Du Bois as the godfather of the civil rights movement but Washington’s stillborn economic dream shadows us, a silent signpost of the road not taken.

Quite simply black America has waged a more effective civil rights movement than economic rights movement.

This doesn’t mean that we have paid no attention to the issue of economic development — it has been a primary concern of figures as diverse as Madame CJ Walker, Marcus Garvey, Earl Graves and Louis Farrakhan. But it simply has not had the same bandwidth as the struggles for civil rights. This might be because a “Whites Only” sign is a tangible totem of the tilted social order; poverty is diffuse and relative. And I’m inclined to think that economic development posed a kind of threat that even social equality might not have — there were generally speaking far more black men lynched for demanding wages than for the faulty specter of threatening white women.

However we slice it, the result is black America occupying a status more asymetrical than at any time since some of us were free and the rest were slaves. It is March 27, 2009. Some of live in the White House; some of us live on the street.

And this is essentially what Booker would tell Barack, or more precisely, what he would tell the rest of us because if you think that a President can save you — even one with a swagger, who lives on the South Side of town and ditches auxilary verbs, then you’ve been missing the whole point.

The full post here.

I think that last sentence is on point. The rest of it?

Cobb makes two moves here that we need to think carefully about. Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, Rosa Parks, Queen Mother Moore, Amy and Marcus Garvey….are all dead. We don’t know what they’d say had they been alive, what types of changes in their philosophies they would have made. We all use the dead as a form of shorthand to speak to the present. “[Insert Black Leader Here] would be rolling over in his grave right now.” But in as much as people like Booker T. Washington aren’t living in an age of turntablism, G-20 summits, Iphones, facebook, much less an age in which a black man is provost of Emory University, CEO of American Express, much less President, it’s hard to say with any degree of accuracy how they’d react to this age.

And it becomes particularly hard when we deal with Dubois and Washington. Not just because they came of age at a time when America was barely driving much less flying at the speed of sound. But because with all of the hype surrounding them we’ve really forgotten some of the key things they differed on. Booker T. Wasington didn’t differ from Dubois on the issue of economic empowerment. As time passed Dubois supported the idea of economic cooperatives, and of using black economic capital to help make black people self-sufficient. He differed with Booker T. Washington on the value of education, on the importance of developing black cultural capital, and on the value of black political enfranchisement.

The normal reading of Booker T. Washington, the one that Cobb presents, goes something like this. Booker T. Washington developed Tuskegee so blacks could develop the skilled trades (carpentry, masonry, etc.) that would enable them to be self-sufficient, and that would over time convince whites to give them political rights.

This is wrong. Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee did not to train blacks for the skilled trades, but trained blacks for industrial labor….work that didn’t build self-sufficiency, but rather dependency. Blacks who showed signs of independence, showed signs of wanting to be self-sufficient, received poor grades at Tuskegee-like institutions. Teachers who showed signs of wanting to TEACH self-sufficiency, were fired. The industrialists that funded Tuskegee and like institutions throughout the south wanted black workers who wouldn’t question orders, wouldn’t rock the boat, and wouldn’t compete against them.

(My reading here comes in part from James Anderson’s invaluable work.)

So the first move Cobb makes is to put his (and to a certain extent my) ideas about what Obama should focus on in the mouth of someone who isn’t alive to say anything one way or the other. The second move though is to misread Washington in doing so. Both moves are dangerous, but this last one is particularly so, because trying to make Washington and Washington style boot-licking palatable at a time where we need to fight aggressively for government intervention can cut into attempts to critically assess what we want and need from Obama.

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A few weeks ago the Seattle Post-Intelligencer dropped regular service and went online. Last week the Ann Arbor News–the newspaper that gave me my first paid journalism gig–gave notice that it was following suit. Today both Detroit newspapers cut their home delivery service to three days and ramp up their online presence. 

I’ve talked about this before. What we’re seeing is a shift that will have significant long term consequences. And some of them may be dire. I think that critiques about suck-ass content are on the money. But what is the alternative?

Here’s one. With the slow death of the only institutions that up to now have the capacity (if not the will) to do real investigative journalism, what will replace it? Huffington’s work will barely fill the need of Baltimore much less the nation, but it’s at least possible that other non-profits or people with loot will subsidize similar endeavors.

But, here’s the one I’m interested in. If you could publish your own full color magazine, what would it be about?

Better yet, if you could take out the [substitute your daily newspaper here], what type of content would you use to do it with? Could you get advertisers to subsidize it?

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