…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.
Thanks for sharing this discussion, Lester.
The information about the Harlem Children's Zone was especially welcome in view of the (claimed) Obama educational plan and a search by my associates during recent years to document Best Practices among educational programs and institutions in the USA . I believe that, without properly naming it, the Harlem project was included in preliminary examples. I had received no specific information about it prior to hearing this podcast. (I intend to find that radio program's earlier recorded segment about Harlem Children's Zone, ASAP.) Thanks, again.
A welcome revelation also in the discussion was the new sound coming from one William Julius Wilson. It appears that Prof. Wilson has learned something from the criticism of his previous work, including the heralded book The Declining Importance of Race, which, from my cursory review, exhibited a “blaming the victim” tendency. I am pleased to hear his emphasis now on the structural aspects of racism and poverty. I can see clearly why you might have been surprised.
The radio host, Rodricks, sounds exceptionally bright and informed for mainstream media. He is sufficiently wise to express a deisire for your return to his program, and, hopefully, you will continue to help him be so constructive.
–Melmanjaro
Yo Doc, I listened to the program and took notes like any good student would. Big time props to Dr. Wilson for bringing some balance to this issue. I look forward to reading his book. I am familiar with the HCZ, but I had not heard about the president’s plans for 20 “Promise Communities.” I’m looking forward to seeing these plans.
I wonder why the president did not mention this when he was asked this question:
As the entire nation tries to climb out of this deep recession, in communities of color, the circumstances are far worse,” said Andre Showell of BET. “The black unemployment rate, as you know, is in the double digits. And in New York City, for example, the black unemployment rate for men is near 50 percent. My question to you tonight is: given this unique and desperate circumstance, what specific policies can you point to that will target these communities and what's the timetable for us to see tangible results?”
In a very carefully worded answer the president explained that his administration's plans for Americans who are down on their luck — such as extending unemployment insurance and health care coverage for those who have lost their jobs — will help all such people. He added that blacks and Latinos tend to be “overrepresented” among the unemployed, and so these measures benefit us.
He also said:
When we put in place additional dollars for community health centers to ensure that people are still getting the help that they need, or we expand health insurance to millions more children through the Children's Health Insurance Program, again, those probably disproportionately impact African-American and Latino families simply because they're the ones who are most vulnerable. They have got higher rates of uninsured in their communities.
So my general approach is that if the economy is strong, that will lift all boats as long as it is also supported by, for example, strategies around college affordability and job training, tax cuts for working families as opposed to the wealthiest that level the playing field and ensure bottom-up economic growth.
And I'm confident that that will help the African-American community live out the American dream at the same time that it's helping communities all across the country.” (Black Voices)
The 50 percent mentioned by Showell was from a 2003 New York City study: “Examining trends in joblessness in the city since 2000 (which) suggests that by 2003, nearly one of every two black men between 16 and 64 was not working.
Mark Levitan, the report's author, found that just 51.8 percent of black men ages 16 to 64 held jobs in New York City in 2003. The rate for white men was 75.7 percent; for Hispanic men, 65.7; and for black women, 57.1. The employment-population ratio for black men was the lowest for the period Mr. Levitan has studied, which goes back to 1979.”
If that was the case between 2000-2003, what is the situation today?
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.—Dr. Spence
I totally agree with you on this point. Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society never reached its potential in part because he made winning the Vietnam War a priority. President Obama is spending trillions of dollars to save failed financial institutions and other failed corporations. He will eventually spend trillions fighting two wars and on corporate welfare for the military-industrial complex.
Hyperinflation will probably hit before his social programs have any positive impact.
Obama knows that some things are indeed too big to fail, and other things are too small to fund. But it is the fact that a large number of African Americans and their political sentiments have not developed an economic vocab that we're not good at talking about such things.
You can't say it's 'black politics' because there is essentially no black politics. There are political sentiments that are satisfied by rhetorical patronage. I say this having peeped a few minutes of Michael Eric Dyson's complaint that his delivery of 60K votes to Obama gets him squat, but I've been talking about rhetorical patronage back since the era of Howard Dean.
And in case your readers have not checked out my followup from the Urban New Media Conference, you should all know that officially Ebony and Jet, with *one* full-time photographer between them in the entire USA, no longer really counts for jack.