Dr. Lester K. Spence

Traffic coming off I35 Bridge, looking South

Originally uploaded by Mordac whose website can be found here.
The recent problems in Minnesota, New York City, and according to Craig Nulan, Montreal, and Saint Louis, all reveal the growing problems in managing our infrastructure. Many of the roads and bridges built during the first major wave of highway construction were overdesigned, so if the specs say that the structures can bear 100 tons, they can likely bear 200.

But this assumes constant maintenance. Which also assumes money to pay maintenance workers, to train maintenance workers. This also assumes education to train people to become maintenance workers. It is easy, perhaps too easy, to blame the current administration.

Make no mistake, particularly given the recent attempt of Tony Snow to blame this on the states (go to the “questions” section of the press release), the current administration does bear a great deal of responsibility. Not just because they happen to be the ones in charge and the highway system is clearly the responsibility of the federal government. But because the ideology they support–conservatism–is at base an anti-government ideology that rails against the use of the federal government for any purpose other than national offense and incarceration.

However they are not alone. John Edwards is the first major democratic presidential candidate to talk earnestly about economic inequality, and to a lesser extent racial inequality. Has any candidate over the last 30 years suggested devoting the billions of dollars needed to make sure our roads continue to work? Our bridges?

Apocalyptic movies like Mad Max, Escape from New York, and the like rarely say exactly how the world went to hell. But I don’t think it starts with a nuclear holocaust. It starts like this. A bridge crumbles here, a series of pipes burst there. There is a brief blip of public awareness, then back to business. But the ties that link cities to one another dwindle. The ties between individuals in cities dwindle.

Those gardens are starting to look better and better every day. Craig and Cobb are beginning to think seriously about this issue. We all should.

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I’ve started a new photoblog over at Vox. My man George reminded me about the following video.

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For those of you who don’t know, my wife has her own radio show called Chocolate Chats. Last week I was the guest, but tonight she’s going to run a full hour and deal with the black presence in new media. Among her guests will be Craig Nulan (from Mobilepage.net but who also pops up from time to time on various black blogs), Steph Renee of Soul Sanctuary, Jennifer James of Mommy Too Magazine, and Carlos Muhammad of Luv4self publishing.Her show usually goes only a half hour, but she’s going to go for an hour this time out. Should be a fascinating conversation, and one that I think a number of folks out there should be interested in.

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A number of people have answered my simple question. How far could you travel when you were a kid?I decided to actually answer this question myself by way of google maps. By walking/bike riding? The farthest I went unsupervised was about 7 miles on foot. And from the comments it sounds like I’m on the short end. Taking the subway from Harlem to Brooklyn (or was it vice-versa) is a lot more than seven miles (though it isn’t on foot).What we lose from this is not only autonomy (and audacity to quote from Craig Nulan), but also a sense of community. Checking out an interview with Grace Lee Boggs on Bill Moyers, as well as reading Keith Owens’ post about the lack of grocery stores in Detroit, helped to crystallize this for me. (more…)

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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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I became aware of Bronze Trinity through Myblog. She’s put into play something that I said would be an excellent idea–a  single place where I can quickly see what other black bloggers were writing about.

Check out her pageflake. In fact, bookmark it. There are literally hundreds of black bloggers, but she’s created a page that seemingly combines a set of topic centered news widgets, with the feeds of almost every black blogger connected to the Afrospear. I know at least one other blogger who has tried to create something like this. Dope dope DOPE.

If you have done something similar, please let me know. We don’t need to all get on the same page necessarily. We just need to do what it is we do, and then have some way to centralize INFORMATION about what we do.

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General Baker is an old school labor activist in Detroit. Check this video out…it runs a little long but it is worth it.
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In response to a followup note on my post on local government, Keith Owens asks:

When you say “a series of self-sustaining societies” what do you mean exactly? I think I may have an idea, but I want to make sure I’m clear on what you’re saying.”

Right now cities are designed for a uniquely mid-twentieth century purpose. They exist as a hub for labor, for manufacturing, for distribution. External capital creates and sustains them. Damn near every significant institution in the city is designed to reproduce this system. Education for example is designed to produce workers/mid-level managers/executives for industry. In a city like Detroit even the churches fit in this model-at least they used to.You could distinguish the powerful churches from the not-so-powerful by how many Ford Motor Co. jobs they could provide.

The strength of this city model is pretty clear. When industry rolls, the city rolls.

But the weakness of the model is not just the flipside of that (when industry fails, so does the city).

The model itself is not sustainable. Not environmentally, as twentieth century industry leaves a pretty toxic footprint. Not economically. Profit margins cannot continue to increase, and even if we take economic cycles into consideration over the long haul the peaks will decrease in size because of diminishing returns, competitors, market saturation, etc.

Finally it is not sustainable politically. As markets free up and capital becomes more and more mobile firms (as a partial result of government action) leave for better economic climates–first outside the city, then later outside of the country. To compete for those firms the best governments can do is reduce the tax burden. Reducing the tax burden means in effect reducing the ability of government to provide services to citizens. This in turn further neuters the citizens.

Now the thing is, at its best the twentieth century model of the city lasted a good 60 years or so. But that’s about it. And while cities like New York may very well last in something like its present form for another 100 years, there are a whole range of rustbelt cities that have not, and will not. Cities like Gary and Detroit are now full of literally thousands of citizens who are trained for jobs that no longer exist, and as a result are unemployable. In Detroit? I’d estimate that about 300,000 citizens in Detroit could easily work on the assembly line if this were 1965, but cannot find meaningful employment now.

So what type of vision can we generate for these cities that put these people to work, and give meaning to their lives?

This is where the idea of self-sustaining societies come from. We’ve got to create a model of living that both generates a life of meaning and purpose for everyone with the physical capacity to work, we’ve got to create a model of living that is not based on the vagaries of global capital, but on local development and modest growth. This means revisiting the idea of community, and perhaps reframing it. This means generating a new more transparent form of politics. This means identifying different means of feeding ourselves. And this definitely means a different way of educating our citizens.

Does this make sense?

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The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation recently gave DC 122 million for their high schools.

(as an aside, i’ve been an Apple guy for the last few years because Windows sucks so bad…but as evil as Windows is pitched to be, it’s hard to argue with Bill Gates’ philanthropy, whereas on the other hand I don’t have a clue about what Steven Jobs does with his loot. )

We’ve got a scientist deficit in the states. More people believe that God created man in his present form than in even a moderate version of evolution. While there are all sorts of ways we might deal with that deficit, I think the best way is simply to train more black boys and girls, Latinos and Latinas, white girls and rural white boys. Go to the under-represented populations and the deficit should diminish significantly. Spending money on schools in DC, Baltimore, and Saint Louis should be a no-brainer. And while some think that these kids aren’t able to be taught, I think there are enough models that prove otherwise.

The problem though is twofold. First we conceive of education as a private rather than a public resource. Which means that we’re less likely to put a sustained effort into dealing with kids we don’t see a private benefit in dealing with. I put work into my children because they’re my children.

The second is that city school systems are sink holes of patronage and as bad as they are they are perceived as being even worse.

Newly elected DC Mayor Adrian Fenty has already been criticized for ignoring black professionals. For something like this to work he already needs the stars to be aligned just right. But on top of that he needs buy-in, from his constituency, as well as from the various educators. I wish him luck.

(Edited to add: Thinking about corruption I ran into this mosaic. An excellent presentation of some of the barriers to overcoming corruption, as well as some innovative solutions.)

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