Although I haven’t performed the “for real for real” type of analysis to definitively show that a shift has occurred, it’s worth comparing. Here’s the commencement address he delivered at Morehouse College in May 2013. [foot]Transcript here.[/foot]

Tuesday July 15 (the same day Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book Between the World and Me was released)[foot]I noted on Facebook that there are three books I’ve read over the past few years that deserve all the accolades they’ve received–Kiese Laymon’s Long Division, Joe Soss, Sanford Schram, and Richard Fording’s Disciplining the Poor and now Coates’ book.[/foot] he delivered a powerful speech to the NAACP detailing the pernicious effects of the prison industrial complex–the most powerful speech on the issue a president has ever delivered. Below, the speech.[foot]Transcript here.[/foot]

The next day, the show aired.

As I noted in the interview we don’t hear any of the “no excuses” rhetoric when he’s talking about reforming prisons. No sense that prisoners are in jail because they didn’t keep their pants up, no sense that prisoners are in jail because they made excuses instead of doing hard work.

David Greene probably selected me for a couple of reasons. The first is that I was one of the few folk of color to routinely appear on NPR, through my work on News and Notes and then Tell Me More. But secondly he interviewed me on the same subject in March 2012.

The President is undoubtedly constrained. The institution of the presidency was designed to be constrained, by the legislative branch, and by the judicial branch. And he’s [foot]Perhaps “he” until this next election.[/foot] constrained by his desire for re-election, and then even in his second term by his desire to see his party keep the office. These constraints are very real. But these constraints didn’t prevent him from pardoning/commuting the sentences of unfairly imprisoned citizens. These constraints didn’t cause him to spend a significant portion of his time castigating black audiences.[It’s really worth listening to the speech he gave Morehouse graduates in  These constraints DID prevent him from promoting an urban new deal that could’ve radically altered the life chances of black men and women. But those constraints didn’t cause him to come up with My Brother’s Keeper. He made choices. Problematic ones.

In the end this President will likely go down in history as one of the greatest presidents of the modern era.

But he had a very very low bar.

P.S. Written more for the historical record than anything else. Later Friday evening I got a chance to perform onstage with George Clinton. (Yes. That Clinton.) I’m sure there’s video somewhere–I don’t have it. To make a long story short, Clinton’s “Atomic Dog” is my fraternity’s unofficial anthem, and we’ve kind of adopted him. He saw one of my fraternity brothers and I performing in the audience and he called us onstage. What I’ve tried to do over the past several years is show folk–particularly but not exclusively black folk–that there’s a way to be productive, to be critical, that doesn’t require embracing the bankrupt trappings of “seriousness”. We all have to do more to get free from the constraints preventing us from doing the work while we live the life.

The more pessimistic approach is rooted in the fact more than one American Dream exists. And they mostly wither when placed against reality.

• 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.

Check out the last line. For me, the natural conclusion to this story SHOULD be a call for organizing of some sort. This is a deeply political issue (rather than the cultural issue Hall believes it to be) and it requires a political solution of some sort. But for Hall the bottom line is individual knowledge. Great story, but it reproduces rather than contests the status quo–note the focus on risk for example and who has to bear it. There’s no way we’re going to change conditions for retirees and potential retirees in the future without political action of some sort. Financial literacy alone won’t cut it.

Our conversation on parental leave was a natural followup. The United States is one of the few countries that does not guarantee paid parental leave for ANYONE much less for fathers. But some corporations are beginning to rethink this issue. Here’s our take:

This is yet another issue that is primary a political issue, one that can only be taken care of through pressure on government to change. As stated on the clip, some people–people valued by their corporation–already get this benefit. Why shouldn’t everyone? Johns Hopkins has a parental leave policy for faculty. I think they stop the tenure clock and give mothers and fathers a semester off if not more. Why shouldn’t everyone be able to take advantage of this policy? (As an aside I really did learn how to braid my daughter’s hair through the 3-man weave practice drill we used to run in basketball practice…)

Finally…there’s the My Brother’s Keeper program rolled out by Obama this week. I’ve been interviewed on NPR as well as on NBC about the issue.  Here’s my clip from The Takeaway:

I basically spent most of today dealing with this issue on Facebook. The image of the President with those wonderful black boys was powerful. But he consistently substitutes images and role modeling for governance. And then shunts off any government responsibility…in fact by saying again and again “this is not a big government program” he makes it harder not easier to mobilize resources for them. I know folk who were at that meeting, folk who are doing incredible work in Detroit and other cities. This isn’t a knock on their activity at all. But at a moment when we routinely spent $70 billion on home mortgage deductions you’d think that the President would at the very least use the bully pulpit to argue for more government intervention in the future, rather than to argue for a new intervention that has absolutely no government money attached to it.

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