Dr. Lester K. Spence

About an hour before Obama’s State of the Union Address, I had the pleasure to deliver a keynote lecture at Hobart and William Smith College. My talk “Constructing Pookie: The Politics of the Black Male Crisis” was sponsored by The Fisher Center for the Study of Men and Women and was the first talk of their “Engendering Crisis” series. I’m going to put the video up later, but I had the chance to talk with the Director of the Center, Cedric Johnson. Cedric’s first book From Revolutionaries to Race Leaders unpacks the politics of the black power movement. It’s required reading for those trying to understand the politics of the post-civil rights era. He is one of my favorite scholars,because he’s deeply engaged in the politics of “black politics” and also in trying to create or at least begin to articulate what a new world should look like in doing so.

And besides that he’s “good people”.

We had the chance to sit down and talk Thursday before I flew back to Baltimore. I had the presence of mind to tape our one hour conversation. I edited it a little bit. Check it out. We talk about neoliberalism, parenting, the Academy, and the black male crisis, among other things. We don’t talk about his book, but maybe we will next time around.

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Roland Fryer has been working on a program that pays children for academic success for a while now, and its been rolled out in Chicago, New York City, and Washington D.C. even though research argues that it does little to nothing to reduce the achievement gap. For all of the talk about black public intellectuals such as Cornel West, I don’t think there is a single black public intellectual who has had more of an effect on public policy. When Fryer jokes that economy studies and rationalizes behavior in this and all known universes he lays out the central premise of neoliberal governmentality.

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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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Michele Martin has been working on a new NPR show and has been demoing parts of it on her blog.  My man Jimi came up with a brilliant idea.  Instead of having a roundtable discussion of experts as experts about the days events, why not have a roundtable discussion of black men (not necessarily “regular” black men) just shooting the sh*t basically.  So he puts me, Gary Dauphin, Eugene Robinson, and Alvin Patrick of ESPN’s Cold Pizza fame, on the mic.  The results?

There were two takes–one with Jimi at the head, one with Michel Martin.  Check out Ms. Martin’s ideas on the piece, and judge for yourself.

Me?  I haven’t listened to both takes, but I talked to Michele briefly afterwards.  The first one with Jimi was cool because it was almost like the microphone wasn’t there.  The second one with Michele was cool becasue Michel has a very beautiful voice, and a stronger radio presence.  But in her case I definitely knew that the mic was there.  I’d be interested i your opinions.

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Somehow I missed Gary Dauphin’s take on John McWhorter. I’m interested in McWhorter about as far as I can throw him, but what I am becoming more interested in are the politics of The New Accomodationism.

Accomodationism refers to the ideology taken up by blacks in the Jim Crow era. Given the pervasive nature of Jim Crow terrorism blacks had to decide whether (and how) to fight, or to go along to get along. This latter strategy involved using various means to change the self-image of black people as well as their image in the minds of whites. It also involved various forms of self-help either through religious, fraternal, professional, or educational institutions, or through various media publications. But the one strategy that was largely disavowed was that of political and economic action against the terrorist regime. The best way for black success was to accept the contours of Jim Crow and to do everything they could to help themselves within those confines (along with getting out of the way of whites).

What we are dealing with now is nothing less than a new form of racial accomodationism. When was the last time that someone posited that structural factors were responsible for black life chances, without qualification? That is, instead of saying “well, we know that some police have it out for black people…but yet and still black crime is real”, saying “some police have it out for black people and we need to figure out how to deal with this.”

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I had the opportunity this weekend to meet a brother I’ve thought of as a friend for at least five years–Jelani Cobb. Jelani was in the area promoting his new book and I got a chance to kick it with him a bit.

We got to talking about nationalism and institutions–what we were just talking about in regards to the State of Black America 2007 event–when we got on the subject of Malcolm:

(more…)

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Mat Johnson’s cooking with gas.

I don’t know how I got put down with Niggerati Manor. Probably Tayari. Yes. Tayari.

I see a great deal of promise in the explosion of Urban Fiction. But for writers like Mat and Tayari, this promise is fraught with…I wouldn’t call it danger, but something akin to it. Just as we have a need for the work of Toni Morrison, we also have a need for the stories of someone like K’Wan. the key though is space.

The space to for writers like K’Wan to tell the stories they want to tell, in the way they feel they want to tell them.

The space for writers like Mat to develop their craft and to do the work needed to move black literature out of the ghetto of low expectations and tired themes.

Book publishers are shutting down imprints left and right. Even academic publishers are now expected to make a profit. In this context where music and books can be freely downloaded it is becoming harder for writers to get the breaks they need to make their mark. And harder for writers to write unique work that speaks to the realities of 21st century black life.

Organizing and networking under these circumstances can only help. Networks can sustain writers through dry spells, they can help writers generate new ideas about distributing their work, they can make what is already viewed as a mystical process much more transparent, and they can spread the wealth that has been previously concentrated in the hands of a few agents, writers, and publishers. I consider this a potential example of Open Source organizing, and I am interested in the journey Mat and his crew are about to take. Harold Cruse talked incessantly about the need for black artists to develop their own critical standards in order to improve their art, and in so doing improve the quality of black life. The Niggerati Manor potentially represents a step in this direction.

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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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Usually on a miserable day like today I rely on self-medication. Like I did yesterday. But that alone isn’t cutting it, particularly after I just got back from talking about the devastating effect that the prison industrial complex is having on urban centers like Baltimore.

So while checking out the Detroit Free Press I ran across this article about Will Smith and his next film effort. The film sounds interesting enough that I’ll probably catch it as a rental unless I’ve some time over the Christmas Holiday. But what continues to impress me about Will and his wife is their commitment to a democratic life. Check out that last quote Jada drops about Proposal 2.

Politics isn’t about electing candidates. It’s about resources…and also possibilities. They understand the possibilities inherent in American life more than most.

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even in the worse ways.  part of me–the democratic theorist and actor–understands that part of my mission is to expand the ability of folks to speak their “special” truth, even when that “special” is “special” as in “special” needs.  we’ve got to make it so that people like my grandfather who didn’t have a high school degree the first can make sense of the world and argue for the common good against some knucklehead with a phd.

but the other part of me needs expertise.  i wish john ridley would stick to writing about mutants.

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