Blacksmythe

(Every status update/blog entry/tweet I write today will have the title of one of Prince’s songs in it in honor of his 51st birthday.)

If you’ve got about ten minutes of free time check out Davey D’s interview of Michael Eric Dyson below:

Michael Eric Dyson is right to question Obama. Right to wonder whether and where his politics coincide with black politics. But his focus is off. WAY off. Dyson is considered one of our foremost black intellectuals and the best he can come up with is that Obama can’t say King’s name out loud? Ta-Nehisi Coates has weighed on this directly. In the wake of Tavis Smiley’s documentary “Stand” (Smiley took a group of black male intellectuals on a tour through the South in order to both tout his new book and to argue that Obama was dismissing King’s legacy) Melissa Harris-Lacewell weighed in indirectly (hat tip to Jelani Cobb) arguing that black politics has “grown up” and that while drawing a straight line from King to Cornel West is hard, drawing a straight line from King to Obama is not:

Smiley and his “soul patrol” seemed to have missed the intervening 40 years between the era of King and the election of Obama. African-Americans are no longer fully disfranchised subjects of an oppressive state.

African-Americans are now citizens capable of running for office, holding officials accountable through democratic elections, publicly expressing divergent political preferences and, most importantly, engaging the full spectrum of American political issues, not only narrowly racial ones. The era of racial brokerage politics, when the voices of a few men stood in for the entire race, is now over. And thank goodness it is over. Black politics is growing up.

The men of “Stand” yearned for an imagined racial past. By their accounting, this racial past had better music, more charismatic leaders and a more-involved black church.

Their romanticism ignores the cultural contributions of contemporary black youth, forgets the dangerous limitations of charismatic leadership and revises the fraught, complicated relationship of black churches to struggles for racial equality. And these men ignored the democratizing effect of new media forms, which revolutionized the 2008 election.

Black people were not duped by some slick, media-generated candidate. African-Americans were co-authors of the Obama campaign. Through social networks, YouTube videos, political blogs and new-media echo chambers, black people were equal partners in shaping the candidate and his campaign. There was no need for the entrenched pundit class to tell black voters what to think or how to behave; they figured it out for themselves.

Still, there is plenty to criticize in the young Obama administration: the refusal to prosecute those implicated in the torture memos, civilian casualties caused by drone attacks, bank bailouts and inadequate defense of gay rights to name a few. But black communities are already engaged in these critiques and many others. Black local organizers, elected officials, bloggers, pundits and columnists have taken substantive, specific positions on a broad range of issues.

Harris-Lacewell is more right than wrong here. The days of brokerage politics aren’t quite over but they’re dying on the vine. The only reason that Al Sharpton still has a job is because the media consistently quotes him, not because black people don’t have the ability to vote and take politics into their own hands. Whereas previous Democratic presidential candidates turned to a variety of black middle men to drum up the black vote, Obama (thankfully) ignored them.

Furthermore the most visible black intellectuals have some combination of job security/tenure (West, Glaude, herself, Dyson, Adolph Reed…who she doesn’t mention), or corporate sponsorship (Smiley, to a lesser extent Jackson and Sharpton), and can’t be said to really be “on the front lines”. It’s hard to claim to BE “hard/authentic” when you don’t really have a constituency to be accountable for or to, and when you don’t have to worry about loot or job security.

Finally she’s right to note that the substance of their critique and praxis is weak as water. Rather than hitting Obama hard on substance–on health reform for example as I am going to do in my next post–they settle. Again, Dyson asking that Obama say King’s name aloud is sick.

But two points stand out for me.

1. It isn’t about King.

Talking about whether King is or isn’t connected to Obama misses the point. And at the end it reads as nothing more than an intellectual version of “set-claiming.” Is Obama down with King (i.e. black people) or is he ain’t?  King is dead. He isn’t coming back. We have no idea who or what he’d be down with if he were alive. We should dismiss attempts to say that Obama isn’t connected to King AND attempts to connect him as misdirection, as sleight of hand. “Watch the rabbit fall out of my hat.” They shift discussion to Obama’s place in black history as opposed to Obama’s work for black populations.

2. There is a REASON why West, Dyson, and others are weak on Obama’s actual politics and hard on his cultural politics.

The three most prominent black male intellectuals are Cornel West, Michael Eric Dyson, and Tavis Smiley. Smiley is a journalist with limited training. Dyson and West are both trained theologians, though they have (limited) chops in political theory, philosophy, and black studies. (Black Studies as a discipline makes a hard humanities turn somewhere in the eighties, privileging professors like Dyson, West, Henry Louis Gates, and Houston Baker, at the expense of social scientists.) The reason they have no substantive political and economic critiques is because they do not have the skillset required to make them. Similarly, the reason why at least West and Dyson are now household names is because they have the preacher’s gift of gab.  Finally it is hard as hell to do real intellectual work when you are on the road lecturing 52 weeks out of the year. It is hard enough to shift from humanities scholar to social science scholar. It is harder if you don’t have the time to sit and think because you’re giving lectures connecting Nas to Nietzsche at a different spot every week.

They fight over King then, rather than engaging in real discusion over Obama because while they can talk King for a million years without repeating a thought, they don’t know much about public opinion formation, public policy creation, federalism, health care, or any of the other detailed political decisions Obama has to make on a day to day basis.

This is a tragedy. I agree with Melissa that we need black intellectuals to deal with the present moment now more than ever. But what we really need are thoughtful social scientists with the ability to break down policy differences and ideological shifts in ways that every day people can understand. While Melissa’s presence on the airwaves is refreshing because she’s young, female, and a race-woman, her support for Obama precludes her from serving as one of the critical voices we really need here. Adolph Reed is brilliant but can’t “media” his way out of a paper bag. And the other political scientists I’d point to–Vincent Hutchings, Cathy Cohen, and Cedric Johnson stand out–are all deluged with too many professional responsibilities to even blog.

I changed the name of my blog from “Dr. lester k. spence” back to “Blacksmythe” sometime ago, because of my colleagues told me to stop blogging.

Maybe I’m the change I’ve been looking for.

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 The New York Times features an article about the challenges the CBC faces in the upcoming term, what with a black President and all. The article has many of the challenges that journalistic accounts of black politics has–confusing age and ideology, ignoring the differences between black constituencies in favor of an approach that focuses on “respect”. The picture they chose to accompany the story speaks volumes.

Absolutely hilarious.

I want readers to do a favor for me. Add your favorite caption. And I’ll announce the winner in another post.

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There were riots in Greece last week just four years after Athens hosted the Olympics (and several months after the media started to ask was it worth it? The proximate cause? An incident of police brutality after clashes between police and protesters left one 15-year old teenager dead. 

But of course the roots go much deeper.

I asked yesterday for readers to connect the dots for me.

Today I do the connecting.

Bringing together youths in their early twenties struggling to survive amid mass youth unemployment and schoolchildren swotting for highly competitive university exams that may not ultimately help them in a treacherous jobs market, the events of the past week could be called the first credit-crunch riots. There have been smaller-scale sympathy attacks from Moscow to Copenhagen, and economists say countries with similarly high youth unemployment problems such as Spain and Italy should prepare for unrest.

“I’ve seen the future and it will be.” 

For an interesting meta-analysis, check out Buster, bout to be added to the RSS feed.

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We hit the Illinois Pay-for-Play scandal hard on the Barbershop. For me it was the most ghetto version of the politics as business model that we’ve been infected with at least since the Reagan era. “Running the city like a business”, the idea of “hiring” a political official (as opposed to electing him/her), asking for loot for a political office? All on the same continuum to me.

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Crossposted at Blackprof.

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I’ve gotten two good, and one poor response to my most recent video post. What I’m going to try to do is respond to them.

I’ll get the poor response out of the way. My good friend Michael Bowen posted a video response. Rather than spend much time on it, I’ll leave it to my thoughtful readers to point out the problems. In the case you don’t see them, please let me know.

Bros. Nulan and Bradley have on the other hand asked extremely good questions. And Bradley has gone above and beyond. The response below is more geared to Bradley, but I think in dealing with his comments I deal with Nulan’s as well.

Bradley argues that I need more information. Of course he is right, although I believe that Harold Ford’s close loss in 2006 rather than Obama’s victory is the first datapoint.

In fact, let’s look at a sample of electoral victories that were based on the Southern Strategy. As an aside I implied that the Southern Strategy was used solely by the GOP. This isn’t true. Bill and Hilary Clinton used it in their primaries (Bill successfully in 1992, Hilary unsuccessfully in 2008) as did Al Gore (unsuccessfully in 1988).

But I’m going to look quickly at the results from a few different races over the years:

• 1988-George Bush beat Michael Dukakis soundly in the 1988 Presidential election. Bush received 426 electoral votes, Dukakis received 110. This although Dukakis was leading in the summer up until the notorious Willie Horton ad. 
• 1990 Jesse Helms beats Harvey Gantt in North Carolina, taking 52.5% of the vote to Gantt’s 47.4%. The race was much closer until Helms ran the hands ad. 
• 1992-Clinton doesn’t use ads but makes a series of tactical moves (including making a point of returning to Arkansas to witness the execution of a mentally retarded black man on death row) designed to establish himself as a “New Democrat”.

Fast Forward…

• 2006-Bob Corker runs against Harold Ford jr. seeking (like Gantt before him) to become the first black Senator in the South since Reconstruction. Again the polls predicted a tight race. Near the end Corker runs the Playboy ad. He ends up taking 51% of the vote while Ford gets 48%. 
• 2008-John McCain runs against Barack Obama. The election was close in the summer according to polls. After Obama begins pulling away, McCain unleashes a series of ads connecting Obama to socialism and liberalism, many like this one implicitly connecting Obama to both (black) grassroots organizing and to the home mortgage crisis (a crisis conservatives attempted to pin on black homebuyers). Obama wins 365-173. 

This is far from scientific. But what I am arguing is that the Southern Strategy–which can only be deemed effective if it produces victories–is dying.

If indeed the cases I’ve selected constitute a trend the “Southern Strategy vote” is becoming smaller and smaller.

Why? I believe there are a couple of reasons:

1. Diminishing white votes as a percentage of the whole. The size of the white population relative to the non-white population is diminishing as we speak. Latino population growth is particularly impressive. The Southern Strategy seeks to do two things: play to white voter fears, and increase white voter turnout. One reason the Southern Strategy is dying is because the size of the white population relative to others is decreasing. Along these lines what is important isn’t so much what whites do, but rather what non-whites do. We are reproducing at higher rates, and are coming out to vote. 
2. White voters are less driven by racial fears. 

This is actually the controversial idea. And as brother Bradley notes, more whites still voted for McCain. Now I don’t think whites voted for McCain just because Obama was black. But let’s assume they did.

But what about the whites who voted for Obama?

Some might argue that the whites that DID vote for Obama weren’t voting for Obama as much as they were so scared they didn’t want Republicans anymore. But the Southern Strategy is at its most effective when it plays to fears. Why would fearful whites vote for the black guy if the Southern Strategy was effective? How would that work exactly? Perhaps because Obama ran on a race-neutral campaign? Perhaps…but then those people must try to figure out why exactly the race-neutral campaign strategy matters now, when it didn’t matter for Gantt, Ford, or other black candidates. 

Now this doesn’t necessarily mean that whites are attuned to social justice claims more so than they were, although I do think it interesting that whites were willing to vote for “the socialist.” But it does mean there is much more variance in white racial attitudes here than we have previously assumed. Bradley argues that what we’re looking at is a refinement of white supremacy–sustainability through refinement. It is possible. But I’m concerned that taking this particular position is not so much the radical or the common sense response as much as it is a response that reproduces the thing critiqued. And would then ask how we would know “real” change rather than “fake” change if we saw it.

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I’m doing some work for blackprof this month. And going straight to video, in order to begin a new type of conversation as I note below:

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Will electing Obama matter? If it were Clinton rather than Obama, will electing her have mattered for women? Of course the default answer is yes.

For scholars like Walter Benn Michaels? No.

In 1947—seven years before the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, sixteen years before the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique—the top fifth of American wage-earners made 43 per cent of the money earned in the us. Today that same quintile gets 50.5 per cent. In 1947, the bottom fifth of wage-earners got 5 per cent of total income; today it gets 3.4 per cent. After half a century of anti-racism and feminism, the us today is a less equal society than was the racist, sexist society of Jim Crow. Furthermore, virtually all the growth in inequality has taken place since the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1965—which means not only that the successes of the struggle against discrimination have failed to alleviate inequality, but that they have been compatible with a radical expansion of it. Indeed, they have helped to enable the increasing gulf between rich and poor.

For Michaels, not only will the election of Obama will not decrease inequality, it will actually increase it. Obama for Michaels represents the perfect tool for neoliberalism. His very election can serve as proof that America is an open meritocracy–Obama born to a single mother, and raised on food stamps, was able to ascend to the highest position in the land through hard work. He represents the embodied culmination of almost 400 years of struggle. But while all of this is true, recall that it was Obama who argued that black fathers have to get their act together, taking the neoliberal disciplinary line. It was Obama who at one time–it isn’t on the website anymore–lauded the virtues of the free market economy. To the extent that Obama’s election represents the culmination of the civil rights movement, it also represents the reality that the civil rights movement did little to nothing to deal with the real problem facing Americans–inequality.

Michaels isn’t alone here. Adolph Reed has made somewhat similar claims, as have Richard Rorty, Sean Wilentz, and others, basically taking the side of class in the longstanding race vs. class argument.

Prometheus6 and a number of black scholars disagree strongly. Although Prometheus6 casually dismisses Michaels argument, and Michaels himself arguing that his article is based on a lie, and then later arguing that Michael’s lit-crit approach ignores reality, I think that Michaels is onto something.

The Gini Coefficient is a standard measure of inequality. The higher the number the higher the level of inequality. We all know that there are stark black-white wealth differences. But what I present above is the level of intra-racial inequality. Note the level of intra-racial inequality is actually greater among African Americans than it is among whites. This is the secret that few scholars outside of leftists like Reed address. If we were to go through a whole host of ills that we attribute solely to racial differences–differences in birth weight, in infant mortality rates, in school quality, in closeness to environmental waste dumps–we’d definitely see racial differences, putting to rest Michaels’ conception of racism purely as racial discrimination. But if we were to solely look at black populations, we’d see very stark differences here as well. Differences that blacks consistently blame on black lower class inferiority rather than on structural inequality.

Yes, blacks are no longer lynched. But it took OJ Simpson thirteen years to get sent to prison…and not for the crime that he was at least involved in. What we think of as a conspiracy to imprison black men is really a conspiracy to imprison black working class and poor men. And where is Obama here? He hasn’t even been elected, and already we see black attempts to juxtapose Obama against 50 Cent, as if electing Obama gives us another vision of black manhood that will separate from political actionsomehow raise our status both in the eyes of “the black community” and among Americans in general. I believe the neoliberal turn in black politics to be a greater threat to our existence than any other, in as much as our attempt to organize politically is shaped by our ability to form an intra-racial consensus. And arguing that race is still a fundamental factor without acknowledging the way that class structures our lives inevitably reproduces this turn.

Now with all that said, how could Michaels have dodged Prometheus6’s critique? Simple really. For Michaels, class is the real thing, while race and gender are both social fictions. He couldn’t be more wrongheaded (empirically and politically) here if he tried. Race and gender are modes in which class is lived. Support for welfare drops like a rock not because support for the poor diminishes, but rather because support for the black poor diminishes. In fact, “poor” and “black” become synonymous. Welfare mother becomes synonymous with “black welfare mother.” Poverty is racialized. Whites (and blacks I think) don’t support welfare because they associate the policy with populations that actually deserve to be poor. Whites support punitive crime measures because they associate crime with young black men, an incorrigible population that deserves punishment. This step isn’t a big one to take…but for some reason Michaels and most of the other left anti-race scholars aren’t willing to take it. But doing so will not only provide some clarity, but a real opportunity for political mobilization and consciousness raising.

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Here’s an essay on black politics that contains almost every worn out cliché on the subject.

I’m glad that the folks at Rust Belt Intellectual wrote a response.

Feministing pointed out the absence of women, which is actually astounding given that the number of black female politicians at every level is rising much faster than the number of black men. To be honest though, I’m not sure how much adding women to the article would’ve helped. It’s a symptom, not a cause.

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Exhibit A.

Now there are all types of reasonable arguments TNR could have gotten some black non-Obama supporter to make. He’s a neoliberal (oh…wait, that doesn’t work because TNR is a neoliberal publication). He’s too moderate compared to Edwards (oh…wait, that doesn’t work because TNR didn’t support Edwards). Clinton’s health care policy is significantly better (oh…wait, the policies aren’t as dissimilar as folks are making them out to be). 

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