Dr. Lester K. Spence

I wrote a piece entitled Black Space/White Space for the february issue of The Urbanite. All of the comments I’ve received, even the critical ones, have been thoughtful and respectful. I had a chance to talk about the piece in more depth on the Marc Steiner Show. Although I’ve been on the show several times now and always enjoy it, what I appreciated in this case was that we were able to spend an hour talking through this issue. It’s my hope we can do this on a regular basis.

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This month The Urbanite is running an issue on “Race”. I was asked by the editor to write about the phenomenon of “self-segregation”. So rather than pen a piece about black kids deciding to sit all by themselves, I took another approach. I wrote a piece about the desirability of “black spaces”. Spaces black people can effectively “breathe” in. Of course it’s a bit more complicated than that. But I only had a couple of thousand words to work with. And on top of it I was able to take one of the worst days of 2008 (the first day of the Fall 2008 semester) and use it. Take a look and see what I mean.

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John Edwards revealed that the affair with his campaign staffer Rielle Hunter produced a child, even as his wife was dying from cancer. Although a number of pundits and politicians are glad his political career is over, I’ve second thoughts.

The tragedy in Haiti has taken a devastating turn, and the media has followed turning towards looting and making it the central issue. We saw this narrative four plus years ago in Katrina.

I wrote a couple of pieces on these issues for NPR. My Edwards piece can be found here. My Haiti looting piece? Here.

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I knew Baltimore was the right place for me when a month into my time here I found out they had an annual book festival. I really knew it was the right place when I first appeared on the Marc Steiner Show. Baltimore is blessed with a few top notch interviewers–people who have the right politics as well as good people skills. Today I was on the Marc Steiner Show talking 2009 politics at the local level. I talked a little bit about the Sheila Dixon case–an issue I don’t think I got around to blogging about here. I compared her and Kilpatrick in Detroit, and talked a little about what I think needs to happen in both cities as we enter the second decade of the 21st Century. Listen in here. Please chime in.

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Tell Me More had me on last week to talk about the top political stories of the decade. It went…ok. I wished I could’ve gotten another crack at some of the questions. Michele asked us which loss hit us hardest. As I’m thinking about it now, I realize that I lost two very close friends I thought would be around for the long haul. The first friend I lost at the beginning of the decade, not a week after the 9/11 attacks. One of my oldest friends, he sold weed to make ends meet in the poor working class town we grew up in. He was murdered in his home while defending his family. More than any other individual put paid to the myth that 9/11 changed ALL of our lives irrevocably.

(9/11 happened back when the Afrofuturist list was still vibrant. After the attacks, one of the list members asked what she could do to feel safe. I responded slightly tongue in cheek “move to somewhere black people live.” A white science fiction author–I believe it was Bruce Sterling but don’t get me to lying–delurked. I didn’t even know he was there.  He went on this long spiel about how Al-Queda didn’t give a damn about black people and would kill black Americans as readily as white ones. I then asked him whether each discrete American building/city/space was equally in danger of being targeted by terrorists, and THEN whether the places that were more likely to be targeted were more likely to be populated largely by whites. I KNEW black people who barely escaped 9/11…but at the same time I knew that cities like East St. Louis, boroughs like the Bronx, weren’t in danger of terrorist attack. He never responded.)

The second friend I lost this past Labor Day weekend. A vice-president of a Detroit Benz dealership (the only one IN the city), he had a heart attack while at work. By the time his co-workers realized what happened it was already too late. His wife was a doctor, and while he was big, with a shot-putter’s build, he had a clean bill of health as far as I know. A member of Kappa Alpha Psi, so many of his fraternity brothers paid their respects they encircled the church three times. I still find it difficult to think too much about it without breaking down. He left behind his wife, and three children. He was two months away from 41.

I wish I had the presence of mind to mention them.

I also wish I had the presence of mind to be clearer about my critique of Bush. (As an aside THE most important political event of the last decade was Bush v. Gore. We’d be living in a VERY different place if Al Gore is President between 2001-2008. The economy would still have tanked, perhaps. But 9/11 wouldn’t have happened–recall that Rice ignored the Clinton administration’s warnings that terrorists planned to fly planes into American targets.) When asked what Americans could do in the post 9/11 moment, Bush said something to the effect of…”shop.”

The moment he missed there? I can’t think of a single statement that was more inappropriate given the moment. Because of our patriotic fervor–fervor that the Bush administration used to invade a country without cause, used to pass an act that gave US officials the right to spy on American citizens without cause–we would’ve supported almost anything at that moment. And what he suggested was that we…shop.

Right.

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I was on Tell Me More last week talking Michael Vick and Cat Fancy, Obama’s Health Care plan, and of course the Gates stuff. Take a listen (and now read the transcript!) here. Some of the best stuff didn’t make it to the final cut–I think this is one of the few cases where Tell Me More should have an extended edition on their website.

I also made it to The Colbert Show. I did a bit on WJZ a couple of weeks ago about the Obama NAACP speech and then promptly forgot about it. But a few days later my folk on facebook are telling me they saw me. Now for a second I thought they were clowning me. Then I thought briefly about Shark–the television show with James Woods (they had a black left-leaning lawyer named “Lester Spence” that was probably named after me). Whatever the case I KNEW that while I was supposedly on Colbert, I was fast asleep.

But then I saw the clip which I unfortunately don’t know how to embed here.

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I’ve been doing the media thing a bit while I get this book done. 

Yesterday I was on Midday with Dan Rodricks. Last week (while I was on the way to tape for NPR incidentally) Congress passed a resolution apologizing for slavery. We debated its merits on the show. You can listen in here. Dr. Carol Swain was Dan’s other guest. She’s pretty conservative, so I expected her to be against it…and I was right, but wrong. She was against it, but because she felt it was weak, and done under the wrong administration–she suggested Bush do it in 2004. 

What I tried to drive home was that while this was a failed apology in some aspects–because it was a voice vote we can’t really distinguish who supports it and who doesn’t, to the extent this is about truth and reconciliation there was little “truth” telling, and it wasn’t really “advertised” (how many of my readers even know this occurred?)–it represents a political opportunity. An opportunity to actually press the government to talk about what they are apologizing for, an opportunity to use this moment to begin not only a larger conversation, but to continue mobilizing for resources. Swain and most of the callers didn’t see it. But for me politics is about pushing forward and extending possibilities in the face of compromise. 

On Monday theGrio published a piece I wrote on black fraternity and sorority improprieties. When criticizing black fraternities and sororities we tend to focus on either perceived exclusionary practices–selecting folks based on loot, or on skin color–or on hazing. While I’ve never seen evidence of the first in my twenty years in, I do understand that the second is a problem. However a problem that we don’t spend much time dealing with, because of the secretive practices of the organizations themselves, is their anti-democratic business practices. A member of Alpha Kappa Alpha sued the International President and the International Board because the board awarded the president a stipend of $250,000 without either informing or vetting the decision with the body. Check that piece out here.

Finally I visited the Barbershop last week, to talk about Iran, about Kobe, about the GOP, and about Father’s Day. I’m pretty sure our discussion about Iran got cut short, but i really wish we could have extended it because the discussion we had in the studio was rich. And for what it’s worth though I watched less of this NBA championship than any NBA championship I can recall, I think that what Kobe accomplished puts him in a very very small group. The only other star player to get a ring without another Hall of Fame/Top Fifty type player is Hakeem Olajuwon. Not Isiah. Not Bird. Not Jordan. Not Shaq. 

Maybe Garnett as I think of it, depending on how we think of Ray Allen and Paul Pierce…..

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…went much better than I expected. Listen here.

Quick thoughts:

An email comment from “Eric” noted that in the wake of Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination it’d be hard to ask taxpayers to continue to expend resources for the black “underclass”. My response was that blacks serve as our nation’s “miner’s canary”, and that sooner or later, he and people he cared about would need help too. Probably sooner than later given the current state of the economy. If I had a do-over what I’d focus on is the fact that taxpayers already spend their resources on the black “underclass”, Why would he prefer that more money be spent on punishing, surveilling, and terrorizing black bodies rather than creating programs that help more citizens live more productive lives? (I suspect I know the answer….)

I also spent a little bit of time emphasizing the importance of “inner-city” values. One of the callers talked about how we can find a great deal of strength in poor communities if we just looked. I agreed wholeheartedly, emphasizing that it was the knuckleheads I grew up with in poor suburban Detroit that taught me most of the values I live by. Without these values I wouldn’t be at Hopkins, wouldn’t have a PhD. I didn’t get any pushback from Wilson here, but there were a number of callers waiting to get a piece of me that never got their chance because of time constraints.

“Middle class people know how to make hard decisions too” was the money quote from one of them.

Here I’ve obviously got class bias issues–I grew up working class, even though I’m no longer in that category. So my comments can be taken with a grain of salt. But if we had a real discussion about what middle-class values were in practice I think we’d look less to the over-spending over-consuming under-saving middle class and more somewhere else for the values that make America work at her best.

The one area of disagreement Wilson and I had was on the amount of spending that Obama included in the stimulus package to deal with poverty. For Wilson 50 billion was a windfall, and he’s right, if you look at it from a position of lack. Going from nothing to $50 billion is a big leap. But I set our sights much higher. If he can spend $1 trillion on the finance industry and they don’t make a single product that you and I can touch with our hands, surely he can spend more than  $50 billion on poor and working class Americans.

And I’d say “that’s just me”. But it isn’t.

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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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Living Art, originally uploaded by Unbowed.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer bit the dust today to be reborn as an online only edition. The San Francisco Chronicle is losing $1 million/week and if it dies I believe that Sanfran will be the only major city without a major newspaper.

(as an aside i think the loss of the Seattle Supersonics was covered more than the loss of the Post-Intelligencer.)

The advertising based model of providing content is dying on the vine. Today’s NYT runs a story about the dearth of blacks on television, using the cancellation of both wack DL Hughley’s and my man (Go Blue!) David Alan Grier’s shows to ruminate about the challenge of having a diverse lineup on television. But who wants to diversify a burning house? Television shows are based off of ad revenue. Again, a dying model. I noted yesterday that there’s no way in hell that you can use 10,000 bic lighters to replace the lights of a baseball stadium.

It looks like those lights ARE going out though.

For those in the creative narrative game this is going to provide a tremendous opening. Ed has it partially right. Augie has part of the picture too. But creating cultural democracy means nothing if there are no institutions powerful enough to keep government institutions in check through shining a halogen light on their insides.

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