, originally uploaded by Asa Beal.

One of my students is currently studying abroad, and has been taking pictures of graffiti that he’s seen while in Europe. I’m going to showcase some of his shots here.

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In talking about what’s going on in Haiti now, this is the SECOND thing that should be mentioned…as it provides context for the enormity of the tragedy. Why is Haiti so poor that they had to tell American planes not to come (because they didn’t have the resources to refuel them)? There is really only one reason.

I’ve seen a few pieces here and there bring this up, but more have focused on the tragedy itself, sans context. And some have made the Katrina like turn towards looters.

I was on The Barbershop last week. We talked about Senator Reid’s “Negro dialect” comment about Obama made off of the record. We talked the Conan vs. Leno case. But we talked about Haiti first.

Listen here.

I had the chance to address the politics of Haiti, and an opportunity to connect this to former President Aristide’s desire to return. I did not. Kicking myself about it, but I thought I’d at least talk about it here. Aristide wants to return, many of his citizens want him to return. If Obama is willing to–in the spirit of bipartisan cooperation–bring Bush into the picture, then Aristide should be there. Before we even take into consideration the fact that he is “former President” largely because of a coup that many think the US helped in.

….

Later that day I had the opportunity to participate in a discussion about MLK and what he means today. Marc Steiner is a Baltimore jewel. He invited Mina Cheon, Mike McGuire, and myself to talk about what Martin Luther King jr. means at this particular moment. The discussion is worth listening to. Over 20 years ago a group of students took over the University of Michigan and forced them to dedicate MLK day to anti-racism. Although I do think about MLK on MLK Day, how young he was when he began, how his ideas changed as he grew older, what I really think about are those kids who had the audacity to believe they could make one of the largest and most prestigious public universities in the world, a better and more humane institution.

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What do I want to get accomplished for 2009?

I want to have two book contracts.—I got one book contract.

I want to have three paid speaking engagements.—I got one speaking engagement, but I signed up with a speaker’s bureau.

I want to start a consulting business of some sort.—I received one prominent consulting gig.

I want to have principled relationships–I didn’t define this, but I dropped my most toxic relationship, rebuilt my primary relationship, and created new powerful friendships with a few quality people.

What do I want to accomplish for 2010. I want to be as detailed as possible.

I want to publish three academic papers over the next year, with at least two papers based on data I have collected over the past few years (“Change We Can Believe In?” and a gender based one combining this with data from the HIV/AIDS paper), and at least one based on my next book project. To this end I want to write a paper a month.

I want to have three strong chapters that I can use to get a book contract for 2011 that will take me into my tenure year. These chapters will chart the effects of neoliberalism, the role race plays in the development of neoliberalism, and how this is reproduced and replicated within black publics. The Hobart and Smith lecture (Constructing Pookie) represents a second cut at this.

I want to have three paid speaking engagements this year–speaking on topics related to black politics, to black culture, and to the role of the city in the 21st Century. I plan to use video of my speech at Hobart and Smith to garner more support for my speaking.

What this means as far as a workflow is that I have to get back to writing every day. 1500 words if possible.

Projects:

Here are academic related projects that I want to pursue in the time I am not working on one of the projects above:

The QR project–I want to create a living book of blackness using QR Codes. A book whose contents will change every week. This is going to
be a lot harder than I thought, but it is possible.

The Coney Island Project–I want to take a picture of every Coney Island in the city of Detroit for the purpose of creating a table book.

The Black Family Project–I want to write the book that I planned to edit on the role and nature of the black family in the Obama era. This project will be a combination personal story of my own family struggles and successes financially, educationally, and otherwise, a story of the politics of familial representation–charting the representation of black families in popular culture over time and connecting these representations to politics, a freakonomics type analysis of black inter-gender dynamics putting numbers to the types of stories well meaning people like Hill Harper have been telling. (How well can black women expect to be treated by black men if the numbers are out of wack? The gender-ratio project will loom large here.) And an analysis of public policies and intervening structures black people can create to build more sustainable relationships and 21st century families.

Black and White 52. In 2009 I came VERY close to taking a picture of myself every day. I may have missed it by 5 days. Because managing such a project is difficult I want to take one quality black and white picture every week, with the purpose of both getting better as a photographer and also developing a project of some sort. I am teaching Black Visual Politics in 2011, so perhaps I can begin to use this opportunity to play with ideas for my own media project. Addendum–this is shaping up to be a black and white 365 project.

Photo show. In 2010 I want my work to be displayed in a photo exhibit either on its own or with other artists. The Baltimore Black And White group I created would be an excellent group from which to have an Exposure.Baltimore type exhibit perhaps once every few months.

Tenure. In Fall 2010 I plan to go on the academic market. I want a tenure position in a top political science/African American Studies program, in a school that will give me the resources to pursue all of my interests, and that will give me the resources to successfully pay for my children’s education and provide for my family. I also want to use that place to further springboard my public intellectual career.

Out of the Mouth of Babes: I got this idea…I forgot how. But I want to take a series of prominent civil rights and black power era photographs and duplicate them using my children. I am now a shade older than Malcolm X was when he was assassinated, and I believe older than Martin Luther King Jr. was when he was murdered. It is striking to me how young they were when they were in effect expected to save black America and America from itself. The Panthers were even younger. I wanted to create an exhibit that would express the contradictions involved in having our youth be responsible for revolution.

The Unincorporated Area Project. The underbounding project I’ve taken on has grant written all over it. Are blacks and Latinos more likely to live in unincorporated areas than other groups? Are residents of unincorporated areas more likely to be beset with siting challenges (environmental racism)? Are they more likely to exhibit certain types of illnesses? Are they less likely to participate? Michelle Anderson began work on this project and spoke of a grant, but in talking with her I found out that the grant died on the vine. THIS is a bigtime grant project. I plan to write a grant of some sort to at the very least bring scholars together to talk about this issue.

What about the other fronts? What about family? What about my health? What about spiritual practice? What about mental practice?

I started working out again after the book was done. What type of meditative practice do I want to add to that? Ten minutes a day?

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Not exactly….but close enough. How is this replicated and reproduced within black politics? That’s the question the second part of my trilogy will answer.

Expect it about 2011/2012. When the world (according to the Mayan calender) ends.

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Obama’s already changed America both policy-wise and value wise. The creation of a Women’s Council within the White House all by itself is tremendous. But the decision to reverse Bush’s Freedom of Information Act policies, the decision to reverse Bush’s stance on abortion providers, the decision to reverse Bush’s stance on labor agreements, all help us in important ways. His decision to increase unemployment benefits and health care to those hit hard by the economy is important as well.

But with that said I give him mixed grades.

Why?

Because he’s black.

And I don’t mean “he’s black” as in “he should do more stuff for black people”. Even though he should in as much as blacks serve as the miners’ canary.

Chris Rock, riffing on the difference between blacks and n*ggas, gave the example of someone who bragged about how they take care of their kids.

Rock: “You’re SUPPOSED to take care of your kids, fool! You shouldn’t get any props for doing what you’re SUPPOSED to do.”

In this case being black means being able to perform under considerable pressure. With grace and style. Swagger even. The fact that he can run and chew gum at the same time–granted it’s a LOT more than this, but feel me–is something that we shouldn’t be astounded about. We knew this from jump.

When asked about Obama’s basketball game, Michael Jordan said that for someone who didn’t get paid to play for a living he was ok. But for Jordan the question was “can he go to his left?” “Can he finish with both hands?”

We’ve got to have the same high standards for Obama that we do for the things that we are willing to figuratively die for in the barbershop.

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Yet and still there was one element of Obama’s speech that I find troubling. He’s still holding on to the line about what parents need to do to ensure their kids educational success.

We’ve moved away from neoliberal policies. I’m expecting us to nationalize banks any day now. And whereas ten years ago we were gushing over CEO heroes, no one is looking to business or to MBA management practices to solve pressing social problems.

Neoliberalism is dead.

But yet and still we’re employing various rhetorical and institutional devices to frame issues in such a way that personal discipline and hustle remain central. We can have a kid write the President a letter telling him her school is basically crumbling around her….yet still emphasize “parental responsibility”, even as the kid sits next to the First Lady. This is neoliberal governmentality in a nutshell, creating a discourse in which people feel compelled to govern themselves, embedding neoliberal ideas about human capital deep within their souls.

I’ve never felt more connected to the country than I have this year. Seeing Obama handle the toughest crisis we’ve faced in the modern era with aplomb was powerful to see, particularly given his predecessor. But that’s part of the problem for me.

Neoliberalism is dead. Long live neoliberalism.

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So Essence, BET, and Ebony I think have all had a crack at him. But still we hear “whining.”

From Roland Martin. From the black press corps in general. We need more blacks not only asking questions, but on the team figuring out who is even ALLOWED to ask questions.

Now I’ve already talked about this at the Barbershop. But a conversation at TNC’s spot has changed my mind. During the last administration, which was fairly diverse phenotypically, I argued that I could do without Bush’s diversity. If having someone black meant having someone like Clarence Thomas or someone like Rice in a position of power? Save that.

I don’t think that any longer.

There are at least two reasons why affirmative action, or programs that increase diversity “for diversity’s sake” are beneficial even when there are no substantive differences in the outlook between the various “diverse groups.”

The first is psychological. I don’t think I’ll ever forget my middle son’s response when I asked him why he was going to vote for Obama in the mock election:

Because white people need to know black people can do it too.

He understands at 8 what it takes years for some to understand–this isn’t about black self-esteem, at all. Whites need to routinely be exposed to non-whites (and women) in positions of power, regardless of attitudes, so their conception of power, their conception of (in this case) what it means to be American can change and grow. And we need to see this too, so our own conception of what our country is capable of can change. Note this has nothing to do with US. We routinely accomplish without the need for “role models.” 

But the second thing is material. In order to stave off societal death as long as possible, we need to have our cultural and human capital distributed as widely as possible. Having non-whites in positions of power and authority does that–regardless of the attitudes and policy stances those non-whites take. We cannot solve our current crisis if we continue to rely on a subset of our population for answers to our problems, just as we cannot hope to win any modern war if even 10% of the eligible population is sitting on the sidelines. 

Again, my own mind has changed here. I still have a strong preference for diversity that leads to a richer set of policy options/ideas. But I now have a preference for what some might call “surface diversity.”

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Tomorrow’s ARP lecture is about the role of race and racial ideology in the generation of knowledge. I’m going to start by discussing why it took so long for political scientists to study racial politics, and then move to some of the problems associated with the modes they used to study racial politics when they began to study it.

But in re-reading the articles I came across the following passage that reminds me of a problematic exchange that I’ve seen regarding police brutality in black neighborhoods. In “Inequalities That Endure? Racial Ideology, American Politics, and The Peculiar Role of the Social Sciences” Lawrence Bobo begins with two post-9/11 focus groups, one predominantly white, the other black. Asking them each what is the most pressing problems they face in their community, the black focus group says “crime and drugs”. One of the participants goes on:

The first two robberies that I had, the elderly couple that lived next door to me, they called the police. I was at work when the first two robberies occurred. They called the police two or three times. The police never even showed up. When I came in from work, I had to go…file a police report. My neighbors went with me, and they had called the police several times and they never came. Now on that Sunday when I returned from church and caught him in my house, and teh guy that I caught in my house lives around the corer, he has a case history, he has been in trouble since doomsday. When I told [the police] I had knocked him unconscious, oh yeah, they were there in a hurry. Guns drawn. And I didn’t have a weapon except for the baseball bat, [and] I wound up face down on my living room floor, and they placed handcuffs on me.” (p. 15)

According to the article, the situation was so shaky that she thought she’d have been shot by the police had it not been for the presence of one black police officer. After this encounter she ended up being arrested, while the perp was taken to the hospital. 

One of my commenters, and others I’ve read elsewhere, mentioned the shibboleth of “black on black crime” when talking about Oscar Grant and other incidences of police brutality. I asked my commenter why exactly we should place violence between two civilians on the same conceptual level as that between individuals and the state? 

Got no answer. Don’t really expect one.

For the agnostic of my readers, re-read that passage above if you could. Crime is a problem in black communities because they tend to be poorer. But crime is also a problem in black communities because the individuals charged with protecting them are either slacking on the job, or unable to discern between criminals and non-criminals, or both. 

Which is the more pressing problem?

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This is an excellent moment to begin to think about what we’re preparing PhDs for. And what universities need to be. 

But first, calm.

I’ve already listed some of the things I think Obama should pursue.

What are some things we can do here?

For those of us currently training graduate students we should begin to have either formal or informal conversations with them about what the future holds, and we need to be realistic here. Even the top tier schools aren’t going to be able to place every single student who wants a job. Students need to understand this without simultaneously approaching their studies and their fellow students in a cutthroat manner. 

We should also take this opportunity to figure out how we can serve much more of a public role than what we currently play. The idea of being a “public intellectual” has fallen into disfavor largely because of the paychecks individuals like Cornel West and Michael Eric Dyson routinely get speaking to “the public.” It’s become a marketing thing, used by some professors to augment their income and their presence/brand (in some cases significantly). Although I do believe that professors are going to have to do more work like this, I’m not talking about Dyson style public intellectual work but rather something different. Roland Fryer’s politics are not my own but he offers a potential model here.

Those are just two ideas. More?

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