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.

Reading it a day after I talked about black popular culture in my second semester Black Politics class, I’m reminded of the early 2001 furor over then Harvard President Larry Summers’ critique of West when West was at Harvard [foot]Summers argued that West should spend much more time on real scholarship and less time on the lecture circuit and non-academic projects like the 2001 spoken word project Sketches of My Culture. West left for Princeton soon after the dispute.[/foot], and much more recent discussions over whether Beyonce was a feminist, whether a New York Times article on Shonda Rhimes was racist, and whether Ava Duvernay should’ve received an Oscar for her movie Selma. Some might argue that I shouldn’t be so reminded. This is much more politically motivated than the others and should be read not just as an attack on West but as an attack on the anti-Obama tendency (such as it exists) among black intellectuals in general.

I don’t believe this piece was politically motivated. There are politics to consider–it isn’t a coincidence that one of the co-editors responsible for the piece used to work on The Melissa Harris-Perry Show, and of course there’s Dyson’s own political history with West to consider. But the politics at play here are not the politics of Obama’s War Room.

However, let’s say that it was. Would the stakes increase if Dyson’s piece weren’t written against West as much as written against the anti-Obama tendency (again, such as it exists)?

No.

In the early nineties, when Cornel West, Michael Eric Dyson, bell hooks, Skip Gates, and Houston Baker became so well-known outside of the academy that the term “black public intellectual” was coined to describe them, Adolph Reed penned two insightful critiques of West and the black public intellectual phenomenon in general. The first (“What Are the Drums Saying, Booker?”) is here, written twenty years ago this month. The second (part of a broader discussion about the first piece) appeared in New Politics Vol 5, Issue 4.

Reed made a few claims.

He argued that scholars like West, Dyson, hooks, and Robin Kelley, were responsible for reproducing a deeply problematic conception of politics that in effect, found politics not only in “real politics” (that is, in voting, in running for office, in political movements, in legislative activity) but also in everyday life and popular culture. For Reed this was both empirically and politically problematic. It was empirically problematic in as much as it placed very very different activities (fast food workers spitting on food, labor unions attempting to organize those same workers) under the same broad general category. It was politically problematic because their conception of politics made the work of political organizing–work was mundane, painstaking, hard, and in some instances, dangerous–so much harder.

Second, he argued that West, Dyson, and hooks, were neither scholars nor activists, but were playing at both. One of the unique dynamics of this moment was that their increased access to public audiences enabled them to shuffle between them and their more academic audiences, enabling them to front like activists when they were around academics, and front like academics when they were in the broader public. This enabled them to basically dodge the fairly hard requirements of being a card-carrying scholar on the one hand, and being a card-carry organizer/activists on the other. Certainly we’ve seen both West and Dyson do this over the past two decades.

Third he argued that their work on black life was not only flat but often times deeply conservative. In Race Matters for instance, Cornel West argued that the most pressing problem black people faced was neither institutional racism nor structural economic dislocation, but rather black nihilism–a term that, when unpacked, functions a lot like the concept of a uniquely black “culture of poverty” in that it places the fault and burden of the black contemporary condition squarely on the shoulders of black folk. Because intellectuals like West were not only phenotypically black but embodied a certain type of black performance, these claims were far easier for them to make, particularly to the white audiences they generally spoke to.

People critiqued Reed’s piece for being acerbic, mean-spirited, and wrong on the facts. But even with the rise of something like #blacklivesmatter I think that over the past several decades we have lost our grip on the function of politics, the number of real political organizers in cities like Baltimore are dwindling, and the progeny of the first generation of black public intellectuals haven’t significantly contributed to our understanding of our contemporary condition, even as some of them claim to engage in politics (often looking to West as a mentor). Reed may have been an ass. But that ass was right.

Indeed reading Reed’s piece brings home to me how little something like Dyson’s attack on West should matter in the grand scheme of things. When West and Tavis Smiley were more prominent I used to routinely defend their attacks on Obama from my friends. I did so more to defend the idea that Obama should be critiqued than to defend West and Smiley per se.

But here?

While I applaud some of West’s activity (his support of Steven Salaita for instance), I think Reed’s critique is even more applicable today than it was twenty years ago. West’s understanding of what politics is, of how politics functions, of when, where, and how we should politically resist, is woefully inadequate, and his understanding pretty much dominates our contemporary intellectual landscape. While some might point to his participation in the #blacklivesmatter movement as positive proof of West’s relevancy, I see it as negative proof. Here are the most important facts about Ferguson:

• Ferguson uses their police force to collect revenue from black citizens through punitive enforcement.
• Black citizens constitute a strong majority of Ferguson residents.
• The vast majority of Ferguson’s elected officials are white.
• Black citizens don’t turn out in local elections.

Focusing on this last fact, it’s important to note that the reason black citizens don’t turn out is not because they are apathetic and aren’t registered. They are, as evidenced by their (enthusiastic) turnout for Obama. The reason black citizens don’t turn out is because Ferguson local elections are held during off-years–that is, they aren’t held the same year as presidential elections. This institutional rule dampens turnout in general, and in this case reinforces white political rule.

But this didn’t have to be the case this time around. That is to say that while Ferguson’s off-elections rule usually dampened turnout across the board, given that black people were already registered to vote, and massive energy was directed at Ferguson through #blacklivesmatter, it didn’t have to do so this time. Indeed because Ferguson was relatively small–meaning that running for office there probably didn’t require significant cash or labor–the entire city’s governing structure could drastically shift.

On April 7, Ferguson held elections for three seats–two contested by African Americans, one contested by a white Michael Brown supporter. The two seats ended up going to African Americans, but the white Brown supporter lost (to the former mayor responsible for the controversial “I Love Ferguson” counter-movement).

This suggests that at least some of the energy of #blacklivesmatter was directed to transforming local politics. But not enough. And while it’s unfair to suggest that West had something to do with this, it is fair to suggest that the idea that local politics matters, that mundane political organizing matters, might not be dead in black communities if black public intellectuals like West and Dyson hadn’t helped to kill it off.

So even if we were to think that Dyson’s piece was primarily inspired by West’s politics, I think we’d be better off focusing our energies elsewhere. Let The New Republic get its clicks from some other population. But particularly given the fact that Dyson’s piece is not primarily driven by politics I’m even more firm in my suggestion that we leave the dispute between Dyson and West to Dyson, West, and others who routinely speak for four or five figure checks, and that those of us with the capacity to do so, help to rebuild a more robust politics within black communities. As Reed suggests:

In a perverse revision of the old norm of labor solidarity, “an injury to one is an injury to all,” now it’s the black (haute) bourgeoisie that suffers injustice on behalf of the black masses. It’s prominent black individuals’ interests and aspirations that are asserted—under the flag of positive images, role models, equivalent vulnerability to racism, and other such class-inflected bullshit—as crucial concerns for the race as a whole.

The sooner we move away from the tendency of defending the relatively powerful black professional managerial class no matter what they suggest their politics are the better.

The constructive program ahead must include a vigorous attempt to improve the Negro’s personal standards. It must be reiterated that the standards of the Negro as a group lag behind not because of an inherent inferiority, but because of the fact that segregation does exist….Yet Negroes must be honest enough to admit that our standards do often fall short….Our crime rate is far too high. Our level of cleanliness is frequently far too low. Too often those of us in the middle class live above our means, spend money on nonessentials and frivolities, and fail to give to serious causes, organizations, and educational institutions that so desperately need funds. [foot] King, Martin Luther, and James Melvin Washington. 1991. A Testament of Hope : The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr. San Francisco: Harper Press. p. 489[/foot]

Even if I’d pulled the entire passage, in which King places most of the blame for this reality on racism, it isn’t hard to imagine someone like a Clarence Thomas or perhaps Thomas Sowell or even a mid-career Glenn Loury making this argument. According to this argument, black personal responsibility should trump any supposed structural reality.

For scholars like Cornel West and Eddie Glaude, focused as they are on the power of the black church the most important King is arguably the Christian King.

Only God is able. It is faith in him that we must rediscover. With this faith we can transform bleak and desolate valleys into sunlit paths of joy and bring new light into the dark caverns of pessimism. Is someone here moving toward the twilight of life and fearful of that which we call death? Why be afraid? God is able. Is someone here on the brink of despair because of the death of a loved one, the breaking of a marriage, or the waywardness of a child? Why despair? God is able to give you the power to endure that which cannot be changed. Is someone here anxious because of bad health? Why be anxious? Come what may, God is able. [foot] King, Martin Luther, and James Melvin Washington. 1991. A Testament of Hope : The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr. San Francisco: Harper Press. p. 508[/foot]

Of course we can’t talk about King’s politics without talking about his support for integration.

The word segregation represents a system that is prohibitive; it denies the Negro equal access to schools, parks, restaurants, libraries, and the like. Desegregation is eliminative and negative, for it simply removes these legal and social prohibitions. Integration is creative, and is therefore more profound and far-reaching than desegregation. Integration is the positive acceptance of desegregation and the welcomed participation of Negroes into the total range of human activities. Integration is genuine intergroup, interpersonal doing. Desegregation then, rightly, is only a short-range goal. Integration is the ultimate goal of our national community. [foot] King, Martin Luther, and James Melvin Washington. 1991. A Testament of Hope : The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr. San Francisco: Harper Press. p. 118[/foot]

However post-1965 we see evidence of King’s support for black nationalism in the form of black power as well.

…Black Power, in its broad and positive meaning, is a call to lack people to amass the political and economic strength to achieve their legitimate goals. No one can deny that the Negro is in dire need of this kind of legitimate power. Indeed, one of the great problems that the Negro confronts is his lack of power. From the old plantations of the South to the newer ghettos of the North, the Negro has been confined to a life of voicelessness and powerlessness. Stripped of the right to make decisions concerning his life and destiny, he has been subject to the authoritarian and sometimes whimsical decisions of the white power structure. The plantation and the ghetto were created by those who had power both to confine those who had no power and to perpetuate their powerlessness. The problem of transforming the ghetto is, therefore, a problem of power–a confrontation between the forces of power demanding change and the forces of power dedicated to preserving the status quo. [foot] King, Martin Luther, and James Melvin Washington. 1991. A Testament of Hope : The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr. San Francisco: Harper Press. p. 577[/foot]

Now the integration/nationalism dichotomy is only one ideological axis of concern. Put another way, it’s possible to be a black integrationist communist, just as it is possible to be a black nationalist socialist. It’s pretty easy to take King’s latter ideas on the economy to cement his status as a radical.

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look at thousands of working people displaced from their jobs with reduced incomes as a result of automation while the profits of the employers remain intact, and say: “This is not just.” It will look across the oceans and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: “This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically damaged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love.[foot] King, Martin Luther, and James Melvin Washington. 1991. A Testament of Hope : The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr. San Francisco: Harper Press. pp. 630, 631[/foot]

This exercise is far from systematic. But going through his speeches, essays, interviews, and books one can find at least five different tendencies. But the tendency scholars, activists, pundits, politicians, and regular everyday folk, tend to focus on says a lot more about them than it does about him. More specifically we can pretty much predict the King one tends to focus on by his/her personal politics.

With that said, which one stands out to me?

If I had to choose between one of the Kings above, I’d choose the radical King. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that King never, as far as I’m aware of, expressed a desire that his fraternity (Alpha Phi Alpha) be integrated. But I think there’s a King no one’s really wrestled with. The institutional King.

…corrective legislation requires organization to bring it to life. Laws only declare rights; they do not deliver them. The oppressed must take hold of laws and transform them into effective mandates. Hence the absence of powerful organization has limited the degree of application and the extent of practical success.

We made easy gains and we built the kind of organizations that expect easy victories, and rest upon them. It may seem curious to speak of easy victories when some have suffered and sacrificed so much. Yet in candor and self-criticism it is necessary to acknowledge that the torturous job of organizing solidly and simultaneously in thousands of places was not a feature of our work. This is as true for the older civil rights organizations as for the newer ones…

Many civil rights organizations were born as specialists in agitation and dramatic projects; they attracted massive sympathy and support; but they did not assemble and unify the support for new stages of struggle. The effect on their allies reflected their basic practices. Support waxed and waned, and people became conditioned to action in crises but inaction from day to day. We unconsciously patterned a crisis policy and program, and summoned support not for daily commitment but for explosive events alone. [foot] King, Martin Luther, and James Melvin Washington. 1991. A Testament of Hope : The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr. San Francisco: Harper Press. p. 612[/foot]

Now I think there are very real problems with focusing on an individual like King to the exclusion of people like Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, Bob Moses, Amzie Moore, and Claudette Colvin (not to mention northern activists like Grace and James Boggs, and Albert Cleage). But to the extent we peel one King off, is this one we needed to really examine.

What is a social movement? How would we know it if it existed? How would we distinguish events that are “social movements” from events that are not?

In a short interview on James Peterson’s show The Remix, Adolph Reed suggests that neither #blacklivesmatter nor Occupy Wall Street qualify as social movements, and that the recent fascination with cultural politics represents a slide into idiocracy.

Listen. (fast forward to about the 7 minute mark)

I do think we place far too much weight on what he calls “manufactured controversy”. And while Reed focuses on Azealia Banks I’d place the Bill Cosby rape scandal, the Ray Rice and Adrian Peterson controversies of last year, questions about JayZ’s refusal to participate in politics, questions about Beyonce’s feminism, the Selma Oscar snub, whether Idris Elba should be the next James Bond, whether Shonda Rhimes gets the respect she deserves from the New York Times, all in the same category. The stances we take on these issues come to displace a range of issues that are arguably more amenable to political action. Further, they come to stand IN for political action. Arguing about whether Bill Cosby raped more than 20 women (I think he did, and am surprised people think otherwise), or whether Ray Rice should have been suspended (he should have), in the form of tweets or status sharing or commenting, become equivalents to political participation even though the only participation they tend to generate is yet more intense sharing, commenting, and tweeting. Furthermore in as much as all of these debates center on the status of wealthy African Americans, they tend to reproduce inequality rather than contest it. Every moment we spend defending Cosby (or even someone worthy like Ava Duvernay), is taken away from people not so independently wealthy and/or prestigious (us). Reed brings up the culture industry for a reason. Huffington Post, Facebook, Gawker, Time-Warner, etc. all are part of a larger industry that makes money off of the clicks, comments, shares, likes, these controversies generate.

This isn’t to say that these controversies cannot generate political action. Nationwide hundreds of thousands of rapes have gone unsolved because of untested rape kits. Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy found 11,000 of them in a Detroit warehouse several years ago and has been fighting to get the resources to test them. One could imagine how furor about Cosby could be used to make a (legitimate) claim that black women’s lives are largely ignored by the government (even when that government is largely run by black men and women), a claim that could lead to a massive effort to get the public resources required to test the rape kits and bring the rapists to justice.

But while an actress–Mariska Hargitay of Law & Order SVU fame–has stepped in to lend critical support to Worthy’s call, you’d find absolutely no connection between the various and sundry pieces critical of Cosby and rape culture, and this issue, which came to light around the same time the Cosby furor began. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if the first time you were made aware of this (or even the potential connection between the two events) is from this piece. And this is because web writing doesn’t really lend itself to the type of investigative reporting that we need to be informed about and then move on issues like this. It more often lends itself to the type of commentary spurred on by a viral video/tweet, which is how we even know about Cosby, Ray Rice, and Adrian Peterson in the first place.

I’d be dishonest if I suggested there were no political value in popular culture. But I think we garner far more from examining how popular culture and the industry that partially generates it reproduces the political status quo rather than contests it.

#Blacklivesmatter

Here too, Adolph has a point, although a weaker one. It’s clear that both #blacklivesmatter and Occupy Wall Street were not simply responses to individual outrageous acts, but were (and are) the responses to a longer pattern of physical and economic brutality. And these responses generated novel forms of social organization and tactics in bringing attention to these issues.

But how do we define a social movement? Charles Tilly is helpful here:

A social movement is a sustained series of interactions between power holders and persons successfully claiming to speak on behalf of a constituency lacking formal representation, in the course of which those persons make publicly visible demands for changes in the distribution or exercise of power, and back those demands with public demonstrations of support.[foot]Tilly, C. (1984b) ‘Social Movements and National Politics’, in C. Bright and S. Harding (eds.), Statemaking and Social Movements (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press), 297–317.[/foot]

I want to focus on two passages. First:

…successfully claiming to speak.

This implies that the people who have brought the issue to light have somehow been granted the authority to speak on behalf of the people they are organizing for, by those people. But how do we know this?

Here’s where the second part comes in I think:

make publicly visible demands for changes in the distribution or exercise of power, and back those demands with public demonstrations of support.

And here’s the problem in both cases. While it is clear that large percentages of black people believe in reforming the police in order to reduce the number of unarmed black citizens they murder, and it is also clear that large percentages of people believe income inequality should be curtailed, it isn’t clear how these two beliefs translate policies or even alternative modes of organization that redistribute power. And the reason it hasn’t been made clear is because the people seeking to speak on behalf of the unspoken for haven’t made them clear. What people in the OWS case and what people in #blacklivesmatter appear to be operating on is the assumption that if they engage in enough disruptive actions, then the political change will take care of itself and a movement comprised of more people will then spontaneously generate–the “myth of the spark” that Adolph Reed brings up at about the 17 minute mark.

The best Patterson can do at this moment is to bring up the “generational divide” [foot]As an aside, can we figure out another term to use for people 30 and under? Chuck D., KRS-One, “Run” Simmons, Darryl McDaniels, and countless other seminal hip-hop figures, are all old enough to be members of the American Association of Retired Persons. The term hip-hop generation is pretty much analytically useless as a way to distinguish these individuals from people born 30 years after them.[/foot], suggesting that people like Reed are out of touch and aren’t giving younger folk their props. Adolph’s response bears quoting in full:

I guess what I would say is that while getting old is not a lot of fun, being old confers some advantages and one of them is having been around the track enough times to be able to make some generalizations. And among the things that I’ve noticed is that for all of this kind of stuff, and this is like Occupy, this goes back to the Million Man March, all of this stuff, the principal defense is a call for what these actions and these lines of endeavor will produce. So you can’t really say anything to that except that well, it hasn’t happened yet. We’ve done this kind of thing before and it hasn’t produced the outcome that you insist this one is going to do. So the argument basically depends on a call for faith in things as yet unseen. So there’s not much you can say to that…

I wouldn’t place either Occupy Wall Street or #blacklivesmatter in the same category as the Million Man March. Whereas the Million Man March was a conservative reproduction of the neoliberal status quo, both OWS and #blacklivesmatter can and should be thought of as critical responses to the neoliberal turn. Further while the MMM was top-down, and ostensibly designed to place Minister Louis Farrakhan at the head of the “black leader table” neither OWS nor #blacklivesmatter are about that life. At all. Patterson isn’t wrong to criticize Reed on this point.

However Reed can be wrong on this while still being correct in general. I wouldn’t at this point, place either OWS or #blacklivesmatter in the same category as the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Power Movement, the Labor Movement, the Women’s Rights Movement, the Gay Rights Movement, or a number of other movements that not only made visible demands for change that were supported by large groups of people, but actually accomplished those demands. And while I wouldn’t go too far with this–I don’t believe we need a “new” civil rights movement and I don’t want to be read as supporting such a notion–I do think that Reed’s critical approach is something the people directly involved in #blacklivesmatter should be more attentive to. Activists have already done the hard work required to bring people together to put their lives on the line. What we need are more actions designed to generate support for either specific policies (that are explicitly articulated), or for an alternative source of public power (that too, is explicitly articulated). The politics won’t take care of themselves. We have to take care of them.

Above is a conversation between Fred Moten and Robin Kelley on #blacklivesmatter, moderated by Maisha Quint, an anti-prison organizer working in Oakland, California with the Eastside Arts Alliance.

For those familiar with Hall I include a longer conversation between Hall and CLR James.

Finally, John Akomfrah’s directed a documentary of Hall’s life. Entitled The Stuart Hall Project, it cannot get to American shores soon enough.

Mike Riggs argues this sentence is wrong.

I disagree.

In my book, I spent a chapter on Kilpatrick and on Detroit. My family supported Kwame in the general election (my father grew up with his parents and spent some time with them in the Shrine of the Black Madonna) and I attended two inaugural events when he was first elected. The first was a black tie event for donors, the second was a party at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History held for 20- and 30-somethings.

I wrote about that party and about Kwame’s status as the “hip-hop mayor”, before digging into an analysis of his decisions, of his budget, and then of his case.

But there was an anecdote that I didn’t write about.

At the inaugural some of my friends who’d supported him were already grumbling that Kwame wasn’t treating them right vis a vis contracting decisions and policy decisions. I pulled one of them aside, one of my fraternity brothers I’d known for almost a decade at that point. “All you have to do is give the city service. And she will pay you back. With whatever you want. But you have to give the city service first. Help Detroit…and Detroit will help you.”

I wasn’t directing this advice to Kwame. But I easily could have. All he had to do was give the city service. And he would’ve eventually received whatever it is he wanted.

This brings me to Briggs argument.

Briggs argues that Kwame’s sentence is a waste of resources (with inflation it’ll probably cost $1 million in prison costs to house Kwame), that it is a sign of how prison sentencing is out of control, and that it is inefficient (it doesn’t allow Kwame to pay back his debt in a way that aids victims; a shorter sentence will likely have the same effect on Kwame and perhaps on other public servants). His bottom line:

Thinking differently about how we punish white collar criminals—including public servants—would be in keeping with the larger move toward sentencing reform. In the realm of drug offenses, for instance, even conservatives think that “swift and certain” sanctions for nonviolent drug crimes are a better punishment than years in the clink. And white collar offenders like Kilpatrick have skills that will absolutely go to waste behind bars. (Hey, he did manage to bring the Super Bowl to Detroit.)

Taking another direction, some also argue that Kwame is being punished because he was black, and that he wouldn’t receive this sentence were he white. Or a Bank of America executive rather than a mayor.

And finally a few people noted on FB that it wasn’t like Kilpatrick killed anyone.

Briggs arguments are strong, as is the argument that there are a whole lot of private actors who’ve gone scott-free over the past several years–the federal government has treated bank executives who willingly put the world at risk with kid gloves. Indeed even though I think Kilpatrick’s sentence is fair, the only thing that gives me pause is the fact that in the grand scheme of white collar crime he is the equivalent of a dime-bag dealer getting the book thrown at him.

Why does it only give me pause though?

Because I believe public servants like Kilpatrick, and white collar criminals like those in Wall Street, commit far more damage given their roles, than violent criminals. Violent criminals “age out”–the likelihood of committing a violent crime drops significantly with age. Furthermore many of their crimes affect individual families. Finally these crimes are often committed under very specific circumstances–they are either crimes of passion, or crimes of war (here I include most gang-related crimes). If anyone should get short sentences, it should be violent criminals, who are unlikely to commit violent crimes when they are in their 30s and 40s.

Concomitantly if there’s anyone who should be given long sentences it should be people like Kilpatrick. Kilpatrick’s crime was not committed against a single family, but against a city. A city that placed its faith in him. He reproduced and spread a culture of corruption that he was elected to reject. He didn’t do so under conditions of emotional distress, or under conditions of war. Thinking about Kilpatrick in this way he isn’t akin to the dime-bag dealer, but to the police officer convicted for serial brutality.

I do wish that others involved in the fleecing of Detroit would receive or even just attention–in the book I argued that focusing on Kilpatrick’s illegal conduct obscures the quasi-legal conduct that’s become par for the course among public servants. While we wax on about Kilpatrick Detroit is in the throes long term neoliberal rebuilding experiment. But it is possible to both acknowledge that Kwame and other public officials are receiving undue scrutiny compared to Wall Street executives and still believe they should be held to a high standard given their responsibilities. In this case we shouldn’t be fighting to reduce Kilpatrick’s sentence to fit those of other (white) public servants/private executives.

We should be fighting to increase the sentence these other individuals receive so as to match Kilpatrick’s.

I'll spend more time on this, and tentatively plan to submit an abstract to a conference on deindustrialization and resistance in Montreal.  

But what I want to jump into is Brittney Cooper's piece on Tavis Smiley and Barack Obama. Cooper uses Obama's comments on the Trayvon Martin verdict to call Smiley's (and by extension Cornel West) critique of Obama wrong-headed and out-of-date. For me the most important passage of the piece is below:

In a total of eighteen minutes, the president did what the prosecutors could not manage to do over the course of two weeks of trial, with over a year to prepare. He demonstrated that Trayvon Martin was a vulnerable kid, unfairly followed, who was victimized because he could only bring his fists and his screams to a gun fight. And after Zimmerman murdered him, the system victimized him further, by suggesting as it does for so many black men, that there is plenty of ground upon which to die, but very little upon which to stand.

The failure to see this, the deliberate choice not to see this, makes it incredibly difficult, then, for me to rock with media pundits and strident Obama critics like Tavis Smiley. Essentially, Smiley argued on Meet the Press this week that because President Obama was “pushed to the podium” at the end of a week of protests rather than walking there of his own accord days earlier, he had again failed to provide “moral leadership.” “Kingian leadership.”

Therein lies the problem: Tavis Smiley and others of his generation crave a resurgence of prophetic leadership. And surely we need it. But they would do well to remember that kings, princes and presidents are rarely prophetic. President Obama is not a part of the black prophetic tradition. His response to Rev. Jeremiah Wright taught us that. He is part of an American democratic tradition that works most effectively when “we the people” lead from below.

I have certainly wished and even pushed for the president to be more vocal not necessarily in the conversation on race, but rather in advocating for policies that actually rectify the systemic injustices to which he pointed in his speech. Where are the policies that ameliorate poverty, crack down on the out-of-control, over-the-top methods of policing practiced throughout the country, address the ever expanding prison industrial complex and provide education and jobs that are accessible to black men?

Cooper, herself an Obama critic, makes three moves I rail against, even though I believe her piece is thoughtful and insightful. The first move conflates "presidents, kings, and princes." 

Cooper's second move is to criticize Smiley partially for thinking Obama part of the prophetic tradition, and partially for relying on that tradition when it is approximately 45 years out of date.

Cooper's third move is to argue that Obama has no real responsibility for deciding where we go next, and that WE should be the ones to legislate, agitate, etc.  

The first move is problematic because presidents are generally (though given our own history not always) elected, while kings and princes are hereditary leaders. This move goes against her critique of the prophetic tradition, but only to the extent her critique of the prophetic tradition is that it is anti-democratic (the prophet doesn't subject him/herself to vote, or to democratic debate, because his/her prophetic utterances come directly from God), rather than that it is simply out of date.

Which brings up the second move. There are two problems here. First is that Cooper doesn't seem to acknowledge the possibility her first move allows for–that it is possible for an individual to be part of BOTH the prophetic tradition and the democratic tradition. Given the use of iconic imagery in and by both of Obama's presidential campaigns it's clear that Obama and his campaign managers have used prophetic iconography and language in order to mobilize voters and donors. Although Cooper notes she's an Obama critic, she lets Obama off the hook by ignoring his own role in promoting prophetic leadership when it suits his political interests. And to a certain extent she goes against her own criticism of prophetic tradition when she focuses on Obama's speech and its power.

I am sympathetic to Cooper's third move. One of the problems I have with Smiley, West, and critics like Eddie Glaude is that they've a surface understanding of the role politics plays in black american political life, and Smiley and West both ignore the role of local organizing. Even if Obama weren't a neoliberal politician, even if he cared about a progressive political agenda we would need a great deal more. In the specific instance of Trayvon Martin Obama can't promote legislation, he can't even draft an executive order that halts Stand Your Ground.

However here she reproduces the argument a lot of pundits, scholars including Larry Bobo, and politicians make, that somehow Obama faces unique hurdles in executing the powers of the presidency because of his race. I acknowledge Obama is likely constrained by a variety of barriers his predecessors didn't face. However these barriers did not prevent him from winning the office in the first place. Given this I'm not sure how daunting these barriers are now. The President still has a great deal of political authority, both in his capacity as an elected official, and in his capacity as the leader of the Democratic Party. By emphasizing his rhetorical authority, Cooper emphasizes the power of "conversation" as a form of politics in and of itself. It was refreshing to hear the President note his own experiences. But that does not and should not serve as a substitute for political engagement. We've enough instances of aggressive presidential behavior to know that Obama has the capacity to deploy it if he chose. While I stand with Cooper in suggesting we keep prophets in the Bible, I am with those who call for far less conversating.   

Critics of the Voting Rights Act will likely consider this a tremendous victory for federalism, given the undue burden they believe the Voting Rights Act placed on states. And they are undoubtedly right. Federalists believe that our system requires that states have much more power over their internal affairs than the federal government, and that our country runs best when states are able to meet the specific needs of their citizens relatively unfettered.

However critics of the Voting Rights Act willfully ignore the roots of federalism in white supremacy. Particularly in the south, federalism translates into two very simple words:

States.

Rights.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4v_yRFf4-Y[/youtube]

For the unaware those two words translate into this. And this. And this. The 13th Amendment represents an attempt to reconcile the harm done to the nation and to black men, women, and children, by in effect making anti-racism a more important principle than federalism. Before its passage individuals were citizens of individual states and through their state citizenship, were national citizens. After its passage individuals were national citizens first and foremost. The states still had any number of rights…but they could no longer constitutionally withhold those rights from black people (from black citizens). The Voting Rights Act passed 100 years later represented an attempt to further cement this important principle.   

Now one could argue that this was history. That the south of today isn't the south of old. The demographics of the south are definitely changing–the South is becoming much more diverse than it was, with large numbers of non-southern whites moving into the region, and with large numbers of blacks and Latino/as coming as well.

However recent attempts by North Carolina, Arkansas and Florida among others to suppress non-white votes should put the myth that the south is really different to rest. 

The week before the Supreme Court heard oral arguments The Atlantic ran an excellent piece on the contemporary relevance of the Voting Rights Act. This is the key paragraph:

Since 1982, the feds told the justices in their Shelby County brief, "… approximately 2,400 discriminatory voting changes had been blocked by more than 750 Section 5 objections, approximately 400 of which involved cases with specific evidence of intentional discrimination." Without Section 5, the feds argue, minority voters would have had to sue individually, at great cost of time and money, in some cases after having lost their right to vote. Like it was before the passage of the statute.

Although there are enough instances of voter suppression in non-southern states to suggest that a number of them (Wisconsin, Ohio, and Pennsylvania come to mind) should be placed under scrutiny as well, the passage above suggests that Section 4 is still required and still relevant.

So what to do?

The reason the 2nd Amendment has the power it does is because of the NRA. 

I suggest the creation of an organization devoted to preserving and extending voting laws–the National Voting Association. People already take voting seriously, as witnessed by the hours people were willing to spend standing in line. But there is no organization that has the sole purpose of protecting the right to vote. There is no organization that has the purpose of creating a shared "voter identity". Before the NRA there were people who happened to own guns. After the NRA there were "gun-owners". They understood their ability to own and use firearms as a crucial part of their identity. 

We need to create the same type of identity among voters. 

Now there are a couple of obvious problems with this idea, particularly as far as comparing it to the NRA.

The NRA is backed by gun manufacturers.[foot]From the Huffington Post:

These companies and other gun industry giants have ponied up big bucks to the NRA since 2005, according to a list of NRA corporate partners posted at its last convention.

For instance, Brownells is in an elite group of donors that have given between $1 million and $4.9 million since 2005. Barrett Firearms in the same period chipped in between $50,000 and $99,000.

Another notable donor is Freedom Group, which owns Bushmaster, the company that made the AR-15 military-style rifle used by Adam Lanza in his bloody assault on Sandy Hook. The Freedom Group has donated between $25,000 and $49,000 to the NRA’s corporate effort.

The NRA’s most generous gun industry backer is MidwayUSA, a distributor of high-capacity magazine clips, similar to ones that Lanza loaded into his Bushmaster rifle and Glock pistol. These clips increase the lethality of weapons by allowing dozens of shots to be fired before the shooter has to reload. According to its website, Midway has donated about $7.7 million to the NRA through another fundraising program that dates back to 1992. Under this program, customers who buy Midway products are asked to “round up” the price to the next dollar, with the company donating the difference to the NRA.[/foot]

The financial backing of the gun manufacturers enables the organization to have a far larger footprint than they would have otherwise. There are no "vote manufacturers" who would have similar weight. 

What about leaders like Rep. John Lewis? 

This is the second problem. The secret no one really talks about is that no one really wants too much political participation from voters. Because if they voted in large enough numbers then representatives would have to give them what they wanted, or at the very least be more attentive to their interests. Black representatives like Lewis are no different here–one of the reasons members of Congress are re-elected at over a 90% clip is because turnout is so low. Political representatives, even representatives who are most likely criticizing the ruling in front of the media as I type this, do not in general have more than a symbolic interest in supporting voters AS voters.

Which suggests such an attempt must be a grassroots movement, starting locally and to the extent possible outside of the two party system. It also suggests that such a movement begin to the extent possible with enough fanfare to make its presence known, and without the participation of a number of elites attached to the two-party system (here I'm thinking about folks like the Reverend Jesse Jackson and Reverend Al Sharpton). 

With the increased browning of America I'd argue that this ruling (along with the recent ruling on Affirmative Action in college admissions) will become moot sooner rather than later. However I believe this specific ruling represents an opportunity to call for a radically different political project, one that re-centers voting and citizenship into the heart of the American experiment.  

Favor passed away last week.

…

Several months ago the New York Times sponsored a debate/discussion on the latest generation of black public intellectuals.[foot]I write “the latest generation” because this dynamic goes back to the rise of Henry Louis Gates, bell hooks, Cornel West, Houston Baker, Toni Morrison, Shelby Steele, and Robin Kelley (among others) in the early nineties, in the wake of Bill Clinton’s election, the Rodney King Rebellion, the explosion of hip-hop, the increased integration of black popular culture, and the increased demand for black studies courses at high tier universities. A variety of critical and laudatory articles appeared in The New Republic, The Village Voice. and The Atlantic Monthly among others. The laudatory articles connected them to the fifties era New York intellectuals and saw in them the future of scholarship on race and racism. The critical articles (most notably this one by Adolph Reed Jr.) argued they were exceedlingly weak on academic content in part because of their feigned activism. We have about enough critical distance from this period for someone to write a book length treatise on this group and on what this period meant for black politics in general. Houston Baker’s Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Rights Movement and Norman Kelley’s The Head Negro In Charge Syndrome attempt the task but both ultimately fail.[/foot] Among the participants were Melissa Harris-Perry (host of the Melissa Harris-Perry show on MSNBC, Professor at Tulane University), Eddie Glaude (Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University), Carl Hart (Professor of Psychology at Columbia University), Stephon Alexander (Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Darmouth University), and Khalil Muhammad (Director of the Schomburg Center).[foot]In disclosure, I know or have met three out of the five participants. I consider Melissa Harris-Perry a close colleague and have appeared on her show. I’ve met Eddie Glaude and have had a number of discussions with him about these issues on the interwebs. And I’ve talked to Stephon Alexander at Dartmouth about issues of diversity.[/foot] The question they were asked to tackle was a simple one. Do black intellectuals have a special obligation to address social and racial issues beyond the campus. 

Their answers? Focusing on three, recognizing public intellectuals of all races have a responsibility to speak the truth Prof. Harris-Perry says no. Prof. Glaude says yes arguing that black public intellectuals have abrogated their responsibility to serve as the moral conscience of (black) America. Prof. Hart gives a slightly different answer–suggesting that whatever black intellectuals do, they should stay in their lane, lest their lack of expertise cause more problems than they solve. Here he uses the example of the “crack baby” syndrome–black scholars did not plant the idea that kids born to crack-addicted mothers were somehow born with more deficits than we’d ever seen before, that would be Dr. Ira Chasnoff but in an effort to garner resources for black communities black elites reproduced it. We now know Dr. Chasnoff’s research was flawed (to say the least) and babies born to mothers addicted to alcohol have more problems than babies born to mothers addicted to crack cocaine, or any other form of cocaine for that matter.[foot]Hart’s recently come out with a book that examines the history of the supposed crack-baby epidemic and provides a set of common-sense solutions to the drug war.[/foot]

Although I am loathe to speak for the dead, I think Homer Favor would probably agree with Glaude, as measured by his participation in the Goon Squad and his creation of the Urban Institute (a Morgan State thinktank created to problem solve the various issues black Baltimore had to wrestle with). There’s nothing he said at the University of Baltimore event that suggests he held a different opinion. And although this interview with Marc Steiner is several years old there’s nothing in the interview to suggest Favor thought otherwise.

I have a different opinion.

Prof. Glaude’s distinction between scholars who have in effect “sold out” out of self-interest, and scholars who are meeting their moral obligation to speak truth to power, is a bit too black and white (no pun intended). First I’m not sure what the standard is here. Gates, West, hooks, and others have all argued at one point or another that black cultural dysfunction is at least partially responsible for racial inequality and for the lack of a sustained black political response. Glaude and I have had a running discussion on the Clinton years–he argues that black intellectuals engaged in critique in the form of academic conferences and the like. I’m not convinced–and as this Boston Review article suggests a very similar critique was levied against black intellectuals during the Clinton era.[foot]Rivers article cited above generated a discussion worth checking out, not only because it asks the same question some 20 years earlier as the New York Times asks above, but because even then the comments from West, hooks, and others expresses an aversion to politics.[/foot]

Furthermore Glaude distinguishes between individuals who have sold out to the Obama administration for loot and individuals who have instead spoken truth to power as it were…as if there isn’t also a market for criticism, particularly in the academy. Tavis Smiley and Cornel West have lost the support they received from black elites and regular folk before they began to criticize Obama (see Joyner’s latest attack). However there are still a variety of rewards critics of Obama can and do receive, particularly those with routine access to the mass media. Speaking engagements from organizations critical of the administration, book contracts from presses interested in critically interrogating the Obama era, increases in status from appearances on radio shows, as well raises and promotions based on the increased productivity and visibility all can come from speaking truth to power. Publishing an op-ed in the New York Times isn’t spilt milk. Given this I’d suggest there’s something more complicated than “selling out” occurring here, although there are a couple of examples of people who apparently switched their views on the administration after they received more access.[foot]I’m thinking about Michael Eric Dyson here.[/foot]

What could be more complicated than “selling out”? What are we missing? Recently Mel Rothenberg veteran Chicago organizer and Cedric Johnson, Associate Professor of African American Studies at the University of Illinois-Chicago and author of Revolutionaries to Race Leaders and The Neoliberal Deluge, participated in a panel about Obama and Black Politics at the University of Chicago, sponsored by The Platypus Affiliated Society. (Michael Dawson, John D. MacArthur Professor at the University of Chicago was supposed to participate but was unable due to emergency.) Here’s the transcript.

I spoke with Johnson the night Obama was first elected. Neither of us supported Obama during the primaries, but we realized his election represented a shift of sorts. What we both understood, and what Johnson articulates below, is that Obama is who we thought he was–a black neoliberal. He’s never been anything different.

One reason Obama emerged as such a powerful figure during the 2008 election season has to do with the context of demobilization, particularly within black life. There was not a large and vibrant enough political movement on the ground, a movement that could connect to people’s realities in terms of their work lives, their everyday lives, and the character of life within neighborhoods. This created a void that was easily filled by a politics of recognition and the symbolism of the Obama campaign. But if we look closely at Obama’s politics, if we go back to that 2004 DNC address, when it comes to domestic politics he has always been clear: a minimized role for government. He wanted to do away with the benevolent role of the state that we had become accustomed to by way of the New Deal and Great Society. He even endorsed the Cosby tirade against the urban black poor. More than once before he announced his candidacy, and many times since—most recently in the address he delivered in February at the Hyde Park Academy—Obama has not emphasized the economy, but parental responsibility and behavior modification as a way of addressing the routinized violence in American cities. What Obama has done skillfully, particularly in his primary race against Clinton, is combine the liberal, public relation society of the new Democrats with neoliberal politics.Most other black folk do not want to deal with these issues. For them, engaging in criticism of Obama is seen as airing dirty laundry, or as part of some insidious plot to sabotage him. So what we have also seen, in his rise to the presidency, is the wholesale decline of critical engagement within black publics. It is very difficult to find a spot where you can openly criticize Obama and have it heard—actually heard, understood, and appreciated in some meaningful way.

The neoliberal critique is one Adolph Reed brought up a long time ago[foot]In fact, even longer ago than this. This is a quote from Reed’s Class Notes, p. 13:

In Chicago, for instance, we’ve gotten a foretaste of the new breed of foundation-hatched black communitarian voices; one of them, a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccible do-good credentials and vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics, has won a state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal foundation and development worlds. His fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic community, talk about meeting in kitchens, small scale solutions to social problems, and the predictable elevation of process over program–the point where identitiy politics converges with old-fashioned middle class reform in favoring form over substance. I suspect that his ilk is the wave of the future in U.S. black politics here, as in Haiti and wherever the International Monetary Fund has sway. [emphasis mine]

[/foot] but it is something that neither West, Smiley, nor Glaude to my knowledge understood until well after Obama’s election. Up until this point, Johnson sounds a lot like Glaude and a number of other critics of Obama and critics of black responses TO criticism of Obama. But note the comments after:

Part of the problem, of course, rests in how we think about black politics. I want to distinguish black political life—a broad category stretching back across multiple decades, even centuries, in reference to black people engaging in various forms of politics, whether slave rebellions or the push for desegregation of the South—fromblack ethnic politics as a peculiar phenomenon that develops during the 20^th century, particularity after the 1960s. When we talk about black ethnic politics, we are talking about a form of politics that is, first of all, predicated on the notion of ethnic group incorporation. Too many people talk about African-American political life and African Americans as a group, as if they constitute a corporate political entity, as if there are clearly defined interests widely shared by all African Americans. The way political scientists do this is to engage in public research—you find some issue for which there is 70% support, and from there make the leap that this constitutes black interests. This is deeply problematic, in my estimation, as it says very little about what black interests look like within real time and space.

Too many of us take the idea of “the black community” for granted, as if there really was one, as if such a thing as the black agenda really existed to sell out in the first place. Johnson calls this into question and brings up the sticky issue of class.

I want to introduce the question of talking about class politics in a racial idiom. This is something I take from Preston Smith’s work, Racial Democracy and the Black Metropolis. It is really a straightforward proposition, as I see it, though it is an approach to black politics that has been lost, both popularly and in academia. If you go back and read Jim Crow-era social scientists—Abram Harris, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ralph Bunche, even E. Franklin Frazier and Carter G. Woodson—all of them offer an analysis of black politics that looks at it in its full expanse. They address how class manifests itself among African-Americans.One thing that happens within such discussions, particularly in our own time, is that we conflate race and class.

There is a tendency to use race as the symbolic language of class. It used to drive me crazy when I taught at a small liberal arts college where many students automatically equated “black” with “poor.” They saw black people as being synonymous with poverty and they had no understanding of African-American life beyond that kind of image they got from pop culture. So, I tried to talk to them about Bronzeville, or about the fact that even in the small community that I grew up in in the 1970s and 1980s in Louisiana, we had black banks, black doctors, and black lawyers. The idea that there is an integral aspect of African-American life was something new to them.

The task for us, and this is what I was trying to lay out before, is to talk about those differences.Race is not the same as class. When we talk about class we talk about particular roles that people play, their specific relationship to production in our society. Race has its origins in slavery and imperialist expansion. But, ultimately, when we look at contemporary African-American politics, we need to address how communities are organized and how particular kinds of politics and sets of interests emerge. This flows from what I said at the very beginning about the disappearance of critical public engagement among African-Americans: I grew up along the Interstate 10 corridor—most of my family was in either Louisiana, Houston, or Mobile. Most of the people whom I learned from as a kid had grown up under Jim Crow.

The teachers I had as far as high school were largely people who had taught at the old Jim Crow high schools in the area. They talked about class. They didn’t talk about it in the ways that academics talk about it. They had their own vocabularies for the differences of opinion and interests among African-Americans. And the discussions were often quite candid. Some of that has since disappeared. You hear it every now and again in, for example, the use of the term ”Uncle Tom,” which was one that I heard constantly as a kid. I recall adult conversations in the other room: They were talking about local politics, they were talking about people they knew personally, and they weren’t afraid to call these people out when their politics were out of step with the broader community of mostly working class African Americans. That kind of internal criticism has evaporated by and large. So why do we no longer have those forms of public engagement, analysis of everyday forms? Why have they evaporated?

What Glaude, West, and Smiley are attempting to do is create a space for internal dissent, a space that Johnson argues used to exist. What’s the problem with that? In the case of all three, they oversimplify the process that causes black people to make the political decisions they make, and oversimplify the process that causes elites like Harris-Perry to defend Obama. Similarly their critiques of Obama suffer from the same degree of oversimplification that led them to support Obama in the first place (West and perhaps Glaude), or posit/support the creation of various national level “conversations” to change conditions of structural inequality (Glaude, West, Smiley).

Now I want to bring this back home to Baltimore and back to The Goon Squad.

Around the same time Favor passed, journalists reported that Mayor Stephanie Rawlings Blake recently stayed at the summer home of (black) lobbyist Lisa Harris Jones (this after Mayor Rawlings Blake officiated Harris Jones’ wedding). The mayor paid Harris Jones (her staff provided a check to prove it) and didn’t think there was anything wrong with it. For people with roots in Baltimore, not even deep roots, Baltimore is “Smalltimore” and the city is simply too small to be able to dodge these types of relationships. Or so Mayor Rawlings Blake says.

The Goon Squad is indirectly responsible for both of them being where they are. We can read the mayor and Harris Jones as having “sold out” black people in general, and the Goon Squad specifically, just as on a national scale we can read Obama as having sold black interests out. This reading can work for us…but the problem is that it ignores the plain and simple fact that “the black community” contains multitudes. Those multitudes contain significant numbers of black people with Rawlings Blake and Jones’s background and with their interests. And while we can perhaps argue these interests are antithetical to black people, I’d argue instead they are antithetical to the black working class specifically and to the working class in general. To the extent these dynamics are best traced by left-leaning political scientists such as Johnson and Reed, I’d argue that what we need is not necessarily more public intellectuals speaking truth to power, but more political scientists committed to class analyses inside and outside of black communities.