• What should the Democrats Do? Thanks to Jelani Cobb, I got a chance to participate in a New York Times debate about what the Democrats should do given last week’s election results. For me it’s pretty simple–use the state’s rights philosophy to push for progressive reform at the state wide level, making Voting Rights as important to Democratic constituencies as the 2nd Amendment is to Republican constituencies, and then stop using shame as a mechanism to guilt people into voting in off-year elections. It’s unlikely the Democratic Party will do any of these three things. They won’t fight for progressive referenda because they don’t quite believe in progressive legislation–they are more of a center-right party than they are a center-left party. The more progressive referenda passes, the more demands it places upon the party. The more demands placed upon the party the more they think they’ll have to actually live UP to those demands and actually govern according to them. Similarly although the Democratic Party is more supportive of voting rights than the GOP, the Democratic Party doesn’t want voting to “become a thing” because the more voters they have the more competitive local elections become. The more competitive local elections become, the less likely local elected representatives will be able to hold on to their seats. And shame works far better as a technique of governance than anger. What’s going to have to happen somehow is that an institution outside of the two-party system is going to have to pursue these ideas.

• “Transition with a Slow Fade”. Over the past few months Mark Anthony Neal and I have been working on a special issue of SOULS dedicated to the work of Richard Iton, who passed away last year. The issue will be out soon. Thanks to Barbara Ransby, Prudence Browne, Lily Palladino, Alison Swety, and all the contributors. Knowing Richard, he probably would’ve been very upset that we devoted an entire issue to his work, because he was as humble as he was productive! But the essays represent a testimony of sorts to the profound contributions he made in so little time.

• Knockin’ the Hustle: Against the Neoliberal Turn in Black Politics.  I’ve been working on a book manuscript developing some of the themes I wrestled with in Stare in the Darkness: The Limits of Hip-hop and Black Politics. It’ll be coming out soonish with Punctum Press. I hope to say more about this soon, but the thing I am most excited about is the fact that Punctum has a radical approach to digital rights. When the book comes out you’lll be able to purchase a hard copy if you’d like (and may have some news about this as well), but you’ll be able to get the entire PDF for free. With this project I’m more interested in having the ideas “take” and in supporting the Punctum project as a new model of how publishing can work than I am in collecting royalty checks (as small as they might be). Thanks to my literary agent Shoshana Crichton, to Tamara K Nopper who edited a draft of the work, to Eileen Joy and the kind folk at Punctum, as well as a host of others to be named later.

That’s it for now. I’ll try to be better going forward. Do me a favor if you could? Leave a note in the comments. Some of you I haven’t heard hide nor hair from in a minute.

[mixcloud]https://x.mixcloud.com/lesterspence/in-search-of-iton-remix/[/mixcloud]

On Thursday, April 21, 2013, Richard Iton, Professor of African American Studies at Northwestern University, passed away after a long bout with leukemia. In honor of his work, Mark Anthony Neal and I are co-editing a special issue of Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society. The Call is below:

Iton was also well known for his scholarly generosity with his students and colleagues. It is in this spirit that SOULS is announcing a special issue that is generative of that life and that work. We invite papers that wrestle with, address and engage some of the themes and dilemmas that defined Richard Iton’s career. Topics may include issues related to the African diaspora, performance, the black left, black imagination, or gender and sexuality. Papers should address these topics with some reference, at least indirectly, to Iton’s work, influence and legacy.

I would add that we are also looking for works that examine the interplay between the explicitly cultural and the explicitly political (campaigns and elections, political development, public opinion, political ideologies, state bureaucracies, issues of political economy).

The final submission deadline is Midnight February 28, 2014.

My dissertation advisor passed away unexpectedly earlier in the year. I wrote about how much he meant to me and to the discipline. I undersold his value. 

Over the past few months we've lost two other giants in the field.

Richard Iton was a Professor of African American Studies at Northwestern University. He's best known for his two books Solidarity Blues, and In Search of the Black Fantastic. He received his PhD in Political Science from Hopkins actually (in the mid nineties). In Search is without a doubt the best book on black politics and black popular culture ever written. It is a masterpiece. My own book wouldn't be possible without his presence–he blurbed the back of it and I'm pretty sure he was one of the anonymous reviewers.

Nick Nelson was a Professor of Political Science at Ohio State University. I just realized Ohio State made his mid seventies work Electing Black Mayors available on pdf. It's invaluable in understanding not only the rise of black mayors in the seventies, but more recently in understanding Obama's rise. He was responsible for developing the African American Studies department at OSU as well as its community extension. He was the former President of the National Conference of Black Political Scientists as well as the National Council of Black Studies. Like Hanes he oversaw dozens of dissertations. And like Hanes he was gracious and humble to a fault–except when the subject was his beloved Ohio State football team.

Nelson was retired, while Iton was at the height of his powers. But both will be missed. 

Finally, Detroit went under emergency financial management and is looking bankruptcy dead in the face. The emergency financial manager has gone so far as to consider selling the Detroit Institute of Arts assets to take care of creditors. This as corporate profits in the city have grown significantly. If we think of something like workfare as the neoliberal policy of forcing women unable to become entrepreneurial enough to either become entrepreneurial or die, then Public Act 72 is the neoliberal policy of forcing cities to do so. And of course the cities and institutions placed under EFM in the state of michigan are majority black. 

These three losses, combined with the fact that I'm spending a lot of time "talking" about these issues on facebook, made it pretty much impossible for me to write consistently here along with my other responsibilities. 

So I've had to pick my battles.  

I've devoted most of my serious writing time to two projects. I've been working on a Race Matters like book (tentative title: Nobody's Coming) charting the neoliberalization of black politics. I made rough rough rough chapters available here. But I've finally finished a draft of it that I've sent off to the press. The book publishing industry is in the midst of transforming itself. Into what, we don't quite know yet. What I'd like to do is create a work that fully takes advantage of this transformation. 

And I've been working on a book examining the post-Boundaries of Blackness politics of HIV/AIDS. I'm going to kick research on that project into high gear this summer with the hopes of having that book done next year.

Going forward, I expect to spend more time writing here, although it probably won't ever be "regularly regular". 

A couple of years ago I was on a panel with Michael Eric Dyson, Melissa Harris Perry, and Sherillyn Ifill, about Manning Marable's biopgraphy of Malcolm X. I thought the book was deeply flawed, and in fact think it is even MORE flawed now. However in my remarks I attempted to unpack what I called "the black box of cultural production". We tend to think that works of intellectual production come full blown from the mind of the people responsible for them. The reality is a bit more complex. Before we even take Marable's ideological flaws into account, we have to wrestle with the fact that he wrote substantial portions of the book on one lung, carrying a breathing machine around with him for the last several months of his life. 

Stare in the Darkness wasn't produced under that type of duress. But it WAS produced under duress. 

I think we should do more to unpack the stuff that goes into producing work, NOT in order to give more props to the people who produce them. Rather, we should do so to further democratize the process. I don't know how many people have attempted to write, to draw, to create, but stopped after hitting the wall…thinking that because they hit the wall they "obviously" didn't have what it took. I don't know how many people have attempted to write, to draw, to create, only to stop after losing the thread of what they were trying to say. 

When the reality is that I don't know a single worker in this field who hasn't hit that wall. I don't know a single worker who hasn't lost the thread of their argument. The first substantive chapter of Stare got away from me so many times I lost count. And even now I kick myself that I called Russell Simmons' Hip-Hop Summit Action Network, the Hip-Hop SOCIAL Action Network more than once. 

You aren't alone.

We don't say that enough in our political struggles, we don't say that enough in our personal struggles, we don't say that enough in our productive struggles. But that's the reality. There aren't as many of us as we'd like, but there are more of us than we realize.

Onward.

In sum, Walton was arguably the dean of black politics, perhaps the most productive of the civil rights era generation of black political scientists. 

My first year of graduate school at Michigan happened to coincide with Hanes Walton's first year on campus. I was one of his research assistants. I graded a few of his classes. I chose him as my dissertation advisor. 

I found him to be incredibly humble. To say he was productive was an understatement–particularly given that he wrote every single book, chapter, article, and review I mention above in longhand (sending his work to an assistant in Savannah to type because she was the only one on the face of the planet who could read his handwriting!). He was an engaging lecturer–one year I happened to be the grader for both of his classes and witnessed him deliver two three-hour long lectures every Friday for an entire semester without notes. And he was open with his time–he spent every Saturday writing the dozens of recommendation letters and tenure reviews he was routinely asked to write. He was NEVER Dr. Walton or Prof. Walton to any of us–he was ALWAYS simply "Hanes."

Finally it is (fortunately or unfortunately depending on your perspective) very possible for a black professor to be simultaneously incredibly productive, an intellectual groundbreaker, and anti-political when it comes to dealing with ACTUAL black politics particularly at the micro-level. There are a number of black professors who through their scholarship make it possible for scholars to study black life without having to compromise, while at the same time looking the other way when those scholars face attack (from non-blacks and blacks alike) because they don't quite fit the grad student/scholar box. 

Hanes Walton Jr. is not one of those professors. On two occasions I know of, and given my own proclivities, probably a dozen other occasions, Hanes protected me. AND made me aware of what was going on around me. Over the past twenty years the University of Michigan has produced more black political scientists than any other institution. Almost all of those students bear his mark.

I wish I could say that there were people up to the task of filling his shoes. 

I cannot.

Hanes Walton Jr.'s CV

This week I received the University of Minnesota Spring Catalog and saw my book featured within. So on a lark, yesterday I went to Amazon.com. And it’s there for pre-order. I’ve been copy-editing since Monday and am due to turn the final copy in Tuesday. I like what I read. Not all of it of course…but it rings true. It’s a book I’d want to read. And in the end that’s what mattered to me. I wasn’t half as excited about being done as I was about being able to use one of my shots for the cover….and seeing it on Amazon.

We got hit with 8 inches yesterday and I’m writing this dispatch from the comfort of a dear friend’s home with five kids watching nick…and the next book writing project calls. But I’ll leave with random thoughts:

• I significantly underestimated Ford’s profits. They earned 6.6 billion in 2010.
• I’m trying to gauge the events of Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen. Because it’s difficult to know motivations and desires at this point, I’m more interested in process. So I’m drawn to the open source revelations.
• Keith Olbermann and MSNBC parted ways. It’s bad news for the Left…but corporations are only so interested in left-leaning pundits. All the more reason to work hard to create our own media.

Amazon.com: Stare in the Darkness: The Limits of Hip-hop and Black Politics (9780816669882): Lester K. Spence: Books.

For those of you nearby I am presenting at a workshop on spatial inequality tomorrow (Friday) at 10am. The title of the workshop is “Borders, Buildings & Bounding: Cross Cutting Solutions to Displacement & Devaluation of Communities of Color.” I’ll be speaking about spatial inequality and its different forms, focusing on a dynamic called “municipal underbounding.”

In other news this week President Obama rolled out a new Fatherhood Initiative. I talked about it like a dog on NPR.

Well…not really like a dog. I’ve too much respect for dogs.

    

Niara and Grandma Tootsie, originally uploaded by Unbowed.

My paternal grandmother passed away last fall. Her birthday would have been today. Here she is with my daughter whose birthday is on Sunday. I thought about her when I heard about Rene Marie.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTpQpRHYKpw[/youtube]

And thinking about Marie brought me back here:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRvVzaQ6i8A[/youtube]

My grandmother and grandfather were able to raise close to a dozen of my grandfather’s brothers and sisters after their parents unexpectedly passed. Throughout their trials and tribulations they remained steadfast, and dedicated to their family. They represented at their best a model of excellence that we should all hope to attain.

By taking the lyrics of the Negro National Anthem and combining them with the instrumental of the Star-Spangled Banner what she did was bring out the best of both. But you had to be awake to hear it.

Gaye did pretty much the same thing, bringing a level of soul and depth to his rendition that was so powerful I’m tearing up as I listen.

At first I thought that what Martin did was hip-hop. But I got it backwards. What hip-hop does at its best is tap into a reservoir of improvisation that begins much earlier. Feel me? We’ve been attempting to imbue our values into the warp and woof of the American fabric since 1619. Hip-hop is just the latest attempt, and maybe not even the greatest.

My grandmother was, an Omni-American. And I honor her memory:

Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us,
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun
Let us march on till victory is won.